Dgraph

Apache 2.0 distributed graph database written in Go, maintained by Hypermode, queried through GraphQL or its own DQL language.

As of 30 August 2026, Dgraph is free to use. Dgraph shards a graph by predicate across Raft groups and serves it over a generated GraphQL API. Softwr lists it under Databases. Dgraph is made by Dgraph Labs, launched in 2016, available on Linux, macOS, Self-hosted, Web.

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Overview

What Dgraph does

Dgraph is a distributed, transactional graph database written in Go. A cluster is made of Zero nodes, which handle cluster membership, sharding decisions and transaction timestamps, and Alpha nodes, which store and serve the data; both use Raft for replication. Data is sharded by predicate, meaning all the edges of a given type live together in one Raft group. It exposes two query interfaces: a GraphQL endpoint generated automatically from a schema you supply, and DQL, Dgraph's own query language descended from what was once called GraphQL+-, which shares GraphQL's shape but is not the GraphQL specification. The current release line is v25, the code is Apache 2.0, and the project is maintained under Hypermode after Dgraph Labs stopped operating independently. What distinguishes it from the obvious alternative is the combination of horizontal sharding and a GraphQL-first surface. Neo4j's community edition does not shard writes across a cluster and its query language is Cypher; Dgraph distributes storage across groups from the start and hands application developers an endpoint their frontend framework already speaks, which removes a resolver layer that teams otherwise build and maintain. The commercial consequence is that Dgraph tends to be chosen by product teams rather than by data teams, as an application backend rather than an analytical graph, and once the schema is expressed as Dgraph's GraphQL and the queries as DQL there is no portable graph standard to migrate to; Cypher, Gremlin and SPARQL are all different targets. The buyers are teams with genuinely graph-shaped application data, identity graphs, recommendations, permissions, knowledge graphs, who want horizontal scale without a licence negotiation. The trade-off is stewardship and depth of ecosystem. The licence is permissive and the code is active, but the company behind it changed, the community is far smaller than Neo4j's, and predicate-level sharding means a single very hot predicate cannot be split further no matter how many nodes you add. Those are the two things that decide whether this is a good bet: who will be maintaining it in five years, and whether your hottest edge type fits in one Raft group.

What people use it for

An application whose core data is a graph, such as permissions, social connections or product relationships, where the frontend already consumes GraphQL
A knowledge graph that outgrew a single machine and needs storage distributed across nodes without a per-core licence negotiation
Recommendation or fraud-detection features that traverse several hops at request time, where a relational join chain has become the bottleneck
Teams that want a graph database they can read, fork and self-host under a permissive licence rather than a source-available one

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Dgraph.

Sharding is by predicate, so a single very hot predicate lives entirely in one Raft group and cannot be split further; adding nodes does not relieve it and the fix is a data model change.
Stewardship passed from Dgraph Labs to Hypermode after the original company stopped operating independently, so anyone building on it is betting on a second custodian rather than on the original team's roadmap.
The GraphQL layer is generated and opinionated, so anything it does not express drops you into DQL, which is a second language your team must learn and which no other database speaks.
The community is a fraction of Neo4j's, so operational answers, tuning experience, hiring and third-party tooling are all thinner, and unusual failure modes in a Zero and Alpha cluster leave you reading source rather than a forum.
There is no portable graph standard to migrate to; Cypher, Gremlin and SPARQL are all different query models, so the schema and every query is a rewrite if you later leave, and that cost grows with the application.

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of Dgraph

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

Dgraphvs
Cockroach Labs
Cockroach Labs: The cloud-native distributed SQL database
Dgraphvs
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL: The world's most advanced open source relational database
Dgraphvs
Airtable
Airtable: Create apps that perfectly fit your team's needs
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Amazon Aurora
Amazon Aurora: MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud

Pricing

What Dgraph costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Community

Free

Native GraphQL
Graph queries
Full-text search

Cloud

$39 /mo

Managed service
Auto-scaling
Enterprise support

Capabilities

Features

Apache 2.0 licence
Permissive open source with no competing-use restriction on the current release line
Generated GraphQL API
A GraphQL endpoint with queries, mutations and filters derived from the schema you upload
DQL query language
Dgraph's own graph query language for traversals, recursion and aggregation beyond what the GraphQL layer exposes
Predicate sharding
Each predicate is assigned to a Raft group so the graph is distributed across nodes automatically
Raft replication
Each shard group replicates through Raft, tolerating node loss without manual failover
Distributed ACID transactions
Snapshot-isolated transactions coordinated by timestamps issued from the Zero nodes
Written in Go
Single binary deployment with no JVM to tune, and a Badger key-value store underneath
Full-text and geo indexing
Search, regex, term and geospatial indexes defined per predicate in the schema
Bulk and live loaders
Offline bulk loading for initial ingestion and a live loader for incremental import
Access control and backups
Role-based access, encryption and backup facilities included in the open release

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Is Dgraph open source?

Yes. The current repository is Apache 2.0, which is a permissive OSI licence, and the project is at v25 under Hypermode's maintenance.

Is it really GraphQL?

It serves a generated GraphQL API, which is real GraphQL for clients. Its native language, DQL, resembles GraphQL syntactically but is Dgraph's own language and is not the GraphQL specification.

How does it compare to Neo4j?

Neo4j has the larger ecosystem, Cypher, and far more operational precedent. Dgraph distributes storage across nodes by default and gives you a GraphQL endpoint without writing resolvers. The choice usually turns on whether you need horizontal scale and a GraphQL surface more than you need ecosystem depth.

What does a production cluster look like?

At minimum a set of Zero nodes for coordination and a replicated set of Alpha nodes for data, typically three of each for fault tolerance, which is a meaningfully larger operational footprint than a single graph server.

Who maintains it now?

Hypermode. Dgraph Labs, the original company, no longer operates it, and that change of custodian is the main non-technical risk to weigh.

Behind it

Who makes Dgraph

Company: Dgraph Labs
Based in: San Francisco, California

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Dgraph, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.

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