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 all that Community Edition offers, plus extra enterprise requirements such as backups, clustering, and failover capabilities.
- Community Edition
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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
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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.
The following table compares the available key features in both editions:
| Feature | Community Edition | Enterprise Edition |
|---|---|---|
Native Graph |
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Native graph processing & storage |
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Standard and Aligned store format (34 Billion Nodes & Relationships) Standard is deprecated in 5.23 |
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High_limit (1 Quadrillion Nodes & Relationships) Deprecated in 5.23 |
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Clients and APIs |
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Language drivers for .NET, Go, Java, JavaScript, and Python [1] |
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High-performance native API |
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APOC 450+ Core Procedures and Functions |
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Support for Neo4j Graph Data Science Community Edition [1] |
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Support for Neo4j Graph Data Science Enterprise Edition [1] |
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Indexes and constraints |
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Security |
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Data management |
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Offline backup (dump) |
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Scale and availability |
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Multiple databases (beyond the |
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1. Must be downloaded and installed separately. |
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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
The Cypher language has been decoupled from the Neo4j server versioning and now has its own versioning system. You can choose between Cypher 5 and Cypher 25:
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Cypher 5 is the language version with which all queries written for Neo4j 2025.05 and earlier versions are compatible. It remains the default version for all newly created databases; however, as of Neo4j 2025.06, it is frozen and will only receive performance enhancements and bug fixes in future server releases.
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Cypher 25 is the new version of the Cypher language. It 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 will be added only to Cypher 25.
For more information about the Cypher versioning, see Cypher Manual → Select Cypher version.
You can specify the version of Cypher in which you want to run your queries (Cypher 5 or Cypher 25) by configuring a default Cypher version for the whole DBMS, for a database, or by setting it on a per-query basis. For details, see the Configure the Cypher default version.