A go-to solution if a graph db is actually needed
January 29, 2026

A go-to solution if a graph db is actually needed

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Aura Professional (cloud)

Overall Satisfaction with Neo4j

We needed a graph database to record relations between different corporate entities. We want to track relations like beneficial owners, subsidiaries, related parties, etc. There could be many edges and the edges needed to record various metadata about the relations like the date that relation became significant. Importantly, we wanted to be able to run relational queries that would be tricky with postgres.

Pros

  • Easy to query deep paths (for Ultimate Beneficial Owner)
  • Storing metadata for edges
  • Easy detection of obscurely connected entities

Cons

  • We felt we could only scale easily vertically
  • We felt limited by Neo4j's hosted machine options
  • Limited constraints to enforce relational patterns
  • Positive: being able to provide new products/insights that weren't really possible before
  • Negative: did lead to some complexity managing multiple DBs as opposed to one
  • Positive: saving a ton of time for our data science team who were manually doing queries/analysis to answer questions that could be easily solved with a 1 line cypher query
Learning cypher was super easy coming from a SQL background. Furthermore, the docs Neo4j provides on their website make it really easy to pull up a reference, guide or a quick example. The mac app they provide is also really well designed with good visualisation tools, with the ability to easily use colour, line thickness etc to help navigate your data.
Neo4j's clean, feature-focused interface and native relationship handling eliminated the "recursive query tax" of postgres which was the real deal breaker. postgres is great for standard relational data like our users' platform data, but Neo4j provided a great solution for navigating deep, interconnected networks of beneficial owners and subsidiaries that postgres couldn't match.

Do you think Neo4j delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Neo4j's feature set?

Yes

Did Neo4j live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Neo4j go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Neo4j again?

Yes

When we had to calculate ownership of deeply nested subsidiaries, Neo4j was awesome. Using Cypher’s variable-length paths (-[:OWNS*..10]->), you can write a script that traverses the entire tree and multiplies the "metadata" (% ownership) along the edges in a single pass. In postgres, this would require a massive recursive CTE that is difficult to debug.

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