DBMS > Neo4j vs. SQLite vs. TiDB

System Properties Comparison Neo4j vs. SQLite vs. TiDB

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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

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

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

Graph DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

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

Score	49.70
Rank	#22	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	124.58
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	4.16
Rank	#88	Overall
	#46	Relational DBMS

Website

neo4j.com

www.sqlite.org

pingcap.com

Technical documentation

neo4j.com/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

Developer

Neo4j, Inc.

Dwayne Richard Hipp

PingCAP, Inc.

Initial release

2007

2000

2016

Current release

5.14, November 2023

3.44.0 (1 November 2023), November 2023

7.4.0, October 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

Public Domain

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.

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

Implementation language

Java, Scala

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

Linux

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

server-less

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

dynamic column types

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

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

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

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

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

Triggers

yes

via event handler

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

yes using Neo4j Fabric

none

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

none

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

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

full support since version 6.6

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)

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

Top 10 Sessions From NODES 2023
28 November 2023

This Week in Neo4j: Py2Neo, Time Series, Data Clusters, Graph Database Internals and more
25 November 2023

AWS and Neo4j Join Forces to Solve LLM Hallucinations and Evolve GenAI
21 November 2023

This Week in Neo4j: RAG, Constraints, NODES 2023 Recap, CI/CD Pipeline Security and more
18 November 2023

This Week in Neo4j: Vector Index, Embeddings, Geospatial, Document QA and more
4 November 2023

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