DBMS > Neo4j vs. OpenSearch vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison Neo4j vs. OpenSearch vs. XTDB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Scalable, ACID-compliant graph database designed with a high-performance distributed cluster architecture, available in self-hosted and cloud offerings

A distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine forked from Elasticsearch and based on Apache Lucene

A general purpose database with bitemporal SQL and Datalog and graph queries

Primary database model

Graph DBMS

Search engine

Document store

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	50.39
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	12.61
Rank	#46	Overall
	#4	Search engines

Score	0.19
Rank	#353	Overall
	#48	Document stores

Website

neo4j.com

github.com/opensearch-project
opensearch.org

github.com/xtdb/xtdb
www.xtdb.com

Technical documentation

neo4j.com/docs

opensearch.org/docs/latest

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

Neo4j, Inc.

Amazon Web Services

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2007

2021

2019

Current release

5.12, September 2023

2.5.0, January 2023

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

MIT License

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Neo4j Aura: Neo4j’s fully managed cloud service: The zero-admin, always-on graph database for cloud developers.

Aiven for OpenSearch: Fully managed open source search and analytics suite including search engine, NoSQL document database, and visualization interface.

Implementation language

Java, Scala

Java

Clojure

Server operating systems

Linux

Can also be used server-less as embedded Java database.
OS X
Solaris
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

All OS with a Java 8 (and higher) VM
Linux

Data scheme

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, extensible-data-notation format

XML support

Some form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
Clojure
Elixir
Go
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Elasticsearch client

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

yes

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

yes

yes, each node contains all data

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Causal and Eventual Consistency configurable in Causal Cluster setup
Immediate Consistency in stand-alone mode

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, flexibel persistency by using storage technologies like Apache Kafka, RocksDB or LMDB

User concepts

Access control

Users, roles and permissions. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
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OpenSearch is a highly scalable and extensible open-source software suite for search,...
» more

Competitive advantages

Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
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Distributed as fully open source under Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2), OpenSearch...
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Typical application scenarios

Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
» more

OpenSearch is used across a broad range of search, analytics, and observability applications....
» more

Key customers

Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
» more

Market metrics

Neo4j boasts the world's largest graph database ecosystem with more than 140 million...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

GPL v3 license that can be used all the places where you might use MySQL. Neo4j Commercial...
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The OpenSearch Project offers open source software licensed under Apache License...
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