Graph databases: growing market, competition & options
In Microsoft’s Q1 2026 earnings call, it was reported that Cosmos DB business grew over 50% YoY.
@cosmosdb is a multi-model database that offers a graph API, and we don’t know the extent to which graph contributed to its growth.
However, this signal is one of many pointing towards growth for graph databases. According to Fortune Business Insights, the global graph database market size is projected to grow from $2.85 billion in 2025 to $15.32 billion by 2032, exhibiting a CAGR of 27.1%.
Microsoft, AWS, Google, and Oracle were named as leaders in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems. All superscalers have a graph database offering with Cosmos DB, Amazon Neptune, Google Spanner Graph, and Oracle Graph, respectively.
@neo4j was the only pure-play graph database to be listed in the same Magic Quadrant as a niche player. Neo4j also announced Fleet Manager, a single control plane for all Neo4j deployments, as well as the release of Neo4j Graph Analytics for Snowflake in the Snowflake Marketplace.
But there has also been churn in the graph database market. Dgraph was acquired by Istari Digital to strengthen data foundation for AI and engineering. And the KuzuDB embedded open source graph database has been abandoned by its creator and sponsor Kùzu Inc.
LadybugDB and RyuGraph are new forks of the KuzuDB codebase aiming to pick up where KuzuDB left off.
Furthermore, GraphLite emerged as a new open source graph database for embedded processes, and
@falkordb introduced FalkorDBLite – both aiming to fill in the embedded graph database void left by KuzuDB’s departure.
Challengers such as
@QLever, TuringDB, TypeDB, and
@duckdb with its DuckPGQ extension are emerging. It seems like the graph database market pie is growing, and the competition for a piece of it is intensifying.
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📩 Excerpt from The Year of the Graph Winter 2025-2026 newsletter
Read "The Ontology issue: From knowledge to graphs and back again" with more sections, references and attribution here 👇
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