Dgraph

Dgraph is the graph database that bets on GraphQL as its native query language. If your API is already GraphQL, Dgraph eliminates the translation layer — your schema defines the graph, and queries hit the database directly. That's a real productivity win for API-first teams.

Neo4j is the dominant player — bigger community (200K+ developers), more tooling, more tutorials. For commercial managed graph, Amazon Neptune and Neo4j Aura are the options. TigerGraph targets enterprise analytics at scale.

Use Dgraph if you're building a GraphQL API with complex relationships and need horizontal write scaling. Its predicate sharding distributes data across Raft groups for parallel processing.

The catch: much smaller community than Neo4j, which means less Stack Overflow help when you're stuck. The project has had turbulent governance — the original company pivoted multiple times. And if your team already knows Cypher, switching to DQL/GraphQL adds learning overhead for no clear gain.