Linkurious Enterprise and Neo4j Bloom: which graph visualization & exploration tool should you use?

Graph is the technology of the future. It will be used in 80% of data and analytics projects by 2025 according to Gartner predictions (1). You might be among the growing number of organizations that have already implemented a graph database, the first step to any graph project. 

Graph visualization and exploration tools such as Linkurious Enterprise and Neo4j Bloom let data professionals harness complex connected data to quickly find insights, anomalies, and patterns. To fully unlock the value of your graph database and your graph data, it’s important to have a way to get this information into the hands of business users - not just developers and data scientists. 

At Linkurious, prospective clients often ask how Neo4j Bloom and Linkurious Enterprise compare for graph data visualization and exploration. In this article, we explore how Linkurious Enterprise can help uniquely empower your business users from the PoC stage to real-life development, from simple visualizations to more complex needs.

If you’re working on a larger graph project, you’ll likely have more users. And with more users, you’ll need to manage roles and permissions. Linkurious Enterprise offers advanced and easy to use user management, making it an ideal solution for teams that are larger and/or that have multiple user roles: administrators, analysts, alert reviewers, etc.

In Linkurious Enterprise, user role management is handled through a user-friendly interface that doesn’t require technical knowledge. It’s straightforward to define and set up new roles. Bloom also allows you to use Neo4j access roles, but these must be set up in advance using Cypher.

Larger teams use more shared resources such as visualizations and queries. The Linkurious Enterprise user interface makes it convenient to display and manage team-wide assets such as Query Templates, alerts, or Custom Actions, facilitating work for teams. Upcoming changes will bring even more tools to manage shared resources on the platform, including the addition of Spaces, where you can organize your assets and easily share them with groups of users.

Projects that are larger in scope or critical to your business will often require integration with other tools. Linkurious Enterprise offers a lot of flexibility from this point of view. 

First, Linkurious Enterprise is virtually graph database agnostic. Where Bloom only works within the Neo4j ecosystem, you can use Linkurious Enterprise with other databases like Azure Cosmos DB (as well as Neo4j, of course!). This means it can adapt with your evolving needs. 

Linkurious Enterprise also has several other integration options to expand your graph capabilities. You can add additional functionalities using plugins. You can also use the Linkurious Enterprise API to add visualization capabilities or automate recurring tasks. And you can incorporate information from a third-party application using custom actions for deeper insights with less effort.

When your project involves sensitive data, you will likely have more advanced security requirements. Linkurious Enterprise has security features that will help you sleep better at night. This includes a 3-tier architecture that protects the database and the data you have stored within it. Linkurious Enterprise also has an audit trail that enables you to verify past actions taken on the platform.

Depending on your specific use case, you may require certain features or capabilities from your graph visualization solution. Linkurious Enterprise offers diverse features to visualize and explore data and improve operational efficiency. “Adding Linkurious Enterprise to our technical stack allows our clients and our non-technical Forensic colleagues to access new features, new possibilities to address their main challenges in a really easy way,” says Christophe da Silva, Director of Data Analytics and eDiscovery at Deloitte Switzerland.

In addition to the visualization and exploration capabilities that are also available in Bloom, Linkurious Enterprise lets you set up alerts to automatically be notified of the patterns and events that matter to your organization. This is useful across many use cases, particularly for compliance management, protection against threats, etc. It can also be combined with the case management capabilities in Linkurious Enterprise to increase operational efficiency.

Understanding how your data evolves over time, or when something takes place, is important for many projects. The Linkurious Enterprise timeline feature enables users to visualize data over a given time period to quickly get to the bottom of relevant temporal information. Geo-mode in Linkurious Enterprise positions nodes on a map, enabling you to better visualize and understand geospatial data.

When you need to share a visualization, Linkurious Enterprise gives you the flexibility to export your graph as an SVG or PNG image via a plugin.

When considering whether Linkurious Enterprise or Bloom, you should ask yourself a few key questions:

• What is the scope of the project in terms of the people involved?
• What is the use case and what are the associated user needs?
• How are these things likely to evolve over time?

Neo4j Bloom seems to be a good solution for small teams of skilled data scientists, technically proficient analysts, and other technical users. It’s suited for those who want to fully work in the Neo4j ecosystem, who are seeking out a tool that is natively integrated with the Neo4j graph database and primarily does graph visualization and exploration. 

For larger-scale projects, Linkurious Enterprise is an enterprise-ready solution that is exceptionally easy to use for both technical and non-technical users and can accommodate both simple graph visualization needs and complex data analysis. It can be scaled easily, and can also readily adapt to an organization’s needs, offering a broad range of additional capabilities, including automatic patterns detection and case management.

Still have questions on Linkurious Enterprise vs Neo4j Bloom? Contact us! Our product experts can give you more detailed information.

(1) https://www.techtarget.com/searchbusinessanalytics/news/252507769/Gartner-predicts-exponential-growth-of-graph-technology