Introduction
Neo4j is the world’s leading graph database. The architecture is designed for optimal management, storage, and traversal of nodes and relationships. The graph database takes a property graph approach, which is beneficial for both traversal performance and operations runtime. Neo4j offers dedicated memory management and memory-efficient operations.
Neo4j is scalable and can be deployed as a standalone server or across multiple machines in a fault-tolerant cluster for production environments. Other features for production applications include hot backups and extensive monitoring.
Neo4j editions
There are two editions of self-managed Neo4j to choose from, the Community Edition (CE) and the Enterprise Edition (EE). The Enterprise Edition includes all that Community Edition offers, plus extra enterprise requirements such as backups, clustering, and failover capabilities.
- Community Edition
-
The Community Edition is a fully functional edition of Neo4j, suitable for single-instance deployments. It fully supports key Neo4j features, such as ACID-compliant transactions, Cypher, and programming APIs. It is ideal for learning Neo4j, do-it-yourself projects, and applications in small workgroups.
- Enterprise Edition
-
The Enterprise Edition extends the functionality of Community Edition to include key features for performance and scalability, such as a clustering architecture and online backup functionality. Additional security features include role-based access control and LDAP support, for example, Active Directory. It is the choice for production systems with requirements for scale and availability, such as commercial and critical internal solutions.
The following table compares the available key features in both editions:
Feature | Community Edition | Enterprise Edition |
---|---|---|
Native Graph |
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Native graph processing & storage |
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Standard and Aligned store format (34 Billion Nodes & Relationships) Standard is deprecated in 5.23 |
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High_limit (1 Quadrillion Nodes & Relationships) Deprecated in 5.23 |
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Block format GA from 5.16 |
||
Change Data Capture (CDC) Introduced in 5.13 Beta GA from 5.23 |
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Parallel Cypher runtime Introduced in 5.13 |
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Clients and APIs |
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Language drivers for .NET, Go, Java, JavaScript, and Python [1] |
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High-performance native API |
||
APOC 450+ Core Procedures and Functions |
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Support for Neo4j Graph Data Science Community Edition [1] |
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Support for Neo4j Graph Data Science Enterprise Edition [1] |
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Indexes and constraints |
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Vector indexes Introduced in Neo4j 5.13 |
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Security |
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Data management |
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Offline backup (dump) |
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Scale and availability |
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Multiple databases (beyond the |
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1. Must be downloaded and installed separately. |
By default, Neo4j Community Edition and Neo4j Enterprise Edition report a small amount of anonymous usage data. This helps Neo4j understand how its products are used and improve them. For more information about what data is collected, see Anonymous usage data report. |
Versioning
Neo4j uses semantic versioning (Semantic Versioning Specification 2.0.0).
Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH
, the increment is based on:
-
MAJOR
version - incompatible API changes towards the previousMAJOR
version. -
MINOR
version - functionality in a backward-compatible manner. -
PATCH
release - backwards-compatible bug fixes.
Neo4j’s fully managed cloud service Neo4j Aura uses only MAJOR
versioning.