Case Study: LinkedIn China achieves rapid time-to-market and better app performance for Chitu with Neo4j

Neo4j Decreases Development Time-to-Market for LinkedIn’s Chitu App

Chitu is a LinkedIn China social app targeting young professionals newly entering the workforce. Facing fast-growing local competitors, the team needed to launch quickly and support complex, rapidly expanding user relationships; their initial MySQL approach produced overly complex joins and poor performance, making speed-to-market the primary challenge.

Chitu switched to Neo4j’s graph database, which more naturally models relationships and delivered much faster queries and easier development thanks to strong tooling and support. The team shipped the first version in four months, improved runtime performance for users, reduced operational costs (eliminating a full-time DBA and shrinking DevOps), and freed developers to focus on growing the user base while planning to leverage additional graph features like influencer calculations.

LinkedIn China

Bin Dong

Manager of Development