I benchmarked CognoDB against four other graph databases. The most interesting result had nothing to do with CognoDB.

I was asked to benchmark CognoDB Cloud, a managed graph database, against four other graph platforms on the same hardware, the same dataset, and the same queries. The brief was clear about one thing: this isn't about proving a winner, it's about proving the comparison itself is fair. That's the part I actually cared about getting right, coming from a DevOps background — a benchmark is only as good as the infrastructure decisions behind it.

The biggest finding wasn't about CognoDB at all. Under a memory cap tight enough to be realistic for a free tier, Neo4j — one of the most widely used graph databases out there — failed 740 out of 744 operations the moment I pushed it to 40 concurrent clients. Not slower. Failed.

Here's what I set up, what I found, and a couple of real bugs I hit along the way.

The setup

CognoDB Cloud (the platform being evaluated) against Neo4j Community, Memgraph Community, ArangoDB Community, and FalkorDB. I picked those four deliberately, not at random: Neo4j because CognoDB documents itself as drop-in compatible with the official Neo4j driver, so it's the closest apples-to-apples comparison available. Memgraph because it speaks the same protocol but is an in-memory C++ engine, not a JVM. ArangoDB because it's deliberately not Cypher — it forces the "same logical query" methodology to hold up across a completely different query language. FalkorDB because it's built specifically for low-memory environments, which is exactly what a free tier is.