Neo4j vs. PostgreSQL

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Neo4j
Score 6.8 out of 10
N/A
Neo4j is an open source embeddable graph database developed by Neo Technologies based in San Mateo, California with an office in Sweden.
$65
per month
PostgreSQL
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
PostgreSQL (alternately Postgres) is a free and open source object-relational database system boasting over 30 years of active development, reliability, feature robustness, and performance. It supports SQL and is designed to support various workloads flexibly.N/A
Pricing
Neo4jPostgreSQL
Editions & Modules
Aura Professional
$65
per month
Community Edition
Free
Enterprise Edition
Contact Sales
Aura Free
Free
Aura Enterprise
Contact Sales
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Neo4jPostgreSQL
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Neo4jPostgreSQL
Considered Both Products
Neo4j

No answer on this topic

PostgreSQL
Chose PostgreSQL
Compared to MySQL, it works well if you need to extend to your use case
Compared to Spark, it works better w.r.t development time in a central database setting
Like Redis, it cannot be used for caching and quick access of non-structured data
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Neo4jPostgreSQL
Small Businesses
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.4 out of 10
Redis™*
Redis™*
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.4 out of 10
Redis™*
Redis™*
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.4 out of 10
Redis™*
Redis™*
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Neo4jPostgreSQL
Likelihood to Recommend
2.2
(9 ratings)
8.7
(53 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
6.0
(1 ratings)
9.0
(6 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.3
(7 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Neo4jPostgreSQL
Likelihood to Recommend
Neo Technologies
Neo4J is great for creating network graphs or illustrating how things are related. It is also good for finding individuals or things that have greater influence than others in a system. It is not appropriate if you have standard data sets that can be analyzed using conventional methods or visualized using Tableau, for example.
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PostgreSQL Global Development Group
PostgreSQL, unlike other databases, is user-friendly and uses an open-source database. Ideal for relational databases, they can be accessed when speed and efficiency are required. It enables high-availability and disaster recovery replication from instance to instance. PostgreSQL can store data in a JSON format, including hashes, keys, and values. Multi-platform compatibility is also a big selling point. We could, however, use all the DBMS’s cores. While it works well in fast environments, it can be problematic in slower ones or cause multiple master replication.
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Pros
Neo Technologies
  • Mature Query language, I found Cypher QL to be mature in handling all sorts of problems we throw at it. Its expressive enough to be intuitive while providing rich features for various scenarios.
  • Native support for REST API, that makes interacting with Neo4J intuitive and easy.
  • Support for Procedures in Java, procedures are custom code that could be added to the Neo4J to write custom querying of data. The best part about the procedures is it could be invoked using the REST API. This allows us to overcome any shortcomings from their Cypher query language.
  • Nice UI and interface for executing the Query and visualizing the response.
  • UI access controlled by User credentials allows for neat access controls.
  • Awesome free community edition for small-scale projects.
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PostgreSQL Global Development Group
  • The stability it offers, its speed of response and its resource management is excellent even in complex database environments and with low-resource machines.
  • The large amount of resources it has in addition to the many own and third-party tools that are compatible that make productivity greatly increase.
  • The adaptability in various environments, whether distributed or not, [is a] complete set of configuration options which allows to greatly customize the work configuration according to the needs that are required.
  • The excellent handling of referential and transactional integrity, its internal security scheme, the ease with which we can create backups are some of the strengths that can be mentioned.
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Cons
Neo Technologies
  • One of the hardest challenges that Neo4j had to solve was the horizontal scaling problem. I am not updated on recent developments, but at the time of my use, I couldn't find a viable solution.
  • Neo4j does not play with other open source APIs like Blueprint. You have to use the native Neo4j API.
  • There wasn't a visual tool to see your data. Of course, third party tools are always available, but I would have loved something which came with the Neo4j bundle. I love that Docker comes bundled with Kitematic, so it's not wrong to hope that Neo4j could also ship with some default visualization software.
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PostgreSQL Global Development Group
  • The query syntax for JSON fields is unwieldy when you start getting into complex queries with many joins.
  • I wish there was a distinction (a flag) you could set for automated scripts vs working in the psql CLI, which would provide an 'Are you sure you want to do X?' type prompt if your query is likely to affect more than a certain number of rows. Especially on updates/deletes. Setting the flag in the headless(scripted) flow would disable the prompt.
  • Better documentation around JSON and Array aggregation, with more examples of how the data is transformed.
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Likelihood to Renew
Neo Technologies
No answers on this topic
PostgreSQL Global Development Group
As a needed software for day to day development activities
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Usability
Neo Technologies
[Based on] Query Language, Performance on small and large data sets, integration and deployment, analysis, API support, Interactive UI.
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PostgreSQL Global Development Group
Postgresql is the best tool out there for relational data so I have to give it a high rating when it comes to analytics, data availability and consistency, so on and so forth. SQL is also a relatively consistent language so when it comes to building new tables and loading data in from the OLTP database, there are enough tools where we can perform ETL on a scalable basis.
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Reliability and Availability
Neo Technologies
No answers on this topic
PostgreSQL Global Development Group
PostgreSQL's availability is top notch. Apart from connection time-out for an idle user, the database is super reliable.
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Performance
Neo Technologies
No answers on this topic
PostgreSQL Global Development Group
The data queries are relatively quick for a small to medium sized table. With complex joins, and a wide and deep table however, the performance of the query has room for improvement.
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Support Rating
Neo Technologies
No answers on this topic
PostgreSQL Global Development Group
There are several companies that you can contract for technical support, like EnterpriseDB or Percona, both first level in expertise and commitment to the software.
But we do not have contracts with them, we have done all the way from googling to forums, and never have a problem that we cannot resolve or pass around. And for dozens of projects and more than 15 years now.
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Online Training
Neo Technologies
No answers on this topic
PostgreSQL Global Development Group
The online training is request based. Had there been recorded videos available online for potential users to benefit from, I could have rated it higher. The online documentation however is very helpful. The online documentation PDF is downloadable and allows users to pace their own learning. With examples and code snippets, the documentation is great starting point.
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Implementation Rating
Neo Technologies
No answers on this topic
PostgreSQL Global Development Group
The online documentation of the PostgreSQL product is elaborate and takes users step by step.
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Alternatives Considered
Neo Technologies
Neo4j is a graph store and has different use cases compared to another NoSQL Document store like MongoDB. MongoDB is a bad choice when joins are common as existing operators for joining two documents (similar to tables in a relational store) as Mongo 3.5 use SQL like join algorithms which are expensive. MongoDB is a great choice when distributed schemaless rich document structures are important requirements. Cross document transaction support is not native to MongoDB yet, whereas Neo4J is ACID complaint with all its operations.
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PostgreSQL Global Development Group
Postgres stacks up just [fine] along the other big players in the RDBMS world. It's very popular for a reason. It's very close to MySQL in terms of cost and features - I'd pick either solution and be just as happy. Compared to Oracle it is a MUCH cheaper solution that is just as usable.
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Scalability
Neo Technologies
No answers on this topic
PostgreSQL Global Development Group
The DB is reliable, scalable, easy to use and resolves most DB needs
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Return on Investment
Neo Technologies
  • Positive: Less complex queries on graph structures, than in relational databases.
  • Negative: maintenance is a huge deal, things doesn't work and break, requiring lengthy restore operations.
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PostgreSQL Global Development Group
  • The user-role system has saved us tons of time and thus money. As I mentioned in the "Use Case" section, Postgres is not only used by engineering but also finance to measure how much to charge customers and customer support to debug customer issues. Sure, it's not easy for non-technical employees to psql in and view raw tables, but it has saved engineering hundreds of man-hours that would have had to be spent on building equivalent tools to serve finance or customer support.
  • It provides incredibly trustworthy storage for wherever customer data dumped in. In our 6 years of Postgres existence, we have not lost a byte of customer data due to Postgres messing up a transaction or during the multiple times the hard-drives failed (thanks to ACID compliance!).
  • This is less significant, but Postgres is also quite easy to manage (unless you are going above and beyond to squeeze out every last bit of performance). There's not much to configure, and the out of the box settings are quite sane. That has saved us engineers lots of time that would have gone into Postgres administration.
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ScreenShots