Amazon Aurora vs SQL Server comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft are both solutions in the Relational Databases Tools category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.4, while Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.3. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 3.1% mindshare in SQL, compared to Microsoft’s 17.9% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Amazon Aurora

Read 18 Amazon Aurora reviews

2,651 Views
2,356 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

SQL Server

Read 268 SQL Server reviews

16,970 Views
12,982 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Amazon Aurora

SQL Server

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

SQL Server and Amazon Aurora compete in the database management systems category. Amazon Aurora appears to have the upper hand due to its cloud-native architecture and cost-efficiency, particularly for scalable applications leveraging AWS ecosystem.

Features: SQL Server excels with dynamic resource allocation, OLTP tools, and robust availability with AlwaysOn. It offers strong community and official Microsoft support. Amazon Aurora provides SQL standardization, seamless AWS integration, and features like auto-scaling and high availability, minimizing maintenance efforts.

Room for Improvement: SQL Server needs enhancement in installation ease, maintenance cost reduction, and broader OS support. Its pricing structure also limits sales. Amazon Aurora can improve on database tooling, performance insights, benchmarking standards, and should address tuning difficulties and unexpected costs for additional features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SQL Server supports versatile deployment options from on-premises to hybrid cloud, with generally well-rated customer service. Amazon Aurora excels in cloud-based deployments and offers efficient customer service, especially when integrated with AWS services, though better query support is needed.

Pricing and ROI: SQL Server has varied pricing based on editions, perceived as expensive compared to open-source options, but competitive within the Microsoft ecosystem, offering a strong ROI when used effectively. Amazon Aurora is cost-efficient for cloud-native setups, supporting pay-as-you-go models, providing solid value through its performance and scalability, with strong ROI when aligned with organizational needs.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Aurora vs. SQL Server Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Aurora vs. SQL Server

April 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 850,671 peers since 2012

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

7th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

SQL Server

Ranking in Relational Databases Tools

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

268

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of Amazon Aurora is 3.1%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SQL Server is 17.9%, down from 23.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Relational Databases Tools

Featured Reviews

Adnan Shafiq

Associate Vice President - Database Management (Principal Solutions Architect) at Northbay

High availability and geographical redundancy ensure reliable performance and cost efficiency

Amazon Aurora ( /products/amazon-aurora-reviews ) 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 ( /products/amazon-aws-reviews ), 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 ( /products/snowflake-reviews ). This makes Amazon Aurora a compelling choice for my organization.

Read full review

AhmadTalha

Product owner at Digitt Plus (AFT)

A robust and secure solution that helps to store data

The GUI needs improvement. From a technical perspective, it's quite complex, which may not be a problem for individuals with technical backgrounds like ours, especially since we've encountered similar interfaces. However, navigating the GUI can be challenging for newcomers or product owners without technical experience. For example, as someone transitioning from a developer role to a product management role, I find it relatively easy to use the GUI. But for those without a technical background, it's much more challenging to grasp what's happening.

Read full review

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."

"The most valuable features of Amazon Aurora include the global instance with the global writer endpoint, which allows failovers and instance switches without requiring changes in my code, thanks to the default global Route 53 endpoint."

"The most valuable feature of Amazon Aurora is SQL standardization, it doesn't have its own syntax which is good. It has a lot of hands-off self-management type of activities, such as log rolling and auto-scaling."

"We had better control over the parameters that we could tweak in terms of intermediate storage and better indexing capabilities."

"My overall experience with Amazon Aurora is very positive. I rate it ten out of ten for its reliability and efficiency."

"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."

"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."

"The provision of custom read and write endpoints eliminates the need for managing a separate proxy load balancer."

More Amazon Aurora pros

"It is a pretty good solution. The on-premise version 2019 has many features, and they had introduced a really good and stable environment in version 2019. It has very good integration with big data clusters and other things. It covers pretty much everything that you can do with a SQL server. You can use any language to connect to it, which is not there in other solutions. They have also introduced Python, and it also has ArcScale. PaaS is a modern, scalable database. You can use Power Automate and a lot of features in this. It is very easy, and you don't have to worry about versions and upgrades. Microsoft keeps on adding new features to this solution. Microsoft is improving its connectivity on an ongoing basis. It connects well with Office 365. If you see something not working, in a couple of weeks, it is going to work because there is a team working on it. You can vote for the things that are missing, and Microsoft can work on them depending on the product that they're launching."

"The setup process is straightforward."

"The solution is easy to use and provides similar features to other competitors."

"The product can scale if a company needs it to."

"SQL Server is quite stable. And now we are using the Lattice 2017 version."

"The main feature of this solution is ease of use."

"The interface for building the queries or writing the store procedures is good."

"The product has very good online documentation that can be used for troubleshooting."

More SQL Server pros

Cons

"In Oracle, tools like Veridata allow for comparing databases and certifying data accuracy, even offering repair capabilities, which are missing in Aurora. There should be a similar comparison tool in Aurora."

"Amazon Aurora should upgrade its base PostgreSQL versions more frequently and offer all PostgreSQL extensions."

"There are tuning challenges."

"The pricing could improve. It should be reduced."

"It is a bit costly. The features are quite good, and I wouldn't say it requires any technical improvements. But from a cost perspective, some clients wouldn't go for Aurora because of that."

"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."

"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."

More Amazon Aurora cons

"Support could be improved."

"Even if you have some technical agreement with Microsoft, the technical support of the solution won't help you. The support needs to be improved."

"There should be more tools and documentation for tuning the performance of Microsoft SQL Server. It would be nice to have more tools for tuning because currently, all the tuning that we have to do with our databases is almost manual. We have to read a bunch of knowledge base articles, and this information should be better documented. Its free text search should also be improved. It is quite important for us. Currently, we're developing our own free text search because of the lacking flexibility in Microsoft SQL Server. Therefore, we're kind of using elastic search and making different implementations in order to reach our targets. Using just the native free text search of Microsoft SQL Server is not enough for us. It should have more flexible features as compared to the current version."

"Microsoft support is an issue unto itself."

"As SQL server could not support the number of connections we desired, we were forced to go with Oracle."

"Although I am satisfied with the solution, some clients have asked us to resolve technical issues, such as those involving silver solution and replication."

"When we are talking about event space architecture, scalability generally comes into play. For example, I might have a hundred thousand transactions a second, and then all of a sudden, I build something that everybody in the world wants. The next thing I know is that I have a million transactions a second. So, to be able to process the throughput, I'd have to scale up, and then when the holidays are over, I'm again down to a hundred thousand transactions, and I want to scale back down. SQL Server is not going to do that. In this way, it is not very scalable. One of the reasons why they want us to use Kafka is so that if we need to, we can do that, but our base program is on SQL Server. So, this is where we would use a Kafka event stack so that if I need more servers, I can just write a command, and I can have more consumers, more brokers, and more producers, and when the holiday season is over, it scales right back down again. SQL Server is not going to do that."

"Scalability of the database could be improved if it could handle increased volumes of data."

More SQL Server cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is no need to buy a license for the product. We can pay as per the use case."

"The tool’s pricing depends on the instance type. For cost optimization purposes, we use the result instance category."

"I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, with ten being expensive."

"It is an expensive solution."

"The price could be lower compared to its competitors."

"It is quite expensive."

"Pricing is reasonable for small organizations, but the scaling increases the price."

"SQL Server's pricing has proven satisfactory for our market range."

"The pricing from Microsoft is quite expensive compared to Oracle."

"Pricing for this product is very reasonable."

"It requires the purchase of a license."

"The cost associated with SQL Servers is on the higher side."

"It is something we have been using for a lot of years. If we're paying, it should be reasonable."

"SQL Server is a cost-effective solution for a small database."

More SQL Server pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

29%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

47%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

Would you say the price of SQL Server is high compared to that of similar products?

SQL Server is fairly priced because it has various editions, depending on the number of users, servers, or core packs you are using. If you compare the product to others in this category, the price...

See all answers

Has using SQL Server helped your organization in any way?

SQL Server has helped my organization through partitioning to distribute the workload, as it splits them up into smaller pieces so the machines can easily deal with it. However, this comes with a h...

See all answers

Which authentication mode is best for SQL Server?

My company connects through SQL Server authentication. We have company Windows accounts, but we do not want to connect the two, out of security concerns and to keep things separated for our own pur...

See all answers

Comparisons

Oracle Database vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 23% of the time

MariaDB vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 8% of the time

Citus Data vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 7% of the time

YugabyteDB vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 7% of the time

CockroachDB vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 5% of the time

More Amazon Aurora Competitors

SAP HANA vs SQL Server

Compared 14% of the time

MariaDB vs SQL Server

Compared 14% of the time

IBM Db2 Database vs SQL Server

Compared 12% of the time

Oracle Database vs SQL Server

Compared 9% of the time

MySQL vs SQL Server

Compared 4% of the time

More SQL Server Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Aurora

May 2025

Download Amazon Aurora product report

Buyer's Guide

SQL Server

March 2025

Download SQL Server product report

Also Known As

No data available

Microsoft SQL Server, MSSQL, MS SQL

Overview

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.

Amazon Aurora is up to five times faster than standard MySQL databases and three times faster than standard PostgreSQL databases. It provides the security, availability, and reliability of commercial databases at 1/10th the cost. Amazon Aurora is fully managed by Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), which automates time-consuming administration tasks like hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.

Amazon Aurora features a distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system that auto-scales up to 64TB per database instance. It delivers high performance and availability with up to 15 low-latency read replicas, point-in-time recovery, continuous backup to Amazon S3, and replication across three Availability Zones (AZs).

Visit the Amazon RDS Management Console to create your first Aurora database instance and start migrating your MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

SQL Server is a relational database management system (RDBMS) by Microsoft. The product's main purposes are to store data and retrieve it as requested by other software applications - on the same computer or on another computer across a shared network. The solution is built on top of Structured Query Language (SQL), which is a standardized programming language used for relational database management.

The product is tied to Transact-SQL (T-SQL), which is an implementation of SQL from Microsoft that adds several proprietary programming extensions to the standard language. SQL Server is built similarly to other RDBMS products, as its structure is a row-based table that connects related data elements in different tables to one another. One of its most important components is the SQL Server Database Engine, as it controls data processing, storage, and security. Beneath the Database Engine is the SQL Server Operating System, which is used for memory and I/O management, locking data to avoid unneeded upgrades, and job scheduling.

The solution has four editions with different sets of services and tools. They include:

SQL Server Developer
SQL Server Expression
SQL Server Standard
SQL Server Enterprise

The first two are available for free and are typically utilized by smaller companies, as they work with fewer functions and storage. The second two editions are generally used by bigger organizations and enterprises and offer more features.

The solution has several functions through which users can facilitate different data-related processes. These include:

Aggregate functions: These functions are used to calculate one or more values and return a single value.
Window functions: Window functions calculate an aggregate value based on a group of rows and return multiple rows for each involved group.
Date functions: These functions allow clients to handle data and time data efficiently.
String functions: Through the string functions, SQL Server processes an input string and returns a string or numeric value.
System functions: The system functions of the product return objects, values, and settings.

SQL Server Services

SQL Server has a wide range of add-on services that provide additional benefits beyond database management. These services include:

Machine learning: SQL Server machine learning services allow users to do machine learning and data analytics within the product.
Service broker: This feature is a part of the database engine and offers messaging and message queuing for applications on the platform.
Replication: This feature consists of transaction replication, merge replication, and snapshot replication.
Analysis: SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) adds online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining capabilities to SQL Server databases.
Reporting: This feature supports the development of custom reporting applications.
Notifications: This feature generates data-driven notifications which are sent to subscribers of Notification Services.
Integration: This SQL Server feature provides capabilities for data integration, data import, and data warehousing.
Full-text search: Through this feature, users can utilize specialized indexing and query for unstructured text stored in the solution.
Visual studio: This feature supports data programming with SQL Server.
Azure Data Studio: This is a cross-platform query editor that can be downloaded and used alongside SQL Server.

SQL Server Benefits

The solution has many benefits for users. These include the following:

The platform ensures a consistent experience across other platforms while being fast and agile.
Through the built-in intelligence features, users can understand their data better.
The solution has enterprise-level security, which ensures the smooth and safe performance of users' data.
SQL Server offers the ability to retrieve large amounts of data quickly and efficiently.
The product installation process is fairly easy, and it offers a user-friendly interface.
SQL Server offers improved data storage and retrieval functions through frequent upgrades.
The solution reduces the risk of database server attacks, since it is not an open-source database.

Reviews from Real Users

A president at a consultancy evaluates SQL Server as a veteran solution with critical log shipping feature.

Harkamal S., a user at a manufacturing company, rates SQL Server with a high mark because it is a stable, scalable, and easy-to-deploy solution that pretty much covers everything.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Dow Jones, Arizona State University, Verizon, Capital One, United Nations, Nielsen, Autodesk, Fanduel

Microsoft SQL Server is used by businesses in every industry, including Great Western Bank, Aviva, the Volvo Car Corporation, BMW, Samsung, Principality Building Society, Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield, and the Catholic District School Board of Eastern Ontario.

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Aurora vs. SQL Server

April 2025

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