Graph databases & knowledge graphs · Hypermode (an Istari Digital company)

Dgraph

Open-source, natively distributed property-graph database with a GraphQL-derived query language, now stewarded by Hypermode.

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Dgraph is a natively distributed property-graph database designed to shard and scale horizontally without an external coordination layer such as Cassandra or HBase, in contrast to JanusGraph's pluggable-backend model. It is queried through DQL (its own GraphQL-derived query language) and also exposes a GraphQL API directly over the graph, which appeals to teams already building GraphQL APIs. Dgraph's core has moved between licenses over its history and is currently Apache-2.0; the project was acquired by Hypermode in 2023, and Hypermode itself was acquired by Istari Digital in October 2025, with development continuing under that ownership and recent releases adding namespaces and enterprise features. Because of that ownership change, confirm current commercial support and managed-cloud availability directly with Hypermode before committing.

At a glance

Vendor Hypermode (an Istari Digital company)
Pricing model Open source + paid options
Free tier Yes
Deployment Self-hosted
Open source Yes (Apache-2.0)
Best for Teams building a GraphQL-first application that want the graph store and API layer combined.

Pricing

Core database is free and open source; enterprise features and managed offerings are arranged directly with Hypermode.

Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.

Features

  • DQL query language (GraphQL-derived)
  • Native GraphQL API over graph data
  • Natively distributed, sharded storage with no external coordinator
  • ACID transactions
  • Namespaces for multi-tenant graphs
  • Full-text and geo search

Integrations

Profile last reviewed September 21, 2026

Alternatives

NebulaGraph Open-source distributed property-graph database using nGQL, built for billion-edge-scale graphs at low latency. ArangoDB Multi-model database combining graph, document and key/value storage under one engine and one query language, AQL. Memgraph In-memory, Cypher-compatible property-graph database built in C++ for low-latency graph analytics and GraphRAG. JanusGraph Open-source distributed property-graph database queried with Gremlin, with pluggable storage and indexing backends.

Dgraph in the index now

Terms to know

Data modeling The practice of organizing data into entities, relationships and schemas that make it accurate and efficient to query.

Related guides

How to choose a graph database Decide property graph vs RDF first, then managed vs self-hosted and how the engine scales — the query language follows from those, not the other way round.