Eclipse RDF4J vs GraphDB

Eclipse RDF4J is a modular Java framework for parsing, storing, querying, and reasoning over RDF data. It supports SPARQL 1.1 query and update, and its API can access remote RDF repositories in the same way as local ones. Supported formats include RDF/XML, Turtle, N-Triples, N-Quads, JSON-LD, TriG, and TriX. Storage options include a transactional in-memory store with optional disk persistence and a transactional Native Store aimed at medium-sized datasets around 100 million triples. Extensions add full-text search, RDFS inferencing, rule-based reasoning, SHACL and SPIN validation, and geospatial queries. The SDK bundles libraries, Server, Workbench, Console, and Javadoc API; Workbench includes a web interface with a SPARQL editor. Developers can use Maven artifacts or download an SDK zip or onejar. RDF4J is free under the Eclipse Distribution License, version 1.0. The latest stable release, 6.1.0, requires Java 25 or newer. The project describes its core databases as mainly intended for small to medium-sized datasets and notes third-party stores may scale further or offer additional features.

GraphDB is a semantic graph database that uses RDF and SPARQL to connect business data and support real-time AI insights. It applies reasoning and semantic search to connected information. Free and Enterprise editions support RDF 1.1, SPARQL 1.1, RDF-Star, SPARQL-Star, and reasoning for RDFS, OWL 2 RL and OWL 2 QL. Listed AI capabilities include GraphRAG, MCP support, no-code RAG chat in Workbench, precision entity linking and natural-language graph queries from LangChain. Integrations include MongoDB, Kafka, JDBC, GraphQL, SQL-accessible data virtualization, and connectors for Lucene, Elasticsearch and Solr. GraphDB Free has a single-core license. Starting with version 11.0.0, every edition requires a valid license, which can be requested for free. Enterprise supports twelve or more cores and features such as parallel query processing, cluster failover, synchronization and load balancing. Enterprise is available on-premise or as a 12-core cluster SaaS through AWS Marketplace and Microsoft Azure Marketplace. GraphDB supports Linux, macOS, Windows, web and self-hosted deployments, with API access.