What's the difference between Amazon DocumentDB and Amazon Neptune?
Both handle semi-structured data, but they're optimized for different query patterns. DocumentDB stores and queries JSON documents; Neptune stores and traverses relationships between entities.
Compare side-by-side
*Content generated by AI and reviewed for accuracy
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Comparisons
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Amazon DocumentDB
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Amazon Neptune
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Category
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Databases, Document databases |
Databases, Graph databases |
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Description
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Fast, scalable, highly available MongoDB-compatible document database service. |
Fast, reliable, fully managed graph database service designed for highly connected datasets, knowledge graphs, and GraphRAG applications. |
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Best for
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Key features
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Pricing model
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On-Demand or Serverless |
On-demand or Serverless |
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Free Tier
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Yes — 750 hours/month for 1 month |
Yes |
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Expert take
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DocumentDB gives you the MongoDB developer experience you know with the operational reliability of a fully managed AWS service. If your team thinks in documents and your schemas evolve frequently, DocumentDB lets you move fast without sacrificing durability. |
Neptune is purpose-built for workloads where relationships between entities are the primary query pattern. When you need to traverse connections — friend-of-friend, shortest path, pattern matching — a graph database outperforms relational joins by orders of magnitude at depth. |
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Customer story
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View product pages
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How DocumentDB and Neptune compare
Both Amazon DocumentDB and Amazon Neptune are fully managed with encryption at rest and in transit, IAM integration, automated backups, and Multi-AZ deployments. The features listed in the table above highlight where the services differ.
Choose DocumentDB when your data is naturally document-shaped (user profiles, product catalogs, content) and your queries filter, sort, and aggregate within documents. DocumentDB handles nested JSON well and gives you MongoDB's flexible query language.
Choose Neptune when the connections between your entities are what you're querying. If your questions are "who is connected to whom," "what's the shortest path," or "find all entities within N hops matching this pattern," Neptune's graph traversal will dramatically outperform document queries that would require multiple lookups and application-side joins.
Key distinction: DocumentDB answers "what are the attributes of this entity?" Neptune answers "how is this entity related to other entities?" If you need both, many architectures use DocumentDB for entity storage and Neptune for relationship queries, syncing data between them.
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