April 14, 2026 Graph databases are the fastest-growing category in all of data management. Graph databases have evolved into a mainstream technology that organizations across industries have successfully implemented to support a wide variety of applications. Organizations are attracted to graph databases to address big, complex data challenges that traditional databases, such as relational and NoSQL, are not capable of conquering.
Selecting a graph database is an important decision that can advance your organization’s business plan. Because graph database software is relatively new and evolving rapidly, buyers often struggle to reconcile the conflicting claims made by different vendors.
The value of graph databases lies in their ability to represent real-world objects and their relationships, making it easier to understand the schema. To assist IT management in selecting graph database software, this article outlines the major selection criteria.
To read the first article in this two-part series, click here.
Software Vendor
Evaluating vendors of graph database software packages is quite difficult due to a rapidly changing marketplace, but it should form part of the overall evaluation.
Quite new technology
Graph database concepts have only recently emerged from academia. Much of the technology that underlies graph databases is quite new.
This situation poses a risk of instability in graph database software packages. Instability undermines the high availability customers expect from their production-quality applications.
Recently founded vendors
The many opportunities organizations see for addressing business problems with applications based on graph databases have, in turn, attracted several vendors to offer graph database software packages.
These graph database vendors vary widely in organizational maturity. It is difficult to know which vendors will:
- Initially grow rapidly with strong venture capital support and superior marketing, then implode due to an inability to manage the meteoric growth.
- Merge with another vendor, then merge product lines in ways that will adversely affect some of their customers.
- Be acquired by a larger entity that will cause product development to slow rather than the promised acceleration.
- Abandon their graph database products due to a lack of market acceptance and negative reviews.
CIO’s should clearly spell out these vendor risks to management as part of the graph database software package selection and acquisition process.
Rapid product changes
The rapid growth in sales of graph database software packages has triggered an arms race among competing vendors to offer the most features, the latest technology and the most attractive pricing.
This situation results in rapid product changes, meaning the recommendations of a graph database software selection process will be valid for only a surprisingly short period of time.
Developer Community
An active, growing developer community for a vendor’s graph database software can be an invaluable resource for generating application ideas and resolving problems.
Implementation
The skills, elapsed time and cost to implement a graph database software package are not trivial and should be included in the overall evaluation.
Data migration
Graph databases from different vendors vary in the technologies they support for data migration.
Ease of migrating data from other datastores and handling different data formats is important because implementing a graph database always involves significant data migration.
Training
Vendors differ in how they train customer staff to implement a graph database.
Given that graph databases are comparatively new, it is unlikely that an organization can hire the experience they require. This lack of experience makes a training plan essential for the success of a graph database implementation project.
Starter kits
Vendors differ in how they help customers climb the learning curve for graph databases.
Starter kits can reduce the cost of implementing a graph database and shorten the time to business value.
Cost of Ownership
Evaluating the cost of ownership of graph database software packages should be a lower-priority part of the overall evaluation. If cost considerations are dominating the selection process, the likely problem is an inadequate business case for the graph database application.
Total cost of ownership
Graph databases from different vendors vary considerably in the typical components of the total cost of ownership, such as:
- Software license fees (low or zero open-source license fees are offset by the cost of additional staff to support the software)
- Software maintenance fees
- Support cost
- Version upgrade implementation cost (expect to install a new version multiple times per year)
- Operating cost (discussed in the next section).
Operating cost
Graph databases from different vendors vary considerably in the consumption of computing resources required to process a given query or update. The differences are significant for all components of computing resources:
- Storage
- Compute
- Memory
- Input/output
Organizations often view the cost of computing resources as unimportant because of their declining share of total application operating costs. However, the computing resources consumed by graph database-oriented applications are significant. This consumption difference across graph database software packages is noticeable and affects the operating costs of the graph database environment.
Cost of a cloud offering
Because operating applications in the cloud is demonstrably cheaper than operating them on-premises, some organizations lose awareness of operating costs until the invoices from the cloud service provider start to arrive. The experience of many organizations is that the cloud unit-cost advantage is quickly eroded by much higher overall consumption of computing resources.
The features that graph databases offer for complex applications, including AI applications, appeal to organizations to advance their business plans. These advantages are driving rapid increases in sales and adoption.
