Amazon RDS vs Google Cloud Spanner comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google are both solutions in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.3, while Google is ranked #9 with an average rating of 9.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 25.0% mindshare in DS, compared to Google’s 4.4% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Google users who would recommend it.

Amazon RDS

Read 54 Amazon RDS reviews

5,264 Views
4,374 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Google Cloud Spanner

Read 5 Google Cloud Spanner reviews

858 Views
649 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon RDS

Google Cloud Spanner

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 12, 2024

Amazon RDS and Google Cloud Spanner are two leading database management solutions, each with distinctive strengths. Amazon RDS is noted for its ease of use and automated management, while Google Cloud Spanner offers superior scalability and global distribution.

Features: Amazon RDS is praised for its ease of use, automated backups, and support for multiple database engines. Google Cloud Spanner stands out for its horizontal scalability, global distribution, and strong consistency.

Room for Improvement: Amazon RDS users often request better performance monitoring tools, more transparent pricing, and enhanced tooling features. Google Cloud Spanner users desire improved compatibility with other database systems, enhanced user documentation, and an easier initial setup process.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon RDS users find its deployment process straightforward and quick but some report that customer service response times are lacking. Google Cloud Spanner deployment is noted for its complexity due to sophisticated configurations, yet customer service is often highlighted as responsive and helpful.

Pricing and ROI: Users report that Amazon RDS generally offers lower setup costs and a quick return on investment, while Google Cloud Spanner has higher initial costs but provides significant value for large-scale deployments due to its advanced features.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud Spanner Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud Spanner

March 2025

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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 RDS

Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)

2nd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Google Cloud Spanner

Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)

9th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon RDS is 25.0%, down from 27.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Cloud Spanner is 4.4%, up from 3.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

Featured Reviews

Samuel Ebite

AICE Graduate at alx_africa

Ensure high availability with robust encryption and seamless backups

Amazon RDS provides data encryption using services like KMS, crucial for securing high-sensitive data and meeting compliance requirements such as HIPAA or PCI DSS. The best practices we've employed with RDS help design a well-architected framework, encompassing security, encryption, scalability with multi-availability zone deployment, and operational excellence with automated backups. RDS features, such as reserved instances, storage auto-scaling, monitoring with technologies like CloudWatch, and proxies, contribute to cost optimization. The solution enhances security with IAM authentication and offers high availability to end users.

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Ethan Lo

Infrastructuer Security at Premise Data

A stable and scalable relational database that ensures a return on investment for its users

The most valuable feature of the solution is its scalability. Scalability comes with two options, among which Google Cloud Spanner can scale horizontally, compared to other relational databases that scale vertically. You can change Google Cloud Spanner's resource configuration, which is done through processing units. Suppose you set up Google Cloud Spanner initially with a hundred processing units, and then you run out of resources since your database used too much CPU. In the aforementioned scenario, you can scale up or down and face no downtime in the production phase. The solution's features are important when running a company twenty-four hours, seven days a week.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Relational databases excel in extensive normalization, eliminating data redundancy and efficiently structuring tables which leads to a clear and efficient relationship between tables using primary keys."

"Amazon RDS fulfills PCI requirements, which is a valuable feature for us."

"The product's installation phase is easy."

"It handles large-scale data migrations perfectly. Amazon RDS's performance is quite good. Charges are incurred after you utilize the service"

"Amazon RDS is easy to maintain and easy to deploy."

"The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that it requires an easy setup phase, and it is also easy to use while not being too heavy on its users."

"The initial setup is straightforward, and technical support is good."

"The solution has unique features like backup and recovery, and snapshots. It upgrades automatically. The solution offers easy analytics concerning performance metrics. Its reliability and scalability are very good. The tool's most valuable features are disaster recovery, high availability and scalability."

More Amazon RDS pros

"The most valuable feature of the solution is its scalability. Scalability comes with two options, among which Google Cloud Spanner can scale horizontally, compared to other relational databases that scale vertically."

"The application deployment in the cloud is the best feature of the infrastructure."

"It is a very scalable solution."

"We can scale the solution if we need to."

"Google Cloud Spanner is stable."

Cons

"Currently, we are using Fargate. Instead of that, we are planning to use EC2 instances, but we are facing some problems, and we are unable to enable NAT gateway for Elastic Load Balancer. When we enable auto-scaling, the instance count increases, and we get IP addresses dynamically. We need to whitelist the IPs of these instances, but there is no option to whitelist those IPs in Amazon RDS. We need one static IP that we can assign to ELB so that we can whitelist this IP."

"Some of the features will not be there. For example, some on-premises things we want to set up will not be supported there. There are some challenges that they are fixing."

"I would like to see improvements in the tool's automatic restart."

"There are some advanced monitoring queries that we cannot execute because Amazon doesn't give admin privileges to the end users."

"The security features could be improved."

"There are some use cases that might come up where we would want to understand the performance aspects better."

"When you are using it for the first time, it is a little bit hard to configure. The first-time configuration is not very easy. It should be easier to configure. Its installation should also be simpler. Currently, its installation is very complex. With SQL Server, we have access to the SQL Server analysis services and reporting services, but such services are not available with Amazon RDS."

"Amazon cannot guarantee the stability of some extensions, and there is a need for different extensions to meet PCI requirements."

More Amazon RDS cons

"The cost can be a bit high."

"Google came up with something called Cloud Spanner Emulator, which fails to work like the real product if I want to develop some code and run a database locally on my machine."

"I want to improve the deployment of cameras and surveillance infrastructure."

"The tool lacks to offer AI features."

"The tool needs to improve horizontal scaling."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The substantial initial credit and cost-effectiveness make Amazon an attractive option."

"The solution's pricing needs improvement."

"The platform pricing is on the higher side, but given its capabilities and ease of use, it remains competitive."

"Amazon RDS is cheaper compared to other tools."

"The solution is expensive."

"The cost of using this solution is similar to that of having your own data center."

"By using a combination of Reserve Instances and On-Demand pricing, you can reduce the cost."

"The price of Amazon RDS is expensive."

More Amazon RDS pricing and cost advice

"Google Cloud Spanner is an expensive solution."

"The solution is expensive."

"It is expensive."

"Price-wise, I heard that Google Cloud Spanner is on the higher side."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

14%

University

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

14%

Retailer

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon RDS?

The product's installation phase is easy.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon RDS?

The pricing for Amazon RDS is reasonable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon RDS?

One key improvement would be adding support for multi-storage paradigms, including columnar support, as seen in TiDB. The serverless support with Aurora could also be enhanced. Additionally, having...

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What is your primary use case for Google Cloud Spanner?

Google Cloud Spanner has all the features of a traditional relational database, including schemas, SQL queries, ACID transactions, and provides excellent integration and monitoring tools as well as...

See all answers

What do you like most about Google Cloud Spanner?

Google Cloud Spanner is stable.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Cloud Spanner?

Price-wise, I heard that Google Cloud Spanner is on the higher side. I am not sure if this is a rumor or if it's fake news, but I believe that having BigQuery and GCP together could be a little cos...

See all answers

Comparisons

MongoDB Atlas vs Amazon RDS

Compared 28% of the time

Google Cloud SQL vs Amazon RDS

Compared 23% of the time

Oracle Database as a Service vs Amazon RDS

Compared 17% of the time

Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs Amazon RDS

Compared 16% of the time

Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer vs Amazon RDS

Compared 4% of the time

More Amazon RDS Competitors

MongoDB Atlas vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 17% of the time

SingleStore vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 14% of the time

Google Cloud SQL vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 11% of the time

Oracle Database as a Service vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 9% of the time

Redis vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 9% of the time

More Google Cloud Spanner Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS

March 2025

Download Amazon RDS product report

Buyer's Guide

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

March 2025

Download Google Cloud Spanner product report

Also Known As

RDS

Google Spanner

Overview

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient, resizeable capacity for an industry-standard relational database and manages common database administration tasks.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Cloud Spanner is the first and only relational database service that is both strongly consistent and horizontally scalable. With Cloud Spanner you enjoy all the traditional benefits of a relational database: ACID transactions, relational schemas (and schema changes without downtime), SQL queries, high performance, and high availability. But unlike any other relational database service, Cloud Spanner scales horizontally, to hundreds or thousands of servers, so it can handle the highest of transactional workloads. With automatic scaling, synchronous data replication, and node redundancy, Cloud Spanner delivers up to 99.999% (five 9s) of availability for your mission critical applications. In fact, Google’s internal Spanner service has been handling millions of queries per second from many Google services for years.

Google

Sample Customers

Edmodo

Streak, Optiva, Mixpanel

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud Spanner

March 2025

Free Report: Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud Spanner

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