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Neo4j

Neo4j is the leading graph database, made by Neo4j Inc., available as a free open-source Community edition plus a paid Enterprise tier. It ranks #23 in real-world usage at roughly 2.6% adoption, and it's picked whenever the data itself is fundamentally about connections — stored as nodes and relationships instead of rows and tables.

📝 Quick facts
Type: Graph database
Made by: Neo4j Inc.
License: Free Community edition (open-source core) + paid Enterprise
Hosting: Self-hosted or cloud-managed (Neo4j Aura)
Primary use case: Highly connected data — social networks, recommendations, fraud detection

Jump to: Example (Cypher)Getting started Best for

Example (Cypher)

Neo4j's query language, Cypher, reads like an ASCII drawing of the graph pattern you're searching for.

MATCH (p:Person)-[:FRIENDS_WITH]->(f:Person)
WHERE p.name = 'Ada'
RETURN f.name AS friend_name; // finds everyone Ada is friends with

Getting started

Neo4j Desktop and Neo4j Aura (a free-tier cloud instance) are the two easiest ways to start, both with a browser-based query console and cypher-shell for the command line.

# run locally with Docker
docker run -p 7474:7474 -p 7687:7687 neo4j:latest

# or connect to a running instance with cypher-shell
cypher-shell -u neo4j -p password

🎯 Best for — projects where the relationships matter as much as the data itself: recommendation engines, knowledge graphs, fraud/anomaly detection, and social-network features.