# Aiven vs Neo4j

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/compare/aiven-vs-neo4j/

Every value below is read from Aiven's and Neo4j's own documentation. See https://inetgeek.com/methodology/ for how.

## At a glance

| Criterion | Aiven | Neo4j |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free tier | Yes — indefinite, but idle services are powered off | Yes |
| Entry paid plan | $5 a month for Developer — one VM, 1 CPU, 1 GB RAM, 8 GB storage, with no choice of cloud or region and no connection pooling. The first plan that behaves like a production service is Startup at $75 a month or $0.10 an hour, which is where the uptime SLA and multi-CPU sizing begin; Hobbyist sits between them at $12. | $65/GB/month (minimum 1GB cluster) on AuraDB Professional, or $0.09/hour ($65.70/month for 1GB) metered hourly. 14-day free trial available. |
| Pricing model | Fixed plans quoted both monthly and hourly, with the plan setting CPU, RAM and storage together rather than metering them separately. Aiven describes the pricing as all-inclusive: backups, monitoring and support come with the plan instead of appearing as line items. Higher tiers buy node count and backup history — Business adds a standby node, Premium a second. | Usage-based, metered per GB-hour of memory on the Professional tier. A paused database cuts cost by roughly 80%. |
| Startup credit program | Aiven for Startups: $12,000–$100,000 in Aiven credits over 12 months. Requires founded ≤7 years ago and external funding from pre-seed to Series B. | Neo4j for Startups: up to $16K in Aura credits. Requires Series B or earlier funding, a single product sold to many customers (not custom per-customer work), a functioning website, and a company LinkedIn profile. |
| Regions | 153 regions across six clouds — AWS 25, Google 42, Azure 39, OVH 22, UpCloud 16, DigitalOcean 9 — counted from Aiven's own reference list, which publishes the regions and no total. No magnitude is recorded, because Aiven states on that same page that the list differs per project and that not all service types are available in every cloud and region: the number is the platform's reach, not PostgreSQL's, and a bar drawn from it would be compared against providers whose counts are engine-specific. | AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, across more than 60 global cloud regions; also available through the AWS, Azure and Google Cloud marketplaces. |
| Engine | PostgreSQL, alongside MySQL, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, Valkey, Kafka, Flink and Grafana. Aiven runs the upstream projects rather than a compatible reimplementation, which is why its own docs point at postgresql.org for per-release detail. | Neo4j, a native property graph database. |
| Point-in-time recovery | Bounded by the plan's backup history, so 2 days on the entry paid plan and 30 at the top. Granularity is fine within that: full backups daily with write-ahead logs copied every 5 minutes or per new file, whichever comes first. | Not included on the entry-paid (Professional) tier — point-in-time restore is a Business Critical feature, with hourly granularity and 30-day retention. |
| Read replicas | Supported | Supported |
| Backup retention | By plan: none on Hobbyist, 2 days on Startup, 14 on Business, 30 on Premium. The magnitude is Startup's 2 days, the entry paid plan. Aiven's high-availability page states 2 days for Hobbyist where the backups page states none — the backups page is the more specific of the two and is what is recorded here. | Daily backups, 7-day retention on the entry-paid (Professional) tier. Business Critical adds 30-day retention with hourly point-in-time restore; Virtual Dedicated Cloud gets hourly backups with 60-day retention. |

## Where they differ

### Entry paid plan

- Aiven: $5 a month for Developer — one VM, 1 CPU, 1 GB RAM, 8 GB storage, with no choice of cloud or region and no connection pooling. The first plan that behaves like a production service is Startup at $75 a month or $0.10 an hour, which is where the uptime SLA and multi-CPU sizing begin; Hobbyist sits between them at $12. ([source](https://aiven.io/pricing))
- Neo4j: $65/GB/month (minimum 1GB cluster) on AuraDB Professional, or $0.09/hour ($65.70/month for 1GB) metered hourly. 14-day free trial available. ([source](https://neo4j.com/pricing/))

### Pricing model

- Aiven: Fixed plans quoted both monthly and hourly, with the plan setting CPU, RAM and storage together rather than metering them separately. Aiven describes the pricing as all-inclusive: backups, monitoring and support come with the plan instead of appearing as line items. Higher tiers buy node count and backup history — Business adds a standby node, Premium a second. ([source](https://aiven.io/pricing))
- Neo4j: Usage-based, metered per GB-hour of memory on the Professional tier. A paused database cuts cost by roughly 80%. ([source](https://neo4j.com/pricing/))

### Startup credit program

- Aiven: Aiven for Startups: $12,000–$100,000 in Aiven credits over 12 months. Requires founded ≤7 years ago and external funding from pre-seed to Series B. ([source](https://aiven.io/startups))
- Neo4j: Neo4j for Startups: up to $16K in Aura credits. Requires Series B or earlier funding, a single product sold to many customers (not custom per-customer work), a functioning website, and a company LinkedIn profile. ([source](https://neo4j.com/startups/))

### Regions

- Aiven: 153 regions across six clouds — AWS 25, Google 42, Azure 39, OVH 22, UpCloud 16, DigitalOcean 9 — counted from Aiven's own reference list, which publishes the regions and no total. No magnitude is recorded, because Aiven states on that same page that the list differs per project and that not all service types are available in every cloud and region: the number is the platform's reach, not PostgreSQL's, and a bar drawn from it would be compared against providers whose counts are engine-specific. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/platform/reference/list_of_clouds))
- Neo4j: AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, across more than 60 global cloud regions; also available through the AWS, Azure and Google Cloud marketplaces. ([source](https://neo4j.com/pricing/))

### Engine

- Aiven: PostgreSQL, alongside MySQL, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, Valkey, Kafka, Flink and Grafana. Aiven runs the upstream projects rather than a compatible reimplementation, which is why its own docs point at postgresql.org for per-release detail. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql))
- Neo4j: Neo4j, a native property graph database. ([source](https://neo4j.com/docs/aura/auradb/platform/backup-restore/))

### Point-in-time recovery

- Aiven: Bounded by the plan's backup history, so 2 days on the entry paid plan and 30 at the top. Granularity is fine within that: full backups daily with write-ahead logs copied every 5 minutes or per new file, whichever comes first. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql/concepts/pg-backups))
- Neo4j: Not included on the entry-paid (Professional) tier — point-in-time restore is a Business Critical feature, with hourly granularity and 30-day retention. ([source](https://neo4j.com/pricing/))

### Backup retention

- Aiven: By plan: none on Hobbyist, 2 days on Startup, 14 on Business, 30 on Premium. The magnitude is Startup's 2 days, the entry paid plan. Aiven's high-availability page states 2 days for Hobbyist where the backups page states none — the backups page is the more specific of the two and is what is recorded here. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql/concepts/pg-backups))
- Neo4j: Daily backups, 7-day retention on the entry-paid (Professional) tier. Business Critical adds 30-day retention with hourly point-in-time restore; Virtual Dedicated Cloud gets hourly backups with 60-day retention. ([source](https://neo4j.com/pricing/))

## Which should you choose?

Pick Aiven if Teams who want more than one open-source data service from one vendor and one bill — Postgres beside Kafka, ClickHouse or OpenSearch — with the availability tier chosen per service rather than fixed.

Pick Neo4j if Teams whose data is naturally relationships-first — recommendation engines, fraud detection, knowledge graphs — where the query itself is a graph traversal Cypher expresses directly and a relational join chain would not.

Consider something else: Aiven — You want long recovery history on a cheap plan. Backup history is what the plan tiers buy here: two days on the entry paid plan against thirty at the top.

Consider something else: Neo4j — The data model is tabular and the graph shape is incidental — most CRUD apps fit a relational or document database better, and Neo4j's per-GB memory pricing is a worse fit for large flat datasets than a row-store.

## Documented by only one

- Managed connection pooling: Aiven: Supported — not on the Free or Developer tiers
- Connection limit: Aiven: Set per plan, not by a formula: 100 on the entry paid plan (Startup-4), rising to 200, 400, 800 and 1000 as the plan grows, with 25 on Hobbyist, 20 on Free and 15 on Developer. Aiven states plainly that it does not apply a per-GiB formula, and that some of the allowance is used by Aiven itself to manage the service.
- Database branching: Aiven: Limited — a full copy from the latest backup, not copy-on-write

## Questions this comparison answers

**Entry paid plan: Aiven or Neo4j?**

Aiven: $5 a month for Developer — one VM, 1 CPU, 1 GB RAM, 8 GB storage, with no choice of cloud or region and no connection pooling. The first plan that behaves like a production service is Startup at $75 a month or $0.10 an hour, which is where the uptime SLA and multi-CPU sizing begin; Hobbyist sits between them at $12.
Neo4j: $65/GB/month (minimum 1GB cluster) on AuraDB Professional, or $0.09/hour ($65.70/month for 1GB) metered hourly. 14-day free trial available.

**Should I choose Aiven or Neo4j?**

Pick Aiven if Teams who want more than one open-source data service from one vendor and one bill — Postgres beside Kafka, ClickHouse or OpenSearch — with the availability tier chosen per service rather than fixed.
Pick Neo4j if Teams whose data is naturally relationships-first — recommendation engines, fraud detection, knowledge graphs — where the query itself is a graph traversal Cypher expresses directly and a relational join chain would not.