Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

neo4j VS Protocol Buffers

Compare neo4j VS Protocol Buffers and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

neo4j logo neo4j

Meet Neo4j: The graph database platform powering today's mission-critical enterprise applications, including artificial intelligence, fraud detection and recommendations.

Protocol Buffers logo Protocol Buffers

A method for serializing and interchanging structured data.
  • neo4j Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-09
  • Protocol Buffers Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-02

neo4j

Website
neo4j.com
$ Details
Release Date
2007 January
Startup details
Country
United States
State
California
City
San Mateo
Founder(s)
Emil Eifrem
Employees
500 - 999

neo4j features and specs

  • Graph DB

Protocol Buffers features and specs

  • Efficiency
    Protocol Buffers are designed to be compact and efficient, using less space compared to other serialization formats like XML or JSON. This efficiency benefits both storage and network transmission.
  • Backward and Forward Compatibility
    Protocol Buffers support easy schema evolution. New fields can be added to your protocol without breaking existing deployed programs that are compiled with an older version of the protocol.
  • Performance
    They offer fast serialization and deserialization, which can significantly improve performance in applications where speed is critical.
  • Language Support
    Protocol Buffers are supported in multiple programming languages, making them flexible for use in diverse tech stacks and across different systems.
  • Type Safety
    With Protocol Buffers, schemas are strictly defined, which provides a level of type safety compared to text-based formats like JSON or XML.

Possible disadvantages of Protocol Buffers

  • Learning Curve
    The initial setup and understanding of Protocol Buffers can be complex for those who are not familiar with binary serialization formats.
  • Debugging Difficulty
    Because Protocol Buffers use a compact and binary format, debugging can be more challenging compared to human-readable formats like JSON or XML.
  • Limited Human Readability
    As a binary format, Protocol Buffers are not easily readable without decoding, which can complicate manual inspection of data during development or troubleshooting.
  • Third-Party Dependency
    Using Protocol Buffers often requires integrating additional libraries into your project, which can introduce dependencies that need to be maintained.
  • Tooling Overhead
    The use of Protocol Buffers requires a compilation step and the generation of code from .proto files, which adds complexity and build-time overhead.

Analysis of neo4j

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Neo4j is generally regarded as a good choice for applications where understanding and leveraging relationships between data points is crucial. Its mature ecosystem, active community, and extensive documentation further enhance its credibility and usability.

Why this product is good

  • Neo4j is considered a leading graph database platform that is highly effective for storing and querying complex data relationships. It is appreciated for its powerful query language, Cypher, useful for handling connected data. Its graph model is intuitive for users to understand and map to real-world applications, making it popular for use cases such as social networking, recommendation engines, and fraud detection.

Recommended for

  • Social network analysis
  • Recommendation systems
  • Fraud detection
  • Network and IT operations
  • Knowledge graphs
  • Data lineage tracking

neo4j videos

All about GRAND Stack: GraphQL, React, Apollo, and Neo4j

More videos:

  • Review - Kevin Van Gundy | Building a Recommendation Engine with Neo4j and Python

Protocol Buffers videos

Protocol Buffers- A Banked Journey - Christopher Reeves

More videos:

  • Review - justforfunc #30: The Basics of Protocol Buffers
  • Review - Complete Introduction to Protocol Buffers 3 : How are Protocol Buffers used?

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to neo4j and Protocol Buffers)
Databases
100 100%
0% 0
Configuration Management
0 0%
100% 100
Graph Databases
100 100%
0% 0
Web Servers
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare neo4j and Protocol Buffers

neo4j Reviews

Top 15 Free Graph Databases
Neo4j is an open-source graph database, implemented in Java described as embedded, disk-based, fully transactional Java persistence engine that stores data structured in graphs rather than in tables. Neo4j Community Edition
ArangoDB vs Neo4j - What you can't do with Neo4j
Multi-Model: Neo4j is a single-model graph database. It does not support any other data models. If your application requires a document or key/value store, you would have to use a second database technology to support it. Being multi-model, ArangoDB allows you to not only use one database for everything,but run ad hoc queries on data stored in different models.

Protocol Buffers Reviews

We have no reviews of Protocol Buffers yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

neo4j might be a bit more popular than Protocol Buffers. We know about 34 links to it since March 2021 and only 24 links to Protocol Buffers. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

neo4j mentions (34)

  • 6 retrieval augmented generation (RAG) techniques you should know
    The key difference lies in the retrieval mechanism. Vector databases focus on semantic similarity by comparing numerical embeddings, while graph databases emphasize relations between entities. Two solutions for graph databases are Neptune from Amazon and Neo4j. In a case where you need a solution that can accommodate both vector and graph, Weaviate fits the bill. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • LLM to extract and auto generate knowledge graph - step by step, in ~100 lines of python
    Neo4j is a leading graph database that is easy to use and powerful for knowledge graphs. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • 10 Ways AI Can Speed Up your Mobile App Development
    Neo4j is one of the most popular graph databases. It offers powerful querying capabilities through its Cypher query language. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Databases in 2024: A Year in Review
    Great heads up. I wonder about graph databases. He mentioned and both include the graph use case and I wonder how they compare to . - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Installing Neo4j In Ubuntu
    The first blog in this series is to install neo4j - desktop version and few plugins which would help us to build an application. I am using Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS. - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
View more

Protocol Buffers mentions (24)

  • Vibe Code Like a Pro: Build an MVP Web App with MongoDB Atlas in <1 Hour Using Cursor
    First, we need to define our data model and API endpoints using Protocol Buffers. They are an industry standard when it comes to low-latency, high-performance data serialization. - Source: dev.to / 16 days ago
  • Pulumi Gestalt 0.0.1 released
    A schema.json converter for easier ingestion (likely supporting Avro and Protobuf). - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Understanding Protocol Buffers: A Fast Alternative to JSON
    Protocol Buffers Documentation Protobuf Json JSON in API Development. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • gRPC: what is it? An introduction...
    For our luck, Go is one of the 11 languages with official libraries. It is important to say that the framework uses Protocol Buffer to serialize the message. The first step then is to install locally the protobuf and its Go plugins:. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Why should we use Protobuf in Web API as data transfer protocol.
    Note: Clients and services will ignore field numbers they do not recognize. For more details about Protobuf, visit protobuf.dev. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing neo4j and Protocol Buffers, you can also consider the following products

ArangoDB - A distributed open-source database with a flexible data model for documents, graphs, and key-values.

Messagepack - An efficient binary serialization format.

Redis - Redis is an open source in-memory data structure project implementing a distributed, in-memory key-value database with optional durability.

gRPC - Application and Data, Languages & Frameworks, Remote Procedure Call (RPC), and Service Discovery

OrientDB - OrientDB - The World's First Distributed Multi-Model NoSQL Database with a Graph Database Engine.

TOML - TOML - Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language