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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Aurora
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
8th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
MariaDB
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
59
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of Amazon Aurora is 3.3%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of MariaDB is 6.9%, down from 9.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Relational Databases Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Rajitha Jatothu - PeerSpot reviewer
Achieve high performance with fault-tolerant and highly available database management
Aurora is a key pillar for us, offering performance and availability. It is faster than RDS and supports multi-region clusters and scalability. One feature we value is Aurora's ability to provide a reader endpoint, allowing applications to connect without tracking replicas. It supports auto-scaling and offers several options for monitoring and optimizing database performance. Aurora's fault tolerance and ability to handle multiple replicas contribute to its reliability and high performance.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"One of the most valuable features is storage scaling."
"My overall experience with Amazon Aurora is very positive. I rate it ten out of ten for its reliability and efficiency."
"The provision of custom read and write endpoints eliminates the need for managing a separate proxy load balancer."
"The solution’s scalability is good since we don’t need to take a maintenance window during unpredictable workloads. I like the solution’s behind-the-scenes happenings. It is a great feature."
"We had better control over the parameters that we could tweak in terms of intermediate storage and better indexing capabilities."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to do multiple-read and single-write. These are the kinds of features that we were interested in, and Aurora takes care of that natively."
"Amazon Aurora stands out for its ease of use in a managed environment, inbuilt security, continuous backups, numerous read replicas, multi-region automated replication, and seamless integration with other AWS services."
"One of the standout features of Amazon Aurora is that we do not need to maintain disaster recovery or manage availability zones."
"The most valuable feature of MariaDB is the power it provides. It is a powerful solution."
"Visual Studio offers unit testing integration and extensive searching capabilities."
"The solution's features have effectively met our operational requirements as a standard SQL database."
"It is a scalable solution. It easily scales up and scales down."
"The product has good documentation and you can find many examples online."
"MariaDB is a fast and flexible tool."
"What I like best about MariaDB is that it is open-source and reliable."
"Installation is straightforward."
 

Cons

"The product's distributed query process for MySQL needs improvement."
"A challenge I noticed is during migration from PostgreSQL RDS to Amazon Aurora. There are technical challenges, such as the inability to provision the database using a PostgreSQL snapshot directly."
"Room for improvement might be in the UI, integrations, or data working capabilities for better user experience."
"There are tuning challenges."
"It would have been helpful if they had provided some benchmarking numbers."
"The pricing could improve. It should be reduced."
"While Amazon Aurora meets your current scaling and storage needs, there is room for improvement in cryptography and scalability compared to other databases."
"There is improvement needed to have more developer focus. Additionally, it would be helpful to have a stand-alone solution outside of Amazon. Amazon has a tendency to favor developing web-based clients, which may not always provide the fastest or most responsive solution as desired."
"I would like to see more compatibility going forward. This would help if there is a need to change databases."
"The maintenance and performance could be a bit better."
"MariaDB's GUI is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required."
"The license should be cheaper and closer to that offered by MySQL, Oracle and other products."
"While MariaDB is a good relational database, it can be inflexible for complex use cases."
"Document caching is an area of concern in the product, where improvements are required to help MariaDB improve on the previous queries as they are retained, and you can roll back to them."
"An improvement would be scaling it up to the levels of Oracle, especially when it comes to resilience, so that we can do higher transactions for two databases or power our operation."
"The GUI could be improved a bit. The user interface needs to be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an expensive solution."
"There is no need to buy a license for the product. We can pay as per the use case."
"The price could be lower compared to its competitors."
"The tool’s pricing depends on the instance type. For cost optimization purposes, we use the result instance category."
"It is quite expensive."
"I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, with ten being expensive."
"This is an open source solution with no licensing fees."
"My company uses the free version of the solution."
"The licensing cost is approximately $4000.00 per year and the licensing is based on the software and the number of posts that you make."
"We pay for a yearly license."
"The price of this solution represents a very good compromise between the cost and what it offers."
"This is an open-source product, which can be used free of charge."
"I rate the product's price a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price, and ten is high price since there are some support costs involved, even though it isn't an open-source solution."
"We use the solution's free version."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
6%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Educational Organization
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 nearly the same as RDS, with Aurora offering additional functionalities. This makes the product cost-effective.
What needs improvement with Amazon Aurora?
There are tuning challenges. The same methods used for tuning in RDS might not work in Aurora, and some functionalities available in MySQL may not be compatible with Aurora. There's also a concern ...
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: April 2025.
847,646 professionals have used our research since 2012.