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Amazon Neptune vs Neo4j
Neptune is AWS-managed with no self-hosted option and can run property-graph or RDF; Neo4j has the more mature Cypher ecosystem and self-hosted paths too.
Side by side
| Amazon Neptune | Neo4j | |||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Amazon Web Services | Neo4j, Inc. | ||||||||||||||||
| Pricing model | Usage-based | Free tier + paid plans | ||||||||||||||||
| Free tier | No | Yes | ||||||||||||||||
| Deployment | Cloud | Cloud, Self-hosted | ||||||||||||||||
| Open source | No | No | ||||||||||||||||
| Best for | AWS-centric teams who want a managed graph database without operating clusters, with flexibility to pick property-graph or RDF. | Teams doing fraud detection, recommendations or knowledge graphs who want the most mature Cypher/graph tooling ecosystem. | ||||||||||||||||
| Pricing | Billed per instance-hour plus storage and I/O for provisioned clusters, or per Neptune Capacity Unit for Serverless.
Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget. | AuraDB is billed per GB/month above a free tier; self-managed Community edition is free, Enterprise requires a quote.
Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget. | ||||||||||||||||
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Verdict
Both are widely used property-graph databases, but they start from different premises. Amazon Neptune is AWS-managed only — there is no self-hosted Neptune — and it is one of the few engines that supports both a property-graph model (Gremlin, openCypher) and an RDF triple store (SPARQL) on the same infrastructure, chosen per instance. Neo4j is the more established name in property graphs specifically, built natively around Cypher (the language behind the new ISO GQL standard), with a large ecosystem of tooling, and it offers both a managed cloud service (AuraDB) and a self-hosted Community or Enterprise edition.
If you are already deep in AWS and want one managed service that can flex between graph models, Neptune fits naturally into that infrastructure. If graph tooling maturity, algorithm libraries, and the choice of self-hosting matter more than staying inside AWS, Neo4j is the more established option.
Choose Amazon Neptune if
- You are AWS-centric and want a graph database that integrates natively with IAM, S3 and SageMaker.
- You need the flexibility to run property-graph and RDF workloads on the same managed platform.
- You want Neptune Serverless's per-second capacity billing rather than managing instance sizing yourself.
Choose Neo4j if
- You want the most mature Cypher tooling ecosystem, including the Graph Data Science algorithm library and Bloom for visual exploration.
- Self-hosting is a requirement, not just an option — Neo4j has a genuine free Community Edition for that.
- You are not committed to AWS, or want to avoid being tied to one cloud's managed service.
What they share
Both support property-graph traversal with algorithm libraries for things like PageRank and community detection, both offer a serverless or auto-scaling billing option, and both are used heavily for fraud detection and recommendation use cases. Neither is free at meaningful production scale — Neptune has no permanent free tier, and Neo4j's AuraDB free tier is capped for learning and exploration rather than production traffic.
Last reviewed September 22, 2026