We benchmarked CognoDB against four graph databases. Here's what "free tier" actually buys you.
A field guide for anyone choosing a managed graph database on a budget - and a template for not trusting benchmarks, including this one. Full repo, all the code, and the raw results: https://github.com/HassanYosuf/graphdb-benchmark Every graph database vendor's homepage says roughly the same thing: fast traversals, no JOINs, point your driver at a URL and go. That pitch is almost never wrong, and…
When evaluating managed graph databases, it is crucial to focus on the smallest and cheapest instances offered by each vendor, as this is where your application will most likely be running. Five databases were tested on their minimum instance tiers, with a dataset of 7,000 people, 2,800 products, and 56,000 relationships. Nine queries were executed to measure latency, throughput, load time, and connection setup time.
The results showed that self-hosted engines outperformed managed databases in raw query speed. CognoDB, ArangoDB Oasis, and FalkorDB Cloud experienced latency ranging from 245-310ms, while FalkorDB had the lowest latency at approximately 35ms. However, two results deviated from the expected network latency theory: CognoDB's free tier failed under sustained load, and Memgraph had slower performance on multi-hop queries compared to other databases.
Load time varied among databases, with FalkorDB taking the longest to load data (231 seconds) compared to CognoDB (40 seconds) and Neo4j Community (21 seconds). These findings highlight the importance of considering the smallest instance tiers and understanding the differences between query latency and bulk load times when choosing a managed graph database.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
