DBMS > Neo4j vs. PlanetScale vs. Snowflake vs. TerminusDB vs. TiDB

System Properties Comparison Neo4j vs. PlanetScale vs. Snowflake vs. TerminusDB vs. TiDB

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

Scalable, distributed, serverless MySQL database platform built on top of Vitess

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Scalable Graph Database platform making enterprise data available by exploiting inferred entities and relationships

TiDB is an open source distributed SQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. It is MySQL compatible and features horizontal scalability, strong consistency, and high availability.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Document store
RDF store

Document store

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

Score	42.68
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	1.09
Rank	#178	Overall
	#82	Relational DBMS

Score	133.72
Rank	#7	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	0.19
Rank	#311	Overall
	#27	Graph DBMS

Score	4.09
Rank	#72	Overall
	#38	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

neo4j.com/docs

planetscale.com/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

terminusdb.github.io/terminusdb/#

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

Developer

Neo4j, Inc.

PlanetScale

Snowflake Computing Inc.

DataChemist Ltd.

PingCAP, Inc.

Initial release

2007

2020

2014

2018

2016

Current release

5.23, August 2024

11.0.0, January 2023

8.2.0, July 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

commercial

Open Source

GPL V3

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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.

TiDB Cloud: Fully-managed TiDB Service. Bring everything great about TiDB to the cloud.

Implementation language

Java, Scala

Prolog, Rust

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

Linux

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

Docker
Linux
macOS

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

SQL-like query language (WOQL)

yes

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
MySQL protocol
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

OWL
RESTful HTTP API
WOQL (Web Object Query Language)

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

Supported programming languages

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

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript
Python

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

yes

proprietary syntax

user defined functions

yes

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

yes

Graph Partitioning

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Journaling Streams

Using Raft consensus algorithm to ensure data replication with strong consistency among multiple replicas.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with TiSpark Connector

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 across shards
Immediate Consistency within a shard

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

full support since version 6.6

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

ACID at shard level

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory journaling

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

User concepts

Access control

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

Role-based access control

Fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Neo4j delivers graph technology that has been battle tested for performance and scale...
» more

TiDB is an advanced open-source, distributed SQL database for modern application...
» more

Competitive advantages

Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
» more

- HORIZONTAL SCALING : TiDB grants total transparency into your data workloads without...
» more

Typical application scenarios

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

TiDB is ideal for transactional applications that require extreme scalability and...
» more

Key customers

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

Block, Pinterest, Catalyst, Bolt, Flipkart, Capcom, Shopee (E-commerce), JD Cloud...
» more

Market metrics

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

34K+ GitHub stars 5K+ members in TiDB Community Slack 1K+ community contributors...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

GPL v3 license that can be used all the places where you might use MySQL. Neo4j Commercial...
» more

TiDB Community : Free open source software (Apache 2.0) TiDB Self-Hosted : Enterprise...
» more

News

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20 September 2024

The Ethics of Generative AI: Understanding the Principles and Risks
18 September 2024

GraphSummit Europe 2024: Actionable Insights From Industry Leaders and Innovators
18 September 2024

This Week in Neo4j: Knowledge Graph, Data Loading, Olympics, CSV and more
7 September 2024

Neo4j Expands Cloud Database Capabilities to Power Enterprise-Scale Graph Deployments
4 September 2024

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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.