Introduction

The Community Edition is a fully functional edition of Neo4j, suitable for single-instance deployments. It has full support for 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.

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 solutions and critical internal solutions.

Neo4j uses semantic versioning (Semantic Versioning Specification 2.0.0). Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, the increment is based on:

Neo4j’s fully managed cloud service Neo4j Aura uses only MAJOR versioning.

Cypher is a declarative query language for graphs. Neo4j uses the property graph approach, where relationships are stored alongside the data in the model, and not computed at query time. Cypher is a powerful, graph-optimized query language that understands, and takes advantage of, these stored connections. When trying to find patterns or insights in data, Cypher queries are often much simpler and easier to write than massive SQL JOINs. Since Neo4j does not have tables, there are no JOINs to worry about.

For more details, see the Cypher Manual → Cypher - The Graph Query Language.

The recommended way of programmatically interacting with the database is either through the official Neo4j Drivers, or through using the Java Reference → Neo4j Java API. Neo4j provides an ACID-compliant transactional backend for your applications.