Choose the Right Neo4j Offering for Your Needs

Sr. Technical Product Marketing Manager, Neo4j

April 2, 2025

4 min read

Every organization’s graph journey looks different. Whether you’re a developer exploring graph concepts, a growing startup building your first graph application, or an enterprise running mission-critical workloads, Neo4j offers options that match your specific stage and requirements.

Understanding Neo4j’s Graph Database Options

At their core, all Neo4j editions share the same advanced graph database technology that helps you uncover hidden patterns and relationships in connected data. However, features, support levels, and management requirements differ to address different use cases and organizational needs.

Neo4j Community Edition

This free, open source version gives you the core graph database capabilities you need to start building and experimenting with graphs right away. Community Edition includes the native graph database engine with ACID transactions, the Cypher query language, and essential visualization tools.

Community Edition works well for:

Learning and exploring graph concepts
Individual development projects
Proofs of concept and prototypes
Non-critical applications with single-user access needs

Neo4j Enterprise Edition (Self-Managed)

Neo4j Enterprise Edition is our self-managed database offering, providing full control over your database environment for organizations with specific regulatory, compliance, or operational requirements. This option extends Community Edition capabilities with advanced security features, high availability clustering, and performance optimization. Enterprise Edition is designed for organizations that:

Must maintain complete control over their data infrastructure due to regulatory requirements (examples include certain government agencies, defense contractors, and financial institutions)
Need to deploy in air-gapped environments or highly secure network configurations
Have established enterprise data center operations with specific integration requirements
Operate in regions with data sovereignty laws requiring on-premises deployment

The self-managed option gives you maximum control while still providing enterprise-grade capabilities. However, it requires that your team handle deployment, maintenance, updates, and scaling.

Neo4j AuraDB (Fully Managed Cloud Service)

Our cloud-native graph database service represents Neo4j’s strategic direction and the future of graph database technology. AuraDB delivers our best and most complete graph database experience while handling infrastructure management, allowing you to focus entirely on building innovative graph applications.

Built on robust Neo4j graph technology, AuraDB also offers enterprise-grade security, compliance with standard industry regulations, built-in high availability, and seamless integration with the broader cloud ecosystem. As our flagship offering, AuraDB receives our highest investment in new features, optimizations, and cloud-native capabilities.

We offer several AuraDB options for your specific needs:

AuraDB Free – Perfect for learning and exploring graphs with no cost or credit card required
AuraDB Professional – Designed for production applications with up to 128GB instances, daily backups, and on-demand scaling
AuraDB Business Critical – Enterprise-grade solution with up to 512GB instances, 99.95-percent uptime SLA guarantee with high-availability cluster, advanced security controls, and 24/7 support
AuraDB Virtual Dedicated Cloud – Comprehensive offering with dedicated infrastructure, VPC isolation, and enhanced backup and support options

AuraDB is ideal for teams that:

Want to focus on building applications rather than managing databases
Need to deploy and scale graph solutions quickly
Prefer predictable operational costs with pay-as-you-go options
Require enterprise-grade reliability without infrastructure overhead
Want to stay at the forefront of graph database innovation

As the cloud continues transforming how organizations build and deploy applications, AuraDB represents our commitment to delivering the industry’s most powerful, secure, and easy-to-use graph database experience.

When to Move Beyond Community Edition

Many teams start with Community Edition to explore graph capabilities and develop initial applications. As these projects prove their value, move toward production use, and become business-critical, the enhanced features of AuraDB become increasingly important. Common signals that it’s time to consider commercial editions include:

Growing security requirements – Data becomes sensitive or regulated
Need for higher reliability – Downtime impacts your business
Scalability challenges – You need to scale beyond a single instance
Team efficiency concerns – Maintenance tasks take too much developer time
Need for expert support – Troubleshooting complex issues requires specialized help

Many organizations have discovered the value of switching to commercial editions as their projects mature. Take Milanote and Flaminem, for example — Neo4j customers who benefited greatly from upgrading to commercial licenses.

Milanote: Boosting Performance and Transforming User Experience

Milanote offers a visual organization and collaboration tool for designers and other creatives. The company used Neo4j Aura Pro to improve the product experience for millions of users by reducing application initialization time from a few seconds to milliseconds and delivering greater application stability and consistency.

“Neo4j didn’t just solve our performance challenges—it changed how we think about building features,” said Glenn Allen, Founding Engineer at Milanote. “We’ve gone from spending our time managing database problems to focusing on what matters: helping our users collaborate and create.”

Read the case study to learn more about Milanote’s Neo4j implementation.

Flaminem: Accelerating Fraud Detection and KYC

A software vendor for compliance managers in the financial sector, Flaminem enables its clients to accelerate fraud detection and know-your-customer (KYC) processes, facilitating compliance with regulations that target money laundering and terrorism financing.

Flaminem upgraded from Community Edition to Enterprise Edition and now manages 50 Neo4j graph databases for more than 20 customers on its OVHcloud environment. Its solutions are invaluable to clients like Bpifrance, France’s largest public-sector investment bank, which has achieved time savings of 90 percent with Flaminem’s solution.

Read the case study to learn more about how Flaminem powers success for Bpifrance.

Unlock the Power of Connected Data

Every Neo4j edition gives you the ability to discover patterns in your connected data that traditional databases miss. Whether you’re tracing supply chain dependencies, analyzing customer journeys, detecting fraud, or mapping complex networks in healthcare and finance, Neo4j reveals meaningful insights through the power of relationships. As you explore the relationships within your data, you’ll uncover insights that can transform how you approach business challenges. To learn more about our graph database portfolio and find the best fit for your needs, check out the following resources: