Frequently Asked Questions

Aura is available in multiple tiers to meet your organization's needs and use cases. Visit our Pricing page to learn more about the product tiers and compare them.

Aura Free is designed for you to rapidly learn, prototype and experiment without any friction or cost. The Free tier includes one Aura graph database that scales up to 50k nodes and 175k relationships, that lets you quickly and easily build and test models for small projects. The Free tier is fully-managed and always on with automated upgrades, but does not offer backup snapshots. You don’t need a credit card to get started with Aura Free. Learn more.

Aura is available directly from Neo4j or via Cloud Marketplaces. Today, Aura Enterprise is available on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) while Aura Free and Professional are available on GCP. Aura Enterprise supports all global regions supported by the cloud provider chosen. We plan to expand to other major cloud platforms and make Aura broadly accessible.

Neo4j Aura is a purpose built, high performance, native graph database engine. It is designed to leverage not only data but also data relationships. While relational databases normalize data into a tabular schema and incurs a cost in relationship storage and performance in the form of JOIN tables, graph databases store data relationships natively and eliminate the cost by the use of pointers. Learn more.

Yes, Aura is designed to be reliable, secure and always on, and can be used for production. Visit our Pricing page to compare the product tiers and select based on your needs.

Yes, Aura is ACID compliant with immediate consistency.

Aura supports Cypher as the graph query language. Cypher is an intuitive and simple-yet-powerful graph query language built by Neo4j. On top of Cypher, modern API libraries like GraphQL and Object Graph Mappers ease your application development.

Neo4j Aura is built on the latest version of Neo4j and will get the latest features and updates first, while staying backward compatible within a major release version.

Both Neo4j Aura and Neo4j Cloud Managed Services (CMS) are designed to eliminate the underlying infrastructure and operations management for running a database cluster, enabling you to focus on building the app. However, the way they deliver this is fundamentally different:

• Neo4j CMS is a fully managed, white-glove offering where database operations management is provided by Neo4j experts who have experience in managing some of the largest Neo4j deployments in the world. This service is designed for enterprise customers who want to customize their deployment model, security configuration, contractual terms and service levels to their specific needs. In this offering, Neo4j experts take care of customers database operations inside of a customer’s own data center or virtual private cloud (VPC).
• Neo4j Aura is a cloud database service that allows the user to instantly provision and connect with. It is offered as a cloud service on Neo4j managed cloud infrastructure. All service operations, such as setup, configuration, provisioning, storage and network setups, are fully automated within the service and the user has no access to these system controls.

Aura has a simple consumption-based pricing model, and is charged based only on the database instance size deployed. The hourly rate depends on the size of the database deployed, as measured by RAM capacity. You are not charged for anything else, including compute, IO, storage or backups, keeping your costs easy to understand and predictable. The price varies for the various tiers of Aura. Refer to our Pricing page for more details.

There are no pricing tiers for development, test and QA environments. Aura is priced the same regardless of environment type.

No, you will not be charged extra for backup snapshots.

Anyone can sign up and start with Neo4j Aura Professional by visiting www.neo4j.com/aura and filling out user information, selecting a hosting region and database size, providing credit card details and agreeing to the terms and conditions of the service.

Aura lets you connect with a wide variety of programming languages. Neo4j officially supports drivers for .Net, Java, JavaScript, Go and Python. Community contributors provide many more, including PHP, Ruby, R, Erlang, Clojure, C/C++ and more.

Yes, you can push your existing Neo4j database into Aura with a command-line tool or import from any other data source using CSV as a transfer format.

At this time, you cannot pause the database while the service is running, However, you can destroy/delete and then recreate the database as many times as you want.

Yes, you can remove your data from Aura anytime you want.

Because your data is continuously backed up, you can use Neo4j Aura’s restore capabilities to generate a copy of your database for your own use, even for a new environment that you manage yourself.

No, Aura is a fully managed cloud database service hosted and managed in Neo4j’s secure public cloud environment on Google Cloud or AWS, as deployed.

At this time, there is no ability for users to customize their instances beyond the choice of available options. Each instance comes with pre-defined RAM, CPU and storage capacity.

Aura offers a variety of instance sizes to meet your workload demands. Aura Professional offers instances from 1GB to 64GB RAM capacity, while Aura Enterprise offers instances from 4GB to 256GB RAM instances. Learn more.

To scale the Aura database, simply choose a larger configuration. Neo4j Aura will enable the user to resize the database for increased capacity with no downtime!

You will have access to their memory, CPU and disk usage information. If they exceed the available memory and CPU, their performance will decline, but the database will continue to operate. However, if they exceed the available disk space, the system will allow them to continue to grow to a point. The user will also get an email from Neo4j informing them about the need to scale their database to accommodate their physical graph within three days. After that, if the user still fails to make the changes, Neo4j will do the appropriate resizing for them.

Aura performs automatic backups of all your databases at no extra cost. Backups can be restored with a simple click on your console. Aura Professional offers daily backups with 7 days retention, while Aura Enterprise offers hourly backups with 90 days retention by default.

Neo4j Aura keeps users databases up to date with the latest security updates and Neo4j software patches with no downtime. Neo4j Aura notifies users when new feature releases of Neo4j are available, and customers can choose exactly when they want to apply them.

Neo4j Aura is a highly available DBaaS that requires no maintenance windows. Unlike other cloud database services, Neo4j Aura is always on, meaning the service is never interrupted for security updates or software patches. This includes upgrades to patch as well as minor releases.

Aura is built from the ground up to be a highly available and reliable graph database service for your most critical applications. Aura’s architecture is self-monitoring and self-healing, and is built on resilient and durable service components on trusted public cloud infrastructure. Aura Enterprise offers a 99.95% availability SLA.

No, Aura does not have any scheduled maintenance windows or downtime. It is designed to be always on and available, and all upgrades and patches are automatically applied in the background without any service interruption or degradation.

Neo4j Aura is a highly-secure service where data is protected with pre-configured security features for authentication and encryption. Aura provides:

• Secure authentication: All access is secured by your unique access credentials known only to you. Database access credentials are not stored by, nor accessible to Neo4j staff.
• End-to-end encryption: All network traffic is encrypted using Transport Layer Security (TLS), as well as data-at-rest encryption using encrypted storage volumes.
• VPC isolation (Aura Enterprise only): The environment is fully isolated with dedicated cloud infrastructure to ensure privacy and security.
• Role-based access control (Aura Enterprise only): With custom roles and granular access permissions, even at a node level, you get fine-grained control to help meet your compliance and data governance requirements.

Learn more about our cloud security.

As an ISO 27001 certified organization, Neo4j is committed to supporting compliance with data protection laws and regulations, such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), throughout our services.

Currently, Aura is not HIPAA compliant.

All your data stays local and ensures you comply with regional data protection regulations.

Aura Enterprise includes 24x7 premium support with 1-hour SEV-1 response time. Aura Professional includes best-effort support with no defined support SLA.

Right from within your Aura console, you can learn about the features that have been widely requested and also input your requests for aura features you'd like to see.