Proper service between Neo4j Enterprise VS Neo4j Aura

[house9737]

Hello,

My startup will release MVP service soon. Our service is very dedicated to Neo4j service( Every service user queries to Neo4j). So, I consider which service is more fit well to my circumstances, I read about enterprise and neo4j aura comparison charts. But I couldn't choose which one is best edtions.
( Neo4j Subscriptions - Neo4j Graph Database Platform )

• My Neo4j Service has 10 million nodes and 40 million relationships.
• We usually call neo4j from AWS lambda with AWS API gateway.
• Automatically Data Backup feature required.
• We want to scale flexibly neo4j.(Especially, we want to prepare peak time in service time)

• I know that Neo4j Enterprise includes all features than Aura. But, with budget limitation, I want to know Neo4j Aura will be correct choice?

Thanks.

[mariusconjeaud]

Hello,

First of all, to really compare pricing, you should take three things into consideration :

• Cost of licence for a "self-hosted" Neo4j Enterprise (as in, "Not Aura") => are you in touch with a member of Neo4j sales team ?
• Egress cost in AWS. Aura won't be hosted inside your AWS VPC so you'll get outbound data, which you pay in AWS ; whereas with a "self-hosted" Neo4j Enterprise this cost would be suppressed. So you should evaluate this volume.
• I don't know how Aura pricing is built, but my guess is it should be something like licence cost + hosting + operations fee. With a self-hosted Neo4j Enterprise, you would have equivalent direct costs (licence + hosting), plus indirect costs in the form of your DevOps team. While you are at the MVP level, I would say that the size of your DevOps team would be the same in both Aura and self-hosted options. So Neo4j Enterprise might be a bit cheaper on the operations side, but then you have to set up more processes to ensure availability, reliability, etc...

Finally, my opinion on this is : As a startup (which I used to have), I would go for Aura. It shouldn't really be more expensive, and you can focus much more on your product and not on the operations side of things. Just take into consideration the egress fees in AWS which might be an issue if you have a huge amount of outbound data.

Marius