Neo4j Aura (pay-as-you-go) is primarily used for research and production-grade graph analytics, including knowledge graph construction for complex relational data and graph-based reasoning and traversal for AI-driven analytics.
Neo4j Aura (Annual)
Neo4jExternal reviews
135 reviews
from
and
External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
Managed graph analytics has supported research but reveals critical gaps in service governance
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
Neo4j Aura has been valuable in terms of reducing infrastructure management overhead, providing a managed, scalable Neo4j environment, and enabling faster iteration on graph-based research and applications. However, this value was significantly undermined by the recent incident where the service was suspended without prior notice, leading to several hours of data inaccessibility. For mission-critical workloads, service continuity and predictable lifecycle management are as important as technical performance.
What is most valuable?
Neo4j Aura (pay-as-you-go) could be significantly improved in the areas of service lifecycle management, communication, and migration handling, based on my recent experience. Specifically:
- Advance notification and transparency for service suspension: My Aura project was suspended without prior notice, immediately making the database inaccessible. For a managed database service, users should receive clear advance warnings before any suspension that affects data availability.
- Clear handling of AWS Marketplace legacy subscriptions: The transition from a legacy AWS Marketplace listing to a new listing was not communicated clearly. When I followed the instruction to 'update' or re-subscribe, a new organization and project were created automatically, while my existing project remained suspended with no visible option to re-link the active subscription. This created confusion and operational risk.
- Explicit migration guidance in the UI and subscription flow: It was not clear that migration to a new project was mandatory and irreversible. This information was only provided after contacting support. Such constraints should be clearly surfaced before a user takes action.
- Reasonable and safe migration windows: After requesting emergency assistance, the suspended project was temporarily unsuspended for only one hour to allow snapshot and migration. This timeframe is not sufficient for safe migration of a non-trivial graph database and exposes users to unnecessary data loss risk.
What needs improvement?
Key areas for improvement include service governance and communication, especially around subscription transitions and deprecations. There should be clearer visibility and warnings for legacy subscription lifecycle changes. Safer and more flexible migration windows are needed when forced migration is required. Users also need explicit UI guidance for re-linking subscriptions or understanding when re-linking is not possible. From a user perspective, process reliability is as critical as technical features.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used Neo4j Aura (pay-as-you-go) for 2 years.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pay-as-you-go pricing model is generally reasonable and suitable for scalable workloads. However, users should be aware that pricing transparency alone is not sufficient. Subscription lifecycle changes, such as legacy marketplace transitions, can have a significant operational impact. Clear advance communication around such changes is essential to make pricing truly predictable.
What other advice do I have?
Neo4j Aura is a technically strong and capable managed graph database, and it has been valuable for research and production use. However, this incident revealed a serious gap between technical capability and operational governance. A production database service was suspended without prior notice, and a platform-side marketplace transition effectively forced migration. The responsibility and risk of emergency migration were placed almost entirely on the user, and only a one-hour window was provided to safeguard existing data. I am not opposed to migration or platform evolution. What I strongly advise is that such changes be handled with clear advance communication, explicit explanations of irreversible actions, and migration timelines that are realistic and safe.
Easy to use but has some stability concerns
What is our primary use case?
It is a very difficult job to show the graph schema and understand a problem using the graph technique.Neo4j AuraDB is a very convenient tool for our team because it allows access to anyone invited to a project. Others can easily access the graph data if I invite people and train the schema.
What is most valuable?
The solution's most valuable features stem from its easy connection to other modules and integrations. Understanding graphs can be a very complex concept, as there are many other combination modules in it, like LangChain, the LLM module, and the data processing module. I think there are more than four modules that heavily rely on GraphRAG's implementation, but AuraDB's role is very good because everything is very convenient for our team in the cloud and graph database systems.
What needs improvement?
During the product's setup process, disconnections in the tool's network caused some problems, making the solution's stability an area of concern that requires improvements.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Neo4j AuraDB for a year. I am a customer of the tool.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Stability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I had to use the cloud system of the tool because our company had faced scalability issues. I used the database for small use cases involving graphs. The tool has issues stemming from the disconnection part that keeps occurring, which led to GraphRAG implementation issues.
Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a four out of ten.
How are customer service and support?
I never had to contact the solution's technical support team.
How was the initial setup?
During the product's initial setup phase, there were some issues due to disconnections in the tool's network.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The tool's enterprise edition is very expensive.
What other advice do I have?
The tool is easy to use.
The tool offers very easy and convenient modules for our teams.
The tool does help handle data security and privacy concerns in our use cases. Our data is a very important factor for us in terms of privacy and security. I think the tool's modules are good. The product offers a text file for AuraDB's information. You should be careful with the text file because it includes information like URLs, passwords, and usernames.
I strongly recommend that people use the tool. I suggest others not be afraid of GraphRAG and databases on the cloud system. The tool is a very convenient source for a beginner of the graph database.
I did use the tool's AI capabilities. There are many important processes in the GraphRAG procedure, and among them, the graph construction was very important because, as per RAG, everything depends on the graph schema. We deal with the design for the graph, and then the tool can easily integrate into their traditional database. The cloud is very easy to access and manage.
I rate the tool a seven out of ten.
Neo4j Review: A Great Database to Start with Graph Technologies
What do you like best about the product?
The Cypher language allows you to construct queries that are understandable even without technical expertise.
Open source and community edition that can be self-hosted.
Neo4j Browser to visualize graph data.
Open source and community edition that can be self-hosted.
Neo4j Browser to visualize graph data.
What do you dislike about the product?
For a self-hosted solution, the update process is not always straightforward.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Neo4j helps us creating and maintain a representation of the real world, with its structure of nodes and relations; something that may be impossible to do with sql-like database
Solution for complex data relations
What do you like best about the product?
It allows storing data with complex relationships, which can be represented suitably, making querying easy.
What do you dislike about the product?
It's primary use is free, but advanced features seem too costly.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Our data has various complex relationships which can be maintained and queried easily with the help of the Neo4j Graph database.
Best graph data science on the market
What do you like best about the product?
Lots of embedded graph data science models
What do you dislike about the product?
Enterprise Edition is expensive, but the version with the minimum required security features
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Ability to convey data in a more meaningful way
Easy to get up and going, support was very helpful.
What do you like best about the product?
Neo4j has a lot of documentation available online, and their support services are very helpful and responsive. The graph data science library is also very comprehensive and allows you to do a lot of powerful stuff without much startup time.
What do you dislike about the product?
I wish there were more robust connectors to other data storage formats, like AWS or Microsoft cloud. We have been having trouble connecting to an enterprise installation of Neo4j from Azure cloud.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Neo4j is helping us solve geospatial aggregations and point queries, as well as exploring and distilling complex relationships into simple summaries to help us make decisions.
Tinkering over the last 7 years
What do you like best about the product?
I like how easy it is to get started. I like the concept of graph in general. I like the tools that come along with Neo4j for visualization and browsing.
What do you dislike about the product?
The user interface to the Neo4j Browser sometimes feels clunky and hard use. Specifically, the scrolling and pinning feel awkward.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
The experience that I learned about at GraphConnect using the GraphQL Toolkit was exciting. I'm not yet using it, but look forward to.
Great on reads and modeling needs improvements writing at scale
What do you like best about the product?
So really like the property container. Modeling relationships between various types and the flexibility. Unlike SQL, Neo4j is able to do much more complicated join queries at scale.
What do you dislike about the product?
Write performance and locking are the most problematic. The pesimistic locking is very restrictive if that was configurable that would be a huge improvement. Also the clustering is much more the application's responsiblity.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
The problems that Neo4j helps the most with is modeling a dynamic application with dynamic reporting/dashboaring. It allows our customers to proactively add more properties and queries easily.
Supply Chain applications - initial evaluation
What do you like best about the product?
cypher is very easy to pick up and intuitive. browser portal is also easy to use. sandbox with examples and tutorials with example datasets is very useful for beginners.
What do you dislike about the product?
some complex queries are not easy to write and often reside in APOC library which for a new user "seems" intimidating.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
End to End supply chain modeling and supply chain event response system.
Fast Graph Based Database that most useful when looking for relational databases alternatives
What do you like best about the product?
Fast , Easy to use and The Relations Between Nodes
What do you dislike about the product?
The queries syntax is somehow weird specially when you are new to it
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Warehouse Management, The Relations In Neo4j is more flexible
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Neo4j Is Best Beneficial when you use it in the right place , If your Application needs a fast , relation oriented Databases then you should consider Neo4j as your first options
showing 1 - 10