DBMS > Neo4j vs. RocksDB vs. Stardog vs. TerminusDB vs. YugabyteDB

System Properties Comparison Neo4j vs. RocksDB vs. Stardog vs. TerminusDB vs. YugabyteDB

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

Embeddable persistent key-value store optimized for fast storage (flash and RAM)

Enterprise Knowledge Graph platform and graph DBMS with high availability, high performance reasoning, and virtualization

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

High-performance distributed SQL database for global, internet-scale applications. Wire and feature compatible with PostgreSQL.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
RDF store

Document store
Wide column store

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

Score	44.47
Rank	#23	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	4.00
Rank	#84	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Score	2.05
Rank	#129	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Score	0.22
Rank	#323	Overall
	#28	Graph DBMS

Score	3.11
Rank	#99	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

neo4j.com/docs

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

docs.stardog.com

terminusdb.github.io/terminusdb/#

docs.yugabyte.com
github.com/yugabyte/yugabyte-db

Developer

Neo4j, Inc.

Facebook, Inc.

Stardog-Union

DataChemist Ltd.

Yugabyte Inc.

Initial release

2007

2013

2010

2018

2017

Current release

5.19, April 2024

8.11.4, April 2024

7.3.0, May 2020

11.0.0, January 2023

2.19, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

BSD

commercial

60-day fully-featured trial license; 1-year fully-featured non-commercial use license for academics/students

Open Source

GPL V3

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

YugabyteDB Managed is the fully managed database-as-a-service offering of YugabyteDB. Get started quickly, and effortlessly ensure continuous availability and limitless scale of your cloud native applications.

Implementation language

Java, Scala

C++

Java

Prolog, Rust

C and C++

Server operating systems

Linux

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

Linux

Linux
macOS
Windows

Linux

Linux
OS X

Data scheme

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

yes

depending on used data model

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.

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Yes, compatible with all major SQL variants through dedicated BI/SQL Server

SQL-like query language (WOQL)

yes, PostgreSQL compatible

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

C++ API
Java API

GraphQL query language
HTTP API
Jena RDF API
OWL
RDF4J API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SNARL
SPARQL
Spring Data
Stardog Studio
TinkerPop 3

OWL
RESTful HTTP API
WOQL (Web Object Query Language)

JDBC
YCQL, an SQL-based flexible-schema API with its roots in Cassandra Query Language
YSQL - a fully relational SQL API that is wire compatible with the SQL language in PostgreSQL

Supported programming languages

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

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

JavaScript
Python

C
C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Rust
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

yes

sql, plpgsql, C

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

via event handlers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

yes using Neo4j Fabric

horizontal partitioning

none

Graph Partitioning

Hash and Range Sharding, row-level geo-partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

yes

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

Journaling Streams

Based on Raft distributed consensus protocol, minimum 3 replicas for continuous availability

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

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

Strong consistency on writes and tunable consistency on reads

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

yes

ACID

Distributed ACID with Serializable & Snapshot Isolation. Inspired by Google Spanner architecture.

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory journaling

yes

based on RocksDB

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)

Access rights for users and roles

Role-based access control

yes

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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YugabyteDB is an open source distributed SQL database for cloud native transactional...
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Competitive advantages

Neo4j is the market leader, graph database category creator, and the most widely...
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PostgreSQL compatible: Get instantly productive with a PostgreSQL compatible RDBMS....
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Typical application scenarios

Real-Time Recommendations Master Data Management Identity and Access Management Network...
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Systems of record and engagement for cloud native applications that require resilience,...
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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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2 Million+ lifetime clusters deployed, 6.5K+ GitHub stars, 7K YugabyteDB Community...
» 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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Apache 2.0 license for the database
» more

News

This Week in Neo4j: Nodes 2024, Data Modelling, Events, Knowledge Graphs and more
27 April 2024

GQL is Here: Your Cypher Queries in a GQL World
26 April 2024

GQL: The ISO Standard for Graphs Has Arrived
25 April 2024

What Is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)?
24 April 2024

This Week in Neo4j: Google Cloud, Analysis, Knowledge Graph, Relationships and more
20 April 2024

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