Cypher is a graph query language that is declarative in nature. It supports expressive, efficient execution of queries and the updating of data on graph data stores. Cypher has a simple query construct but its power lies in the fact that we can express very complicated queries in a simple visual manner. This helps a developer to focus on the problem domain rather than worry about access issues of the database.

Cypher as a query language is humane by design. It is developer friendly as well as easily usable by an operations professional. Cypher's goal is making simple things easy and complex things possible; it bases its constructs on basic English prose, which makes queries increasingly self-explanatory. Since it is declarative in nature, Cypher emphasizes on expressing clearly what data has to be fetched from a graph, rather than how it is to be fetched, unlike most scripting and imperative languages such as Gremlin, or general-purpose programming languages such as Ruby or Java. In this approach, the optimization of queries becomes an implementation issue instead of going for the on-the-fly "updation" of traversals when the underlying structure or indexing of a database changes.

The Cypher syntax has been inspired by some well-established approaches for efficient querying. Some keywords in Cypher such as ORDER BY and WHERE are similar in functionality to those used in SQL. SPARQL-like (a primitive graph query language by Google) approaches for the matching of patterns have been adopted in Cypher; languages such as Python and Haskell have also inspired certain semantics.