DBMS > Neo4j vs. Sphinx vs. STSdb

System Properties Comparison Neo4j vs. Sphinx vs. STSdb

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

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

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Key-Value Store with special method for indexing

optimized for high performance using a special indexing method

Primary database model

Graph DBMS

Search engine

Key-value store

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

Score	58.03
Rank	#20	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	8.03
Rank	#55	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Score	0.05
Rank	#321	Overall
	#49	Key-value stores

Website

neo4j.com

sphinxsearch.com

github.com/STSSoft/STSdb4

Technical documentation

neo4j.com/docs

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Neo4j, Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

STS Soft SC

Initial release

2007

2001

2011

Current release

4.4.3, January 2022

3.4.1, July 2021

4.0.8, September 2015

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

GPLv2, commercial license available

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

C++

Server operating systems

Linux

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

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Windows

Data scheme

schema-free and schema-optional

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

primitive types and user defined types (classes)

Secondary indexes

yes

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

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

Proprietary protocol

.NET Client API

Supported programming languages

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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

C#
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes

via event handler

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

yes using Neo4j Fabric

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

none

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

yes

User concepts

Access control

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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

Competitive advantages

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

Typical application scenarios

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

Key customers

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

Market metrics

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

Licensing and pricing models

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

News

Graph Data Science: The Secret to Accelerating Innovation with AI/ML
26 January 2022

GeneWeaver: Building a Graph to Map Variants to Genes Using Neo4j 4.x and Bulk Import
25 January 2022

This Week in Neo4j – Web3, NFTs, PHP Dev, and Sports Data Science
22 January 2022

Category Creation: Emil Eifrem’s Virtuous Cycle & Four Tips for Success
20 January 2022

Neo4j in the News – Winter Edition: Neo4j Growth, Big Data, and Cybercrime
19 January 2022

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.