DBMS > Neo4j vs. SQLite vs. Stardog vs. TigerGraph vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Neo4j vs. SQLite vs. Stardog vs. TigerGraph vs. TimescaleDB

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

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

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

A complete, distributed, parallel graph computing platform supporting web-scale data analytics in real-time

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Relational DBMS

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

Score	42.68
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	103.35
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	1.93
Rank	#121	Overall
	#10	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Score	1.44
Rank	#152	Overall
	#14	Graph DBMS

Score	4.06
Rank	#73	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

neo4j.com/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

docs.stardog.com

docs.tigergraph.com

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Neo4j, Inc.

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Stardog-Union

Timescale

Initial release

2007

2000

2010

2017

Current release

5.23, August 2024

3.46.1 (13 August 2024), August 2024

7.3.0, May 2020

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Public Domain

commercial

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

commercial

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.

Implementation language

Java, Scala

Java

C++

Server operating systems

Linux

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

server-less

Linux
macOS
Windows

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

dynamic column types

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

yes

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

SQL-92 is not fully supported

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

SQL-like query language (GSQL)

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

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

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

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

GSQL (TigerGraph Query Language)
Kafka
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

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

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

C++
Java

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

yes

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

via event handlers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

none

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

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 in HA-Cluster

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

relationships in graphs

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

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)

Access rights for users and roles

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...
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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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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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