Hazelcast vs Neo4j: What are the differences?
Hazelcast: Clustering and highly scalable data distribution platform for Java. With its various distributed data structures, distributed caching capabilities, elastic nature, memcache support, integration with Spring and Hibernate and more importantly with so many happy users, Hazelcast is feature-rich, enterprise-ready and developer-friendly in-memory data grid solution; Neo4j: The world’s leading Graph Database. Neo4j stores data in nodes connected by directed, typed relationships with properties on both, also known as a Property Graph. It is a high performance graph store with all the features expected of a mature and robust database, like a friendly query language and ACID transactions.
Hazelcast belongs to "In-Memory Databases" category of the tech stack, while Neo4j can be primarily classified under "Graph Databases".
Some of the features offered by Hazelcast are:
- Distributed implementations of java.util.{Queue, Set, List, Map}
- Distributed implementation of java.util.concurrent.locks.Lock
- Distributed implementation of java.util.concurrent.ExecutorService
On the other hand, Neo4j provides the following key features:
- intuitive, using a graph model for data representation
- reliable, with full ACID transactions
- durable and fast, using a custom disk-based, native storage engine
"High Availibility" is the primary reason why developers consider Hazelcast over the competitors, whereas "Cypher – graph query language" was stated as the key factor in picking Neo4j.
Hazelcast and Neo4j are both open source tools. Neo4j with 6.6K GitHub stars and 1.63K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Hazelcast with 3.18K GitHub stars and 1.16K GitHub forks.
Medium, Movielala, and Hinge are some of the popular companies that use Neo4j, whereas Hazelcast is used by Yammer, Seat Pagine Gialle, and Para. Neo4j has a broader approval, being mentioned in 114 company stacks & 47 developers stacks; compared to Hazelcast, which is listed in 26 company stacks and 16 developer stacks.