# Cayley Reviews **Vendor:** Cayley **Category:** [Graph Databases](https://www.g2.com/categories/graph-databases) **Average Rating:** 3.9/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 11 ## About Cayley Cayley is an open-source graph written in Go inspired by the graph database behind Freebase and Google's Knowledge Graph. ## Cayley Reviews ### 1. Great graph db for lighter usecases **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Matthew C. | Software Engineer, Internet, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 15, 2017 **What do you like best about Cayley?** The swappable backend stores are awesome...already have Postgres in your stack? Just use that. Doesn't need long term persistence? It can operate in-memory. LevelDB is there for max performance, and with Bolt support you can have a 100% in-application Go-only codebase. It was really easy to get setup, and if your familiar with other graph products you probably already know at least the basics of Gremlin. **What do you dislike about Cayley?** There aren't as many builtin algorithms for graph traversal as competitors, but you can always write those yourself. It's a triplestore, so it also doesn't support node/edge properties which can be fine or annoying depending on your use case. **What problems is Cayley solving and how is that benefiting you?** We used it to house fairly stable connections that we needed to traverse/lookup quickly but would have taken many expensive/disk io heavy joins on our Postgres instance. The latency of those queries was greatly reduced. ### 2. my exp with cayley **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 19, 2018 **What do you like best about Cayley?** The interface, flexibility and abikity to integrate with other systems **What do you dislike about Cayley?** It get hang sometimes and need a whole os reboot **Recommendations to others considering Cayley:** Try a demo or poc before you get an **What problems is Cayley solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cost savings on developing own software and project management costs in finding a solution that can match our business need. ### 3. Easy to use open-source graph Database **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 21, 2017 **What do you like best about Cayley?** I like how easy it is to use, the intuitive nature of the product, and how easy it is to get help if needed. **What do you dislike about Cayley?** Linking my organization was difficult, but the hope chats were easy. **Recommendations to others considering Cayley:** Use to FAQ's and watch youtube videos to see how other people have implemented it **What problems is Cayley solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data visualzation and communication. Easily shared info in graph form. ### 4. Great Product **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Entertainment | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 19, 2018 **What do you like best about Cayley?** The extent of the data that the graphs can collect **What do you dislike about Cayley?** A confusing interface that takes a long time to adjust to **What problems is Cayley solving and how is that benefiting you?** Getting to logical educated facts and information based on the graphs created ### 5. Cayley as a scaleable graph solution backed by MongoDB **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Brendan M. | Lead Software Developer, Health, Wellness and Fitness, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 16, 2016 **What do you like best about Cayley?** The best direct benefit for us of working with Cayley was it's ease of integration in Go based programming environments. It allowed us to bootstrap development environments immediately, as our existing infrastructure for working with MongoDB was easily compatible with Cayley as a library. In addition to the ease of setup, Cayley has excellent library support in Go, and supports a strong interaction model for build and navigating graphs. **What do you dislike about Cayley?** While Cayley has a strong set of tools for building and navigating graphs directly, it lacks (at this time) the ability to easily implement queries common in other graphing databases. Queries like "closest x of y" are significantly more complicated than in systems like ArrangoDB or Neo. This leads to longer startup time for less experienced developers, and code which requires much more documentation to ensure readability. **Recommendations to others considering Cayley:** Our recommendation would be to keep an eye on the Cayley project going forward. It's still a very new open source project, but it has strong backing and a great team working on its features. **What problems is Cayley solving and how is that benefiting you?** The primary business problem we looked to solve was to accomplish a scaling graph database with strong native Go support and an open source licensing model. Cayley was a perfect fit for this, providing exactly what we needed to initiate development. ### 6. The best choice for graph storage in Go **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Steve C. | Developer Experience Engineer, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 15, 2016 **What do you like best about Cayley?** - Multiple backends. This is great because in a client/server app where there is some replication on the client, you can use the slim, file-based bolt, while using Postgres or Mongo on the server - Simple Go API. I personally haven't used Cayley server, opting instead to use the direct Go API, but it's quite simple and easy to learn. - Very fast. This largely depends on the backend you're using, but the benchmarks using bolt show Cayley to be a very effecient wrapper. - Written in Go. **What do you dislike about Cayley?** - Since Cayley is just a graph wrapper around existing databases, it lacks a lot of deeper features, like vertex/edge properties or special indexing. With that said, this use case doesn't explicitly match the goal of Cayley, which is freebase-style graph database, which store's values in triples. **Recommendations to others considering Cayley:** Definitely watch Barack Michener's video on graph databases and the specific goal that they're trying to achieve with Cayley to ensure that it can fulfill your use case. Additionally, if your primary language is Go, use the embedded API instead of Cayley, which ensures optimal performance, **What problems is Cayley solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cayley is ideal for the project I'm working on, which is a storage/backup engine, written in pure Go. It was ideal for my use case, as I did not want to introduce any non-Go dependencies, and needed a graph database to persist the file tree and related metadata. Cayley meets my requirements in both of these respects, and is very performant on top of that. ### 7. Cayley, fast but incomplete graph database that accessible to everyone. **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gema Aji W. | Programmer, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 11, 2016 **What do you like best about Cayley?** Cayley is one of many graph database that really easy to configure and use, with some inspired capability that Freebase MQL Language offers and gremlin language support. The visualization of the data is a really great addition as you don't need to install another third-party software like Gephi to visualize the data, Cayley did it only on one dashboard homepage. Cayley size relatively small and after the first run of test with the dummy movie database it only take less than 1 second to execute the gremlin query that I wrote. **What do you dislike about Cayley?** No authentication support, let's face it that cayley still new in development rather than existing graph database like neo4j and TitanDB offers. Lack of in-memory database support, cayley use n-quads as their default database and unlike database such as TitanDB and others in cayley, you need to create the set of node and edge in a n-quads format rather than console command as in gremlin AddE() or AddV(). There only a small amount of documentation into it, this maybe contradict the fact that Cayley is easy to use but that I know that this is project are maintained by one-man programmer and the documentation amount are enough but there no comprehensive, with enough community support Cayley could still be accessible. The gremlin language is inspired, and not complete API that TInkerPop offers, the language still inspired with TinkerPop2 with a lot of deprecated feature, this lead to confusion to many of user that had extensive experience with Gremlin query language. It still early in development, this is not the database that is you want to use on production-ready state, Cayley is new and maybe time will tell that this is maybe the database you going to use to run your project. **Recommendations to others considering Cayley:** It's maybe not a great software to run your business or such, but if you're trying to create a simple graph database to run on your network maybe cayley is a great choice to use. Cayley is inspired on graphd database that Freebase use for a couple years till it's acquired by Google and the development of it was still on going with helpful community that could help you running your own project. I had fun trying and using the software as I explore the vast world of graph databases today, and cayley is no exception as a free and open source project that anybody could free to use and develop with. **What problems is Cayley solving and how is that benefiting you?** I'm trying to create a network of public transit using Cayley with n-quads as the back-end database, the result are quite impressive as I realized that this software capable enough to run visualization of every node and edge without any extensive knowledge of what running behind the software. This is the software that anybody could use to learn the basic of graph database without extensive knowledge of graph database in general, as I tried to try teach to some fellow programmer that interested starting to work on graph database. ### 8. Cayley seems quite promising **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Martial J. | Founder and CTO, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 16, 2016 **What do you like best about Cayley?** My favorite feature is the JS (Gremlin-based) query language. It makes working with Cayley similar to working with MongoDB (which is our preference for data persistence). Less context-switching between our AngularJS frontend and NodeJS backend means we can work faster and deploy our developers further into the stack (with Cayley). **What do you dislike about Cayley?** Honestly I'm not a fan of the Go language, and would prefer if the source were in JS so that I could make meaningful contributions to the source itself. **Recommendations to others considering Cayley:** Give it a spin. It's definitely better than trying to serialize network graphs as MongoDB documents : ) **What problems is Cayley solving and how is that benefiting you?** We're solving problems that require deep-neural networks and have realized statefulness for our networks with the graphing features of Cayley. ### 9. Modular and flexible **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Education Management | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 10, 2016 **What do you like best about Cayley?** I can use DBs like MongoDB, PostgreSQL for storing graph nodes and the connections. The learning phase is really very less. **What do you dislike about Cayley?** The graph visualize can be improved. The docs can be improved. **What problems is Cayley solving and how is that benefiting you?** I was making a real time visualizer for the number of interconnected likes and views in all the users of an web-portal. As the data are being stored in user defined database, i can pre-populate the db from other scripts, reuse them and tweak them if required. However I didn't get time to check for the performance yet. ### 10. I'm use Cayley on my startup and very happy with graphic UI **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dmitriy G. | Founder, Internet, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 15, 2016 **What do you like best about Cayley?** Graphic UI for find database relationship **What do you dislike about Cayley?** Little functionality if compare with Mongo DB **What problems is Cayley solving and how is that benefiting you?** Develop additional UI dashboard for review dependency ### 11. Great option to experiment with graph database models **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Online Media | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 10, 2016 **What do you like best about Cayley?** Cayley is a very beginner friendly database with a lot of flexibility, especially the in-browser editor is great for experimentation. **What do you dislike about Cayley?** Cayley is not the best solution if performance is the main concern **What problems is Cayley solving and how is that benefiting you?** Evaluating graph databases as a replacement for relational data models ## Cayley Discussions - [What is Cayley used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-cayley-used-for) - [View Cayley pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/cayley/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-13+11%3A21%3A19+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=dba78a81-56e9-4a52-ad62-558f47076b31&secure%5Btoken%5D=69c7d369df3beef4499fd5c6fd0d319f2e8dfc226836cd137e84f6afcc25c4ff&format=llm_user) ## Cayley Features **Data Management** - Data Model - Data Types - Built - In Search - Event Triggers - Query Language **Availability** - Auto Sharding - Auto Recovery **Performance** - Query Optimization **Security** - Role-Based Authorization - Authentication - Audit Logs - Encryption **Support** - Multi-Model - BI Connectors - Operating Systems ## Top Cayley Alternatives - [Neo4j Graph Database](https://www.g2.com/products/neo4j-graph-database/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (131 reviews) - [Arango](https://www.g2.com/products/arango/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (115 reviews) - [OrientDB](https://www.g2.com/products/orientdb/reviews) - 3.9/5.0 (58 reviews)