Eclipse RDF4J vs RDFox
Eclipse RDF4J
rdf4j.org
RDFox
oxfordsemantic.techSide by side
| Figure | Eclipse RDF4J | RDFox |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 4 |
| Spec score · RDF Databases | 8.8 (#2) | 8.5 (#3) |
| Spec score · Knowledge Graph Software | 9.0 (#3) | 8.4 (#10) |
| Documentation depth | Documentation includes getting-started tutorials, programming guides, reference material, tool manuals, release notes and JavaDoc links. | The documentation includes user guides, REST and Java API references, Javadoc, shell instructions, operations manuals, high availability and Docker deployment chapters. |
| Founded | 2015 | 2017 |
| Integrations | Documented compatible systems include GraphDB, Halyard, Stardog, Amazon Neptune, Blazegraph, Oracle RDF, MarkLogic, Strabon and Virtuoso. | RDFox was made available on AWS Marketplace through a DataLens partnership with pay-as-you-go deployment and connectors for SQL, CSV, XML, JSON, REST and unstructured data. |
| Security | The Eclipse project page links to the Eclipse Foundation vulnerability reporting channel. | RDFox v7.0 added encryption at rest and client-certificate authentication using mutual TLS for endpoint and remote-shell requests. |
| Self-hosting | RDF4J Server and Workbench are deployable as web applications, with documentation covering Tomcat installation and repository configuration. | The product documentation covers cloud, on-premises, edge and on-device deployment scenarios. |
| What it does | Eclipse RDF4J is a modular Java framework for parsing, storing, inferring and querying RDF data. | RDFox is an in-memory RDF triplestore and semantic reasoning engine that queries graph data with SPARQL. |
Plans
RDFox
- Free evaluationFree
- RDFox free evaluation licenseFree
- AWS Marketplace RDFoxPriced on request
- RDFox commercial licensePriced on request
In their own words
Eclipse RDF4J
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.
RDFox
RDFox is a main-memory data store for centralized RDF graphs, queried with SPARQL 1.1. It represents rules and ontological axioms with Datalog, OWL 2 and SWRL, and updates rule consequences as data changes; it can process 2–3 million new-fact inferences per second. Its supported knowledge-graph technologies include RDF, SPARQL 1.1, Datalog, SWRL, OWL 2 RL and SHACL. Java applications can connect through a native API, or RDFox can run as a standalone server through a REST API. Import and export formats include CSV, JSON, N-Triples, Turtle, TriG and OWL 2 Functional-Style Syntax. It can replicate knowledge and data changes across servers to maintain service during an outage, and deployments are described for cloud, on-premises, on-device and edge use. RDFox runs on Linux, macOS and Windows. Security features include encryption at rest, mutual-TLS client-certificate authentication and OpenID Connect single sign-on. Pricing is on request; the free 30-day evaluation license is restricted to evaluation and non-commercial use.