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Amazon DocumentDB vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 29, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

Scalability Issues

No sentiment score available
Sentiment score
7.7
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB provides flexible, efficient scalability with global distribution, reducing costs and supporting large-scale, diverse applications.
Its scalability deserves a ten out of ten.
In cases where it has to automatically scale up to your maximum, that happens very quickly.
 

Valuable Features

No sentiment score available
Sentiment score
8.2
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is a scalable, secure, and cost-effective cloud database offering high performance and flexibility for developers.
After migrating applications from an SQL database to Azure Cosmos DB, the change in the organization is massive.
The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is its ability to handle concurrency and consistency.
While we don't utilize every feature, auto-scaling has been invaluable for optimizing both cost and performance on our platform daily.
 

Room For Improvement

No sentiment score available
Sentiment score
4.9
Users want better SQL documentation, pricing models, performance, integrations, UI enhancements, and expanded API and developer tools.
SQL Server is very portable. You can even install it on your machine. That is the number one thing that is missing in Azure Cosmos DB.
The first one is the ability to assign role-based access control through the Azure portal for accounts to have contributor rights.
Complex cross-partition querying, and BI/analytical tasks often necessitate moving data to other solutions like Fabric and Azure AI Search.
 

Stability Issues

No sentiment score available
Sentiment score
8.2
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is praised for strong reliability, scalability, and 99.999% uptime despite occasional complexity in configuration.
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is highly stable and built for stability and scalability.
The solution is very stable, and I cannot recall a time when Azure Cosmos DB let us down.
 

Customer Service

No sentiment score available
Sentiment score
8.2
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's customer support is praised for responsiveness but needs faster access to knowledgeable specialists.
The response was quick.
I would rate customer service and support a nine out of ten.
Our experience with technical support has always been great.
 

Setup Cost

No sentiment score available
Sentiment score
6.8
Azure Cosmos DB offers scalable pay-as-you-go pricing, seen as cost-effective yet potentially expensive compared to traditional RDBMS.
With so many improvements to the platform and ways to optimize, in our big enterprise deployments, Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB tends to be one of the least expensive services even though it gets a lot of use.
 

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
52
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
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
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.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
5%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
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?
Cosmos DB is a managed offering, so its cost is understandably higher. However, the value it provides aligns with its price, especially considering the discounts we receive. By purchasing reserved ...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
Cosmos DB has a couple of areas for improvement. Firstly, the lack of multi-collection joins is a significant limitation. Secondly, Azure Synapse Link, their data warehousing and synchronization fe...
 

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.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.