Titan DB vs Neo4J

30 Mar 2015

This comparison is an outdated comparison. I think Neo4J has improved a lot with the time. But I’m posting this because a person who wants to compare both of these technologies, can get an idea about the aspects they need to focus. If you know something is outdated please feel free to suggest using comments. I’ll update the blog post accordingly.

Feature	Neo4J	Titan
License	GPL/AGPL/Commercial	Apache 2 License
Commercial Support	Available Advanced: Email 5x10 USD 6000/yr Enterprise: Phone 7x24 USD 24,000/yr	Available (Prices and availability of support not published officially.)
Graph Type	Property Graph	Property Graph
Storage Backend	Native Storage Engine	Cassandra, Hbase, Berkeley DB
		Depending on the requirement we should select Database Backend (eg: Cassandra for Availability and Partitionable, Hbase for Consistency and Partitionable)
ACID Support	Yes	ACID is supported on BerkeleyDB Storage Backend
	Has Transactions in Java API.	On Cassandra Eventually consistent
Scalability	Can’t Scale-out like Titan	Owns very good scalability
		can scale like Cassandra if storage backend is cassandra
High Availability	Replication is the only way to have high scalability	Titan is like API because of that Availability of Storage backend is the availability for graph database
	Failover is not smooth	If we are using Cassandra with Titan No-Single-Point of failure. Extremely Available
Query Language	Cypher and Gremlin	Gremlin
	Cypher easy to learn but only suitable for simple queries.	Gremlin has good algorithms to retrieve data in an optimal way. (+ More generic)
Graph Sharding	Not Available, under development	Not Available, under development
Support for languages	Java/.NET/Python/PHP/NodeJS/Scala/GO	Java
Written in	Java	Java
Protocol	HTTP/REST	Can expose REST using Rexster
Use cases	more than 10 available	0 use cases exposed officially
Number of edges vertices supported	2^35 (~34 Billion) Nodes (Vertices)	2^59 Vertices
	2^35 (~34 Billion) Relationships (edges)	2^60 (quintillion) edges
	2^36 (~68 Billion) Properties
	2^15 (~32 000) Relationship types
Limitations		Key Index must be created prior to the key being used
		Unable to drop key indices
		For bulk graph operations we have to use Faunus otherwise storage backends get OutOfMemoryException
		Types cannot be changed once created
Web Admin	Available	Not Available
Embeddable	Yes	Yes
MapReduce	-	Yes with Faunus
Lucene Indexing Support	Yes	Yes
Backups	Yes	Yes (+Titan Parallel backup)

This link is also very useful - http://db-engines.com/en/system/Neo4j%3BTitan

Titan DB vs Neo4J

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