Neo4j has always been fully open source software. Every single line of code in every component can be evaluated with full transparency. We believe this is the best way of providing value to our customers and to the open source community.
There are 3 editions of Neo4j, released with differing license arrangements:
- Neo4j Community, a high performance, fully ACID transactional graph database – licensed under the GPL
- Neo4j Advanced, adding advanced monitoring – licensed under the AGPL
- Neo4j Enterprise, adding online backup and High Availability clustering – licensed under AGPL
Which license is right for you? That depends on how you’re using Neo4j.
You are developing Open Source Software
We love open source development, and so you are free to use all Neo4j components for your project. Even if you are developing a software or service that you get paid for – as long as the source of the system is available to the customer, commercial use is not a problem!
You are testing or evaluating Neo4j
All these activities are covered under both GPL and AGPL, even in closed settings, as the users of your system are in the same organization as you – and thus per definition have access to your source code. You don’t need a commercial license from Neo Technology to conduct your internal development and evaluation work.
You build closed-source Web applications (SaaS)
This is easy. Just use Neo4j Community and treat it as you would MySQL in a LAMP setup. That is – you can use it for your application without needing anything more.
The are a couple of fringe cases to be aware of:
- You decide you need monitoring and High Availabilty for your Neo4j database. Consider the Advanced or Enterprise editions of Neo4j. They are AGPL, so you can test and develop, and then get in touch with Neo Technology for a commercial license if you’re not able to use AGPL software in production.
- You distribute your software and do not want to open source the code for your product (as per the GPL). Instead, contact Neo Technology for a commercial OEM setup.
You want to embed Neo4j as an OEM component
If your product is Open Source software – Neo4j is, too. If not, you must obtain an OEM license from Neo Technology since neither the GPL nor the AGPL permit closed source OEM scenarios.
You need to support mission-critical Systems
If you need monitoring and/or an system can’t afford downtime, consider Neo4j Advanced for monitoring and Neo4j Enterprise for disaster-grade failover and online backup. These editions are under AGPL, so for closed source production use please contact Neo Technology for the commercial licensing, if you are not planning to open source your solution.
Updated: May 3, 2011