There are many alternatives to Neo4j, which are listed as follows:
- Dgraph
- ArangoDB
- OrientDB
- Azure Cosmos DB
- Amazon Neptune
- Cayley
- Virtuoso
- BlazeGraph
- RedisGraph etc.
When it comes to Dgraph, it tops the list for its many unique features that are mostly missing from many other graph databases. For starters, Dgraph is the only database to support Graphql natively. It not only provides high performance but also allows the capacity to process Graphql queries in parallel.
Unlike Neo4j, you can use a distributed graph database with Dgraph, and it gives you the ability to use the same query everywhere, behaving like it would if you query a single database. In addition to that, Dgraph is Jepsen-tested, has synchronous replication with immediate consistency for all clients, open-source, and has automatic sharding. Automatic sharding allows this open-source database to avoid N+1 problem when running a query.
Neo4j does graph sharding by allowing users to break a larger graph down to the individual, smaller graphs, and separate databases. This feature retains some level of data redundancy to maintain the relationships between entities. Users also have to change their queries and mutations to work with clustering. For more information about Neo4j alternative, check out this site.
Dgraph has synchronous replication across all replicas, whereas Neo4j only provides consistent replication at core servers. Dgraph has HA Cluster Setup, which is not included in Neo4j. HA Cluster Setup means you have to run three or five replicas of the Zero node and three or five replicas for the Alpha node. The Dgraph cluster has divisions known as Raft groups. Dgraph Zero is group 0, and each subsequent numbered group corresponds to a Dgraph Alpha shard.
Until the 3.5 x update, Neo4j users could use HA functionality, but they cannot now because of no new features for the HA component. Your files are encrypted with Dgraph, whereas Neo4j does not support Transparent Data Encryption. They recommend a volume-level encryption system, which is less secure.
Other databases, such as ArangoDB, are multimodel graph databases that can be useful if you need to work with Graph, JSON documents, and SQL. OrientDB natively supports Cypher and Gremlin, while ArangoDB uses a proprietary query language. It uses C++ with a JavaScript front.
Read a similar article about GraphQL tools here at this page.