Release Date: 29 September 2025

Release Note for Neo4j 2025.09.0 (29 September 2025)

Neo4j Server

Server internals:

• Embedded Lucene upgraded. This brings general performance improvements to indexing and query execution. Heads-up: if you maintain a custom full-text index analyzer provider or other extensions that access Lucene libraries or on-disk files, you may need to update them for compatibility with the new Lucene version.

Neo4j-admin:

• Added –remote-address-resolution to the neo4j-admin database backup command. When used, it allows the DBMS to determine which servers are valid targets to take a backup from for a given database. For documentation, see Operations Manual -> Backup/Restore -> Backup an online database
• Added the ability to run a consistency check against a specific full backup or a dump file when many artifacts are in the same directory. For documentation, see Operation Manual -> Check database consistency.

Cypher 

Cypher 25 additive features:

• Added format() function. The format() function returns a string representation of a temporal value according to a user-defined pattern. For documentation, see the Cypher Manual: format() function.

• When running a valid Cypher 25 query as Cypher 5, the parser will now provide a more informative error, pointing out that the failed Cypher 5 query would be a valid Cypher 25 query. For documentation, see Status Codes for Errors & Notifications -> 42I67

Cypher performance improvements

• Increased the cost of SubtractionNodeByLabelsScan. The Planner should prefer NodeIndexScan over it more often.

Bug fixes

• Fix a bug where, in very rare cases, a uniqueness constraint would mistakenly allow duplicate properties during population of the constraint backing index.
• Fix missing null-pointer check which could lead to a NullPointerException being thrown for variable path patterns when concurrent deletions of nodes occurred.
• Fix for a memory issue that could lead to OutOfMemoryError in physical planning.
• Fix bug that sometimes leads to the wrong result for queries with p=shortestPath() combined with `all(n IN nodes(p) WHERE…)’
• Fix a bug in pipelined runtime dynamic scheduling that could cause certain queries with multiple SelectOrSemiApply operators in the query plan to sometimes fail with error messages like: “Cannot put key 1234 before first key 1235”
• Fix a bug where relationship indexes were not returned in the indexes column of SHOW TRANSACTIONS
• The GQL error code on an invalid allReduce invocation is now 42I51
• Fixes an issue in neo4j-admin import with the block format importer where a very long :ID string could fail the import due to an internal buffer overflow

Deprecations

• For all server changes and deprecations, see Operations Manual -> Changes, deprecations, and removals in Neo4j 2025.x
• For all Cypher language changes, deprecations, and compatibility, see 
  • Cypher 5 Manual -> Deprecations, additions, and compatibility.
  • Cypher 25 Manual -> Deprecations, additions, and compatibility
• CBC (cipher block chaining) ciphers, as used in TLS v1.2 network encryption, have several security vulnerabilities that make them less secure than alternative methods. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) does not recommend using CBC-based ciphers (RFC 8447), and these ciphers were removed from the TLS standard with the development of TLS v1.3.   CBC-based ciphers such as TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA384 are deprecated and have been unsupported since the 2025.01 Neo4j release.  In our next monthly Neo4j release in October they will be no longer available by default.  Ensure that applications are using supported TLS ciphers before upgrading to the 2025.10 release. Manually adding a cipher to the neo4j.conf will override the defaults.  For example: dbms.ssl.policy.bolt.ciphers=TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384

For most deployments no changes are required. See our documentation for more information.

Please refer to the changelog for full details of the changes.

Bundled products

The following products have been included in the distribution – available in /products directory unless stated otherwise – and are fully compatible with this release. 

• APOC Core 2025.09.0 – The most popular community library developed for the database, is fully supported (included in Labs directory).
• Bloom 6.x-2.24.0 – A beautiful and expressive data visualization tool to quickly explore and interact with Neo4j’s graph data platform – no coding required. Please refer to the release notes for details.  (Requires a License)
• Browser 2025.08.0  – Neo4j Browser is a tool for developers to interact with the graph. It is the default interface for both Enterprise and Community Editions (included in the /libs directory) of the Neo4j database. 
• Neo4j GenAI Plugin 2025.09.0 -The GenAI plugin delivers integrations with various generative AI services, including support for transforming text data into vector embeddings using VertexAI, OpenAI, or Amazon Bedrock. The resulting vector embeddings can be used together with Neo4j’s vector search indexes.
• Neo4j Graph Data Science 2.22.0 is a compatible version of the connected data analytics and machine learning platform that helps you understand the connections in big data to answer critical questions and improve predictions. Please refer to the release notes for further details. (GDS Enterprise requires a License. )
• Enterprise Fleet Management 1.1.0 allows a self-managed deployment to be registered within the Aura console, providing a fleet-wide view of all Neo4j instances. It supports EE and CE deployments.
• Neo4j Ops Manager 1.13.0 is a UI-based tool that enables Administrators to operate and observe all of their Neo4j Database Management Servers. Now includes support for Neo4j’s any-to-any upgrade. Please refer to the release notes for details. (Included in Enterprise).