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Amazon DocumentDB vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 29, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon DocumentDB
Ranking in Managed NoSQL Databases
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB
Ranking in Managed NoSQL Databases
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
Database as a Service (DBaaS) (6th), NoSQL Databases (3rd), Vector Databases (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Managed NoSQL Databases category, the mindshare of Amazon DocumentDB is 11.5%, down from 14.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 17.3%, down from 19.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed NoSQL Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Javed Zahoor - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 18, 2024
Offers the ability to replicate data across different instances
Its speed has had the most significant impact on our projects. For starters, we used it for its flexibility. With DocumentDB, you're not tied to a rigid structure like you are with Aurora or other relational databases. This makes it great for startups. When we work with established systems where the structure is well-defined, the speed of DocumentDB becomes the most important factor. Compared to a relational database, scaling DocumentDB is easier because of its ability to replicate data across different instances. If you use a network-based storage service with your cluster, the primary instance doesn't even need a full local copy of the data, since it's accessible on the shared storage. That definitely contributes to scalability. AWS-managed services already handle a lot of the scaling complexity. We don't have to do anything.
Michael Calvin - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 9, 2024
Easy to integrate, has a shallow learning curve, and scales dynamically
Azure Cosmos DB is quick to adopt with a shallow learning curve. The average user can be operational within hours or days, handling small to medium data volumes. However, optimizing for ultra-high throughput scenarios involves a steeper learning curve, requiring substantial knowledge to master Azure Cosmos DB. Nonetheless, most users can leverage it as their operational data store with minimal effort. Our platform boasts several extensive language model features, particularly around summarization capabilities. We use vector searching in Azure Cosmos DB to facilitate the retrieval of an augmented generation model with our LLM implementation. It's a standard RAG implementation using Azure Cosmos DB. Compared to other options, a key advantage of vector indexing in Azure Cosmos DB is the ability to query documents alongside vectors. This pinpoints the precise information required for RAG in our LLM solution, granting us greater flexibility than vector searching in other Azure services. We integrated the vector database with the Azure OpenAI service for our LLM solution. The Azure AI services were simple to integrate with the vector database. There was a slight learning curve, especially as we were on the private preview of vector searching. This led to some hiccups with our existing database configurations, specifically regarding continuous backup. We couldn't enable continuous backup and vector searching simultaneously. However, this was solely due to our participation in the preview, and I'm confident this issue won't persist in the general availability release. Azure Cosmos DB is fantastic for searching large amounts of data when the data is within a single partition. Over the last two weekends, we ingested over 400 gigabytes of data into our Azure Cosmos DB database and saw no change in querying performance compared to when our database was only 20 gigabytes in size. This is impressive and powerful, but the scope is limited to those partition queries. The first benefit we've seen is increased developer productivity. Azure Cosmos DB is an easy database to work with. Its schema-less nature allows us to iterate quickly on our platform, develop new features, and store the associated data in Azure. Developers find it easy to use, eliminating the need for object-relational mapping tools and other overhead. Geographic replication and the ability to scale geographically is another advantage. This is challenging with other databases, even other NoSQL databases, but Azure Cosmos DB makes it easy. Cost optimization is a major benefit as well. We've been able to run our platform at a fraction of the infrastructure cost our customers incur when integrating with us. This allows us to focus resources on feature development and platform building rather than infrastructure maintenance. Azure Cosmos DB helped reduce the total cost of ownership. We don't need DBAs, system administrators, or typical IT staff to run the infrastructure because we can use Azure Cosmos DB as a platform or a software-as-a-service data storage solution. This makes the total cost of ownership significantly lower than any comparable solution using relational databases or other NoSQL solutions like MongoDB. We enable auto-scaling on all of our Azure Cosmos DB resources, which helps us achieve cost optimizations.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Amazon DocumentDB is a simple solution."
"Its speed has had the most significant impact on our projects. For starters, we used it for its flexibility. With DocumentDB, you're not tied to a rigid structure like you are with Aurora or other relational databases. This makes it great for startups."
"Migrations are easy using this product."
"The best feature is the velocity to make a query."
"Specifically, we are using the MongoDB API, so we leverage it in that way. I like the flexibility that it offers. My team does not have to spend time building out database tables. We can get going fairly quickly with being able to read and write data into a MongoDB collection that is hosted inside Azure Cosmos DB."
"From a global distribution perspective, Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is good and easy to handle."
"Cosmos DB is a pretty stable solution. I would rate it a ten out of ten."
"It is a cloud-based solution that is easy to deploy, easy to access, and provides users with more features compared to other clouds like AWS and GCP."
"Cosmos DB makes life easier because if we want to use Mongo-type data, or Cassandra-type data, or maybe even just a simple cable storage-type data, then graph, there are multiple ways to do this."
"Cosmos DB's greatest strengths are its easy setup and affordability, especially for those who understand its usage."
"The solution is stable."
 

Cons

"The technical support could be improved."
"One possible improvement could be a hybrid database solution, where parts of the application leverage a relational database alongside DocumentDB. If a system were heavily relational in nature, a database like PostgreSQL might be a good fit."
"There's a bit of a learning curve at the beginning."
"It is easy to use, but optimization has been a mixed experience. It has been more of trying to figure out how to do so. We have not found much support there, so we have to come up with our own way of optimizing it in different ways. That is one area of improvement."
"Azure Cosmos DB could be better for business intelligence and analytical queries."
"While Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is generally easy to use, it has some limitations."
"An improvement would be a more robust functionality around updating elements on a document, or some type of procedural updates that don't require pulling the entire document."
"It would be ideal if we could integrate Cosmos DB with our Databricks. At this point, that's not possible."
"The biggest problem is the learning curve and other database services like RDS."
"The integration of the on-premise solution with the cloud can be difficult sometimes."
"There is room for improvement in their customer support services."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Cost isn’t a big hurdle for us right now. The solution is not costly."
"The cost is the biggest limitation of this solution."
"With heavy use, like a large-scale IoT implementation, you could easily hit a quarter of a million dollars a month in Azure charges if Cosmos DB is a big part of it."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's licensing costs are monthly."
"For the cloud, we don't pay for the license, but for the on-prem versions, we do pay."
"The RU's use case determines our license fees."
"Cosmos DB is a PaaS, so there are no upfront costs for infrastructure. There are only subscriptions you pay for Azure and things like that. But it's a PaaS, so it's a subscription service. The license isn't perpetual, and the cost might seem expensive on its face, but you have to look at the upkeep for infrastructure and what you're saving."
"Right now, I have opted for the student subscription plan, for which Microsoft charges me around 100 USD. The pricing of the solution depends on the solution's usage."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
5%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Retailer
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What advice do you have for others considering Amazon DocumentDB?
Amazon DocumentDB offers us many useful features. It is definitely a solution that an organization in need of comprehensive and effective document management should invest its money into. We are im...
What do you like most about Amazon DocumentDB?
Its speed has had the most significant impact on our projects. For starters, we used it for its flexibility. With DocumentDB, you're not tied to a rigid structure like you are with Aurora or other ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon DocumentDB?
The specific DocumentDB implementation we use is on the expensive side. We tend to use it strategically in complex systems, primarily for lookup capabilities. For simpler use cases, we often choose...
What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
The initial setup is simple and straightforward. You can set up a Cosmos DB in a day, even configuring things like availability zones around the world.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
The pricing and licensing model was initially difficult to understand, but as soon as I learned what was going on and how it was priced, it was pretty easy. What is more difficult is to understand ...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
The one thing that I have been working on with Microsoft about this is the ability to easily split partitions and have it do high-performance cross-partition queries. That is the only place where e...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Finra, The Washington Post, Freshop
TomTom, KPMG Australia, Bosch, ASOS, Mercedes Benz, NBA, Zero Friction, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Kinectify
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon DocumentDB vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.