Licensing

GraphDB uses RDF4J as a library, utilizing its APIs for storage and querying, as well as the support for a variety of query languages such as SPARQL and SeRQL and RDF syntaxes such as Turtle and RDF/XML. Full licensing information is available in the license files located in the doc folder of the distribution package.

GraphDB is offered under several different licenses, including a free-to-use non-commercial option.

  • GraphDB Free is a free-to-use semantic repository system, suitable for massive volumes of data. It employs file-based indexes that make it possible to scale to billions of statements even on desktop machines, and ensures fast query evaluations through inference and query optimizations. GraphDB Free supports a limit of two concurrent queries, and is suitable for low query loads and smaller projects.

    Note

    Starting from GraphDB 11.0, GraphDB Free is no longer automatically distributed with GraphDB. If you want to use GraphDB Free, you must first request a free license from the Graphwise website and manually install it before use.

    This also applies when upgrading between minor versions of GraphDB.

  • The GraphDB Enterprise Edition (EE) is a high-performance, clustered semantic repository that scales in production environments with simultaneous loading, querying and inferencing of billions of RDF statements. It supports a high-availability cluster based on the Raft consensus algorithm, with several features that are crucial for achieving enterprise-grade highly available deployments. It also adds more connectors for full-text search and faceting — the Solr and Elasticsearch connectors, as well as the Kafka connector for synchronizing changes to the RDF model to any Kafka consumer.

    The Enterprise Edition license is offered on a per-server-CPU-core basis. In other words each license is applicable to an individual machine only, and for a specific number of CPU cores on that machine. For example, when running a cluster, each individual node must be licensed separately.

    The number of cores affects the performance of your server — the more cores your license supports, the more your GraphDB deployment will be optimized. Excluding internal federation, each individual core supports only a single concurrent query. In other words, the number of concurrent queries you can run is equal to the number of cores you are licensed for. The number of cores also determines how backup and restore use parallel streams with cloud storage and it affects the efficiency of importing data and the preload tool.

GraphDB Standard Edition (SE) is a discontinued commercial version of GraphDB with a smaller feature set than GraphDB Enterprise. It is no longer offered but is still supported.

GraphDB feature comparison

Feature

GraphDB Free

GraphDB Enterprise

Deployment type

On-premise only

On-premise, Managed service

GraphDB core features

✅

✅

GraphQL basic (core feature)

✅

✅

GraphQL extended (add-on for an additional cost)

❌

❌

GPT SPARQL Functions

✅

✅

Talk to Your Graph

✅

✅

Concurrency

single core

multiple cores

Advanced security: LDAP

❌

✅

Advanced security: Kerberos

❌

✅

Advanced security: X.509 certificate

❌

✅

Advanced security: OpenID/OAuth

❌

✅

Advanced security: FGAC

❌

✅

Additional connectors: Elasticsearch

❌

✅

Additional connectors: OpenSearch

❌

✅

Additional connectors: Solr

❌

✅

Additional connectors: Kafka

❌

✅

Support

Community

SLA

High-availability cluster

❌

✅

40-bit entity IDs (more than 2B RDF nodes)

❌

✅

Max number of repositories

5

Unlimited

GraphDB core features

All editions of GraphDB support the following core features:

GraphQL extended features

These extended GraphQL features are not included in any GraphDB edition and are available as a separate add-on for an additional cost:

  • Role Based Access Control (RBAC)

  • Schema validation against data

  • GraphQL federation

  • SPARQL Federation