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Amazon Aurora vs MariaDB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
5.6
Switching to Amazon Aurora saves costs nearly 30% over RDS while improving performance, reliability, and manpower efficiency by 50%.
Sentiment score
6.3
MariaDB offers high ROI with cost savings, robust features, and community support enhancing functionality and flexibility.
Using Amazon Aurora has saved us significantly in terms of manpower costs, with nearly fifty percent savings compared to an on-premises solution.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.3
Amazon Aurora offers varying support quality; enterprise users get prompt help, while free trial users experience limited assistance.
Sentiment score
6.2
MariaDB customer service is praised for support but some rely on community resources or find response times slow.
Technical support from Amazon is rated very highly.
The initial support could improve by having engineers familiarize themselves with the issue content to provide more specialized assistance from the start.
Compared to MongoDB, there are some platform deficiencies, but the support team shouldn't bear that burden.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Amazon Aurora excels in scalability, seamlessly auto-scaling for dynamic environments, though AWS's pricing model has limitations.
Sentiment score
7.0
MariaDB is generally scalable, though challenges in larger environments require manual configuration and specific setups for optimal performance.
This scalability is critical as it allows for runtime expansion, which is essential for businesses moving from on-premises to the cloud.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Amazon Aurora is stable with occasional minor issues, offering high availability and reliability for MySQL and PostgreSQL engines.
Sentiment score
7.8
MariaDB is stable with minimal maintenance needed but clustering can be challenging; separation from other systems is advisable.
It offers a stable environment, ensuring consistent performance.
We haven't found issues with the stability of MariaDB.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon Aurora users seek better pricing, expanded support, smoother migrations, and improvements in performance, scalability, and developer resources.
MariaDB needs enhancements in integration, scalability, performance, security, and features like clustering and materialized views for enterprise use.
There are technical challenges, such as the inability to provision the database using a PostgreSQL snapshot directly.
Keeping extensions up-to-date with PostgreSQL releases would enhance Aurora's functionality.
I used the backup options in Amazon Aurora for cloning databases. It's very common.
MariaDB is scalable and easy to scale.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon Aurora provides flexible, cost-effective pricing with notable performance benefits, though some consider it expensive compared to self-managed solutions.
MariaDB's open-source nature minimizes costs, offering free and paid versions, making it budget-friendly compared to Oracle.
The pricing for Amazon Aurora is different from DocumentDB because DocumentDB is cheaper.
The pricing is reasonable and not overly expensive.
Amazon Aurora is not very expensive as other solutions with similar features from other vendors come at almost the same cost.
MariaDB is in the pricey range, especially for huge databases handling terabytes of data.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon Aurora offers automated maintenance, high scalability, and compatibility, ideal for diverse databases and efficient FinOps management.
MariaDB is favored for its open-source, speed, scalability, advanced features, compatibility, tech integration, and strong community support.
It replicates data across multiple Availability Zones, ensuring high availability and geographical redundancy, which can be considered a GR instead of a DR.
Amazon Aurora offers a 99.9% SLA compared to PostgreSQL. This ensures a high level of availability for our applications.
Configuration, setup, and schema design are good features in MariaDB.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Aurora
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
MariaDB
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
60
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of Amazon Aurora is 2.7%, down from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of MariaDB is 5.7%, down from 8.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Relational Databases Tools Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
MariaDB5.7%
Amazon Aurora2.7%
Other91.6%
Relational Databases Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Adnan Shafiq - PeerSpot reviewer
High availability and geographical redundancy ensure reliable performance and cost efficiency
Amazon Aurora provides up to fifteen to sixteen read replicas. It replicates data across multiple Availability Zones, ensuring high availability and geographical redundancy, which can be considered a GR instead of a DR. As a managed service, maintenance tasks like backup and restore are handled by AWS, saving my organization significant time and money. Additionally, its fast cloning feature allows us to create a new clone from a large database swiftly, similar to a zero-copy cloning feature in Snowflake. This makes Amazon Aurora a compelling choice for my organization.
KumarManish - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to deploy, cost-effective, and integrates seamlessly with other products
We had planned for an RDBMS version and not NoSQL. We use MariaDB Galera Cluster. It's a good product. It is cheap, scalable, performs well, and is efficient. We use GCP’s BigQuery for machine learning. We must follow the best practices of the tool. We missed some best practices like the storage engine and InnoDB. It was very difficult to identify why we were having performance issues. Then, we realized that some of our tables were still on MyISAM, the default storage engine. When we switched it back to the InnoDB, it was very smooth. InnoDB is the recommended one. We must follow the best practices given in the documentation during the initial setup. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
14%
Retailer
6%
University
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise13
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise25
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Aurora?
Aurora's compatibility with MySQL or PostgreSQL benefited our database management. The migration from on-premise MySQL to Aurora was similar, so we didn't need to change our source code.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Aurora?
The pricing for Amazon Aurora is different from DocumentDB because DocumentDB is cheaper. However, when you manage the administration more closely, you can control costs better with Amazon Aurora. ...
What needs improvement with Amazon Aurora?
I would like to see some tutorials from Amazon for Aurora because I'm too new to it. I believe Amazon can make more tutorials for the product since there's a lot of reading required, and a short tu...
What do you like most about MariaDB?
The integration with other products is seamless.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for MariaDB?
I have found the price of commercial MariaDB to be pretty steep, although not as high as Oracle. Customers often prefer the Community Edition because it's free.
What needs improvement with MariaDB?
The only potential area for improvement could be the pricing model, which might benefit from being more flexible or a bit cheaper.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Dow Jones, Arizona State University, Verizon, Capital One, United Nations, Nielsen, Autodesk, Fanduel
Google, Wikipedia, Tencent, Verizon, DBS Bank, Deutsche Bank, Telefónica, Huatai Securities
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Aurora vs. MariaDB and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,832 professionals have used our research since 2012.