DBMS > Neo4j vs. Postgres-XL vs. PouchDB vs. RethinkDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Neo4j vs. Postgres-XL vs. PouchDB vs. RethinkDB vs. Snowflake

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

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

DBMS for the Web with a mechanism to push updated query results to applications in realtime.

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	42.68
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	0.43
Rank	#260	Overall
	#119	Relational DBMS

Score	2.18
Rank	#114	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Score	2.58
Rank	#105	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	133.72
Rank	#7	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

neo4j.com/docs

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

pouchdb.com/guides

rethinkdb.com/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Neo4j, Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2007

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2012

2009

2014

Current release

5.23, August 2024

10 R1, October 2018

7.1.1, June 2019

2.4.1, August 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Mozilla public license

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

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.

Implementation language

Java, Scala

JavaScript

C++

Server operating systems

Linux

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

Linux
macOS

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

schema-free

yes

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

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

via views

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

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
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

JavaScript

community-supported driver
C#

community-supported driver
C++

community-supported driver
Clojure

community-supported driver
Dart

community-supported driver
Erlang

community-supported driver
Go

community-supported driver
Haskell

community-supported driver
Java

official driver
JavaScript (Node.js)

official driver
Lisp

community-supported driver
Lua

community-supported driver
Objective-C

community-supported driver
Perl

community-supported driver
PHP

community-supported driver
Python

official driver
Ruby

official driver
Scala

community-supported driver

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

user defined functions

View functions in JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

yes using Neo4j Fabric

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

Sharding

range based

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

Multi-source replication

also with CouchDB databases
Source-replica replication

also with CouchDB databases

Source-replica replication

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

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

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

MVCC

Atomic single-document operations

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC based

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, WebSQL or LevelDB as backend

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)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

users and table-level permissions

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

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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Competitive advantages

Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
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Typical application scenarios

Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
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Key customers

Over 800 commercial customers and over 4300 startups use Neo4j. Flagship customers...
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Market metrics

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

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4 September 2024

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