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Neo4j Graph Database vs SQL Server comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Neo4j Graph Database
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
NoSQL Databases (12th)
SQL Server
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
276
Ranking in other categories
Relational Databases Tools (1st), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Databases solutions, they serve different purposes. Neo4j Graph Database is designed for NoSQL Databases and holds a mindshare of 6.3%, up 5.9% compared to last year.
SQL Server, on the other hand, focuses on Relational Databases Tools, holds 10.2% mindshare, down 14.2% since last year.
NoSQL Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Neo4j Graph Database6.3%
MongoDB Enterprise Advanced11.3%
Cassandra8.8%
Other73.6%
NoSQL Databases
Relational Databases Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SQL Server10.2%
Oracle Database10.3%
IBM Db2 Database6.5%
Other73.0%
Relational Databases Tools
 

Featured Reviews

RT
VP odfTechnology at Enterpi Software Solutions Private Limited
Delivers superior search and data aggregation capabilities
Neo4j helps with advanced search needs, providing good search results and aggregates compared to MongoDB. Aggregating with MongoDB can be difficult; however, with Neo4j, it's easier. Aggregating data, backing up, and creating new clusters are user-friendly from the back end. In DevOps web deployment, we noticed no database issues. We created Docker instances and set them up efficiently, managing databases up to 50 gigabytes.
Shakti Gupta - PeerSpot reviewer
SQL server database administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Hybrid data platform has strengthened performance, security, and incident response for production
SQL Server is very mature, but I see areas for improvement, especially in performance tuning, troubleshooting, and automation. Although tools such as Query Store and dynamic management views are powerful, some troubleshooting tasks still require senior SQL Server database administrator expertise. It would be valuable to have more intelligent, built-in recommendations for root cause analysis, indexing, blocking, and query optimization. I would also like to see simplified and consistent management across on-premises SQL Server and Azure SQL services, as managing hybrid environments sometimes requires different tools and approaches. Finally, improved patching, updates, monitoring, and cost and license transparency could make SQL Server easier to manage at the enterprise scale. One area I would improve in SQL Server is its documentation and troubleshooting guidance. SQL Server documentation is comprehensive, but for complex production issues, I would like to see more real-world troubleshooting examples, especially for scenarios such as Always On synchronization issues, blocking and deadlocks, performance degradation, and upgrade features.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Creates the ability to visualize outputs."
"The graph modeling paradigm suits our data set well, where there may be orders of magnitude more connections between data points than data points themselves."
"It enables circumstances which would have been a complex problem to be simplified."
"Neo4j helps with advanced search needs, providing good search results and aggregates compared to MongoDB."
"It is good for search-based tasks, providing solid search results and aggregate results."
"Enables people to understand what the business problem is and how the technology helps."
"As a graph database, I am surprised at their performance and response time."
"The solution's best feature is how it differs from traditional SQL databases. It's hard to map people and find those near me in SQL, which requires long, complex queries. Neo4j Graph Database makes this easier with simpler queries. It also supports more data types, like JSON, which SQL doesn't."
"I haven't really experienced any issues that required the assistance of technical support."
"We found it to be quite scalable."
"It's much more friendly in comparison with Oracle."
"SQL is stable."
"SQL Server is definitely easy to use, and with the volume that we have, it's also stable."
"The MSBI features SSAS, SSIS as well as SSRS together has enabled us to build a data warehouse for our Enterprise with Business Intelligence reports around the data."
"As a data warehouse and storage solution, it's quite good."
"This solution is available at a much lower price point than Oracle, and it includes 99% of the same feature functionality, so I'd say it knocks ROI out of the park."
 

Cons

"The tool could improve by having more resources, especially for Golang, which we use. It lacks good basic libraries and doesn't have an ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) tool, which many NoSQL databases have. We thought about building an ORM for the Neo4j Graph Database but are too busy."
"For me, when the tool was deployed on an on-premises model, it was a little bit difficult the first time."
"So far, we have not had any issues and are happy with the product in general."
"There are concerns about performance and whether the tool can necessarily scale to provide the solution."
"The only problem is that the community is quite small."
"There are things I found unintuitive or difficult to understand, however I can't say this is a deficiency in the product and likely more a function of my relatively low experience."
"I would appreciate a dark theme for SQL Server Management Studio and ability to add databases with TDE enabled into availability groups."
"SQL Server is a stable solution, but it could be improved."
"The price could be better. In the next release, it would be better if the database was more easily extendable."
"From a DB administrator perspective, I would like to see more space requirements and space capacity history, so that we are able to see which DBs are growing, and by how much per day or week."
"Setting up some of the more complex systems could be simpler."
"The documentation could be much better. It's lacking right now."
"The pricing could be more affordable."
"The scalability could be better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is not expensive."
"The solution is open source so that you can use it for free. They also offer an enterprise version with its billing. If your company is earning well, I suggest using the enterprise version. Otherwise, you can deploy it on your own cloud and pay based on usage."
"It's cheaper than Oracle."
"For smaller companies, they find this solution expensive."
"The pricing from Microsoft is quite expensive compared to Oracle."
"If you are looking for a small setup and do not want an open-source solution or invest too much money in your database then SQL Server is a very good choice."
"I rate the product’s pricing a six out of ten."
"With recent releases, the Standard Edition (cheaper) SKU has some of the earlier version Enterprise features. SQL Express has some limitations."
"The price could always be lower."
"For licensing, we pay yearly. The licensing is very expensive, and it should be cheaper."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
34%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business119
Midsize Enterprise60
Large Enterprise122
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Neo4j Graph Database?
The only problem is that the community is quite small.
What is your primary use case for Neo4j Graph Database?
We have used Neo4j in microservices. In one of the microservices, we used Neo4j since we have some requirements similar to MongoDB plus Elasticsearch. It performs both functions. Instead of doing t...
What advice do you have for others considering Neo4j?
We have used both editions without any difficulty. In the fourth year, they provided the software, and we installed three additional community editions with no issues. Backing up required some effo...
Would you say the price of SQL Server is high compared to that of similar products?
SQL Server is fairly priced because it has various editions, depending on the number of users, servers, or core packs you are using. If you compare the product to others in this category, the price...
Has using SQL Server helped your organization in any way?
SQL Server has helped my organization through partitioning to distribute the workload, as it splits them up into smaller pieces so the machines can easily deal with it. However, this comes with a h...
Which authentication mode is best for SQL Server?
My company connects through SQL Server authentication. We have company Windows accounts, but we do not want to connect the two, out of security concerns and to keep things separated for our own pur...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Microsoft SQL Server, MSSQL, MS SQL
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Walmart, Telenor, Wazoku, Adidas, Cerved, GameSys, eBay, Schleich, ICIJ, die Bayerisch, Megree, InfoJobs, LinkedIn
Microsoft SQL Server is used by businesses in every industry, including Great Western Bank, Aviva, the Volvo Car Corporation, BMW, Samsung, Principality Building Society, Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield, and the Catholic District School Board of Eastern Ontario.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, MongoDB, Couchbase and others in NoSQL Databases. Updated: October 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.