Comparison
One axis that matters.
We're not claiming CognoDB is the best database at everything. We're claiming it's the best, by design, at building context graphs for AI agents — and the table below is how that claim cashes out.
| Capability | CognoDB | Neo4j | MongoDB | Postgres | Vector DB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Relationships as first-class | 🟢 Native | 🟢 Native | 🟡 $graphLookup | 🔴 Joins | 🔴 None |
| Multi-hop traversal | 🟢 Native & fast | 🟢 Native | 🔴 Exponential | 🔴 Recursive CTE | 🔴 Impossible |
| Shortest path | 🟢 shortestPath | 🟢 Yes | 🔴 No | 🔴 Painful | 🔴 No |
| Similarity + structure | 🟢 Graph + embeddings | 🟡 Add-on | 🔴 Separate | 🔴 Separate | 🟡 Similarity only |
| Atomic subgraph write | 🟢 ACID | 🟢 ACID | 🟡 Single-doc | 🟢 ACID | 🔴 None |
| Private graph per agent | 🟢 Trivial | 🔴 Heavyweight | 🟡 Per-collection | 🟡 Per-schema | 🟡 Per-namespace |
| Provenance as edges | 🟢 First-class | 🟢 Yes | 🔴 Manual | 🔴 Manual | 🔴 None |
| Cold start | 🟢 7 ms | 🔴 17 s | 🟡 1.6 s | 🟡 ~1 s | 🟢 Fast |
| Idle footprint | 🟢 ~15 MB | 🔴 ~3.5 GB | 🟡 ~180 MB | 🟡 ~50 MB | 🟢 Light |
| Edge deployable | 🟢 Single binary | 🔴 No | 🔴 No | 🔴 No | 🟡 Sometimes |
| Pluggable storage backend | 🟢 mem/local/mongo (+more) | 🔴 Fixed | 🔴 Fixed | 🔴 Fixed | 🔴 Fixed |
| Purpose-built for agents | 🟢 Yes | 🔴 Analytics | 🔴 Documents | 🔴 OLTP | 🔴 Generic recall |
Only one column is green the whole way down.