Introduction

Neo4j is the world’s leading graph database. The architecture is designed for optimal management, storage, and traversal of nodes and relationships. The graph database takes a property graph approach, which is beneficial for both traversal performance and operations runtime. Neo4j offers dedicated memory management and memory-efficient operations.

Neo4j is scalable and can be deployed as a standalone server or across multiple machines in a fault-tolerant cluster for production environments. Other features for production applications include hot backups and extensive monitoring.

Neo4j editions

There are two editions of self-managed Neo4j to choose from: the Community Edition (CE) and the Enterprise Edition (EE). The Enterprise Edition includes everything the Community Edition offers, plus additional enterprise requirements such as backups, clustering, and failover capabilities. Infinigraph is a special Enterprise Edition that also includes unlimited horizontal scaling with automatic sharding, as well as Graph Data Science with a license key.

Community Edition (CE)

The Community Edition is a fully functional edition of Neo4j, suitable for single-instance deployments. It fully supports key Neo4j features, such as ACID-compliant transactions, Cypher, and programming APIs. It is ideal for learning Neo4j, do-it-yourself projects, and applications in small workgroups.

Enterprise Edition (EE)

The Enterprise Edition extends the functionality of Community Edition to include key features for performance and scalability, such as a clustering architecture and online backup functionality. Additional security features include role-based access control and LDAP support, for example, Active Directory. It is the choice for production systems with requirements for scale and availability, such as commercial and critical internal solutions.

Infinigraph

Infinigraph is a specialized Enterprise Edition of Neo4j designed for high-performance graph processing and analytics at scale. It includes all features from Enterprise edition, as well as unlimited horizontal scaling with automatic sharding and graph analytics capabilities. Requires a separate subscription.

The following table compares the available key features in both editions:

Table 1. Key features per edition
Feature CE EE EE with Infinigraph

Open source under GPLv3

Native Graph

Property graph model

Native graph processing & storage

Standard and Aligned store format (34 Billion Nodes & Relationships) Standard is deprecated in 5.23

High_limit (1 Quadrillion Nodes & Relationships) Deprecated in 5.23

Block format

Change Data Capture (CDC)

ACID-compliant transactions

Cypher graph query language

Slotted Cypher runtime

Pipelined Cypher runtime

Parallel Cypher runtime

Listing and terminating running queries

High-performance caching

Cost-based query optimizer

Clients and APIs

Cypher Shell

Neo4j Browser with syntax highlighting

Bolt Protocol

Language drivers for .NET, Go, Java, JavaScript, and Python [1]

High-performance native API

APOC 450+ Core Procedures and Functions

Support for Neo4j Graph Data Science Community Edition [1]

Support for Neo4j Graph Data Science Enterprise Edition [2]

Support for Neo4j Bloom

Gen AI integration via Neo4j GenAI plugin

Indexes and constraints

Fast writes via native label indexes

Composite indexes

Full-text node & relationship indexes

Vector indexes

Property uniqueness constraints

Property existence constraints

Property type constraints

Node and relationship key constraints

Security

Role-based access control

Property-based access control

Sub-graph access control

LDAP and Active Directory integration

Kerberos security option

Data management

Offline full import

Incremental import

Auto-reuse of space

Store copy

Offline backup (dump)

Scale and availability

Online backup and restore

Multiple databases (beyond the system and default databases)

Autonomous clustering

Composite databases

Sharded property databases New in 2025.12

Monitoring and management

Endpoints and metrics for monitoring via Prometheus

Neo4j Operations Manager

1. Must be downloaded and installed separately.
2. Infinigraph includes a license key for Neo4j Graph Data Science.

By default, Neo4j Community Edition and Neo4j Enterprise Edition report a small amount of usage data. This helps Neo4j understand how its products are used and improve them. For more information about what data is collected, see Usage data report.

Neo4j server versions

2025.01.0 introduces a new calendar versioning (CalVer) for the Neo4j server instead of the previously used semantic versioning (SemVer). The new versioning format, YYYY.MM.Patch, is based on the year and month of the release, for example, 2025.01.0, 2025.02.0, and so on. The patch number is incremented for each release within the same month.

Some of the releases will be designated as long-term support (LTS) releases.

Neo4j Aura always uses the latest version of the Neo4j server.

Cypher® versions
Introduced in 2025.06

As of Neo4j 2025.06, the Cypher language is decoupled from the Neo4j server and follows its own versioning. Currently, there are two versions of Cypher available: Cypher 5 and Cypher 25. You can specify the version of Cypher by configuring a default Cypher version for the whole DBMS by explicitely setting db.query.default_language configuration in the neo4j.conf file, per database when using CREATE DATABASE or ALTER DATABASE, or by prepending the query with CYPHER 5 or CYPHER 25 on a per-query basis to override the default. For more information, see the Configure the Cypher default version and Cypher Manual → Select Cypher version.

Cypher 5

Cypher 5 is the language version with which all queries written for Neo4j 2025.05 and earlier versions are compatible. However, as of Neo4j 2025.06, it is frozen and will only receive performance enhancements and bug fixes in future server releases.
Setting the default language to CYPHER 5 ensures that all queries run on that database use the version of Cypher 5 as it existed at the time of the Neo4j 2025.06 release (unless you prepend your queries with CYPHER 25, which overrides this default). Any changes introduced after the 2025.06 release do not affect the semantics of the query.
Cypher 5 remains the default version for all newly created databases unless db.query.default_language=CYPHER_25 is explicitly set on the DBMS level or overridden using CREATE DATABASE or ALTER DATABASE, or by prepending queries with CYPHER 25.

Cypher 25

Cypher 25 builds upon Cypher 5 and includes new and improved features, as well as some removals. Any new Cypher features introduced in Neo4j 2025.06 or later are added only to Cypher 25. Setting the default language to CYPHER 25 ensures that all queries run on that database use the version of Cypher 25 that the database is currently running (unless you prepend your queries with CYPHER 5, which overrides this default). For example, a Neo4j 2025.10 database with default language Cypher 25 will use Cypher 25 as it exists in Neo4j 2025.10, including any changes introduced in Neo4j 2025.06, 2025.07, 2025.08, and 2025.09.

Starting from Neo4j 2026.02,the distributed neo4j.conf explicitly sets db.query.default_language=CYPHER_25. As a result, new deployments using the provided configuration file default to Cypher 25 for newly created databases. The Cypher version can still be explicitly specified in the CREATE DATABASE command or can be changed at any time using ALTER DATABASE.

If you want to use Cypher 5 as the default for new databases, you can remove or comment out that configuration entry, which is equivalent to setting db.query.default_language=CYPHER_5. Existing databases retain their existing default language.

Operations Manual versioning

The Operations Manual is versioned according to the calendar version of the Neo4j server. For example, the Operations Manual for Neo4j 2025.01.0 is versioned as 2025.01.0 and reflects the features and changes in that release.