JanusGraph vs LadybugDB
JanusGraph
janusgraph.orgLadybugDB
ladybugdb.comSide by side
| Figure | JanusGraph | LadybugDB |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Graph Databases | 7.7 (#22) | 8.2 (#11) |
| License | JanusGraph is fully open source under the Apache 2.0 license, and the site says all functionality is free with no commercial license required. | All source code and precompiled binaries are distributed under the MIT License. |
| Product | JanusGraph is a distributed graph database for storing and querying graphs across a multi-machine cluster. | Ladybug is an embedded graph database optimized for complex analytical workloads on very large graphs. |
| Support | The project lists Discord, a users mailing list, Stack Overflow, and GitHub as community help channels. | The site lists community support and says commercial enterprise support contracts are available. |
| Transactions | It supports ACID or eventually consistent transactions and thousands of concurrent users executing graph traversals in real time. | Ladybug supports serializable ACID transactions. |
Plans
In their own words
JanusGraph
JanusGraph has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
LadybugDB
LadybugDB is an embedded columnar graph database for analytical workloads and agentic applications. It uses Cypher with a structured property graph model and can run on disk or in memory; in-memory data is lost when the process ends. Its query engine uses columnar disk storage, vectorized and factorized processing, multi-core parallelism, and join algorithms. Transactions are atomic, durable, and serializable. The project distributes source code and precompiled binaries under the MIT License, which permits commercial and proprietary applications. Imports support Parquet, CSV, JSON, NumPy, Pandas or Polars DataFrames, and PyArrow Tables. Official client APIs are listed for Python, Node.js, Java, Rust, Go, Swift, C, and C++, alongside a command-line interface. Ladybug Explorer provides a browser-based way to query and visualize a database, and the MCP Server exposes a database to LLMs and agents. Extensions cover sources and systems including Azure storage, Delta Lake, DuckDB, Iceberg, PostgreSQL, and vector similarity search. Concurrent access permits one read-write Database object or multiple read-only objects; multiple processes needing writes should use an API server pattern.