Amazon RDS vs Google Cloud Spanner vs Microsoft Azure SQL Database 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 8.4, while Google is ranked #8 with an average rating of 9.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 14.8% mindshare in DS, compared to Google’s 6.4% 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 58 Amazon RDS reviews

3,594 Views
3,486 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Google Cloud Spanner

Read 5 Google Cloud Spanner reviews

1,047 Views
984 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Read 134 Microsoft Azure SQL Database reviews

3,559 Views
3,488 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Amazon RDS

Google Cloud Spanner

Microsoft Azure SQL Database

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon RDS, Google Cloud Spanner, and Microsoft Azure SQL Database based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), MongoDB and others in Database as a Service (DBaaS).

To learn more, read our detailed Database as a Service (DBaaS) Report (Updated: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

January 2026

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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:

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon RDS is 14.8%, down from 25.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Cloud Spanner is 6.4%, up from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure SQL Database is 11.3%, down from 16.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Database as a Service (DBaaS) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Microsoft Azure SQL Database	11.3%
Amazon RDS	14.8%
Google Cloud Spanner	6.4%
Other	67.5%

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

Featured Reviews

reviewer2592669

Director Software Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

Positive experiences with database services, with minor room for feature enhancements observed

I don't really see any disadvantages of Amazon RDS. With Oracle, I think AWS doesn't provide the RAC stability. If you have Oracle installed in your own data centers, you can set up various clusters and we can set up the RACs, but in Amazon RDS, we cannot have the RAC feature of Oracle. They could add that feature. Amazon RDS has limitations regarding RAC. If we talk about installing Oracle in RDS, we cannot have the RAC, but if you deploy Oracle on GCP, then there is probably the RAC feature available. I observed that around two or three years back, but I'm not sure whether they have added the RAC feature in AWS. Amazon RDS is expensive compared to GCP. GCP also has the same features, and although it is quite extensive and feature-rich, I see Amazon RDS as slightly expensive compared to other clouds.

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LijomonJose

System Architect at UST Global EspaÃ±a

Offers good performance to users

The tool lacks to offer AI features. In the future, I would like the product to offer AI features to users. Nowadays, we are creating small acronyms for our SQL Server. We put some templates. If I just put your name and stop it, the entire cloud can be explored, but such features are not there in Google Cloud Spanner. As a layman rather than a developer, if I create a tool or a procedure. If I write a procedure and then when you describe a procedure, a dummy procedure will be written for you, and it will be available for you as a template in SQL Server, but such kind features are not there in Google Cloud Spanner.

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Thomas Sawyer

Executive Director, Platform Architecture at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation – SMBC Group

Automatic tuning and multi-region availability have reduced manual workloads and improved performance management

The features of Microsoft Azure SQL Database that I like the most are easy scaling and high availability. I appreciate those features because it's easy to make Microsoft Azure SQL Database readily available in a multi-region infrastructure. Using Microsoft Azure SQL Database is very easy; it's much easier than SQL on-premise because I don't have to worry about deploying infrastructure, and I can rapidly deploy via infrastructure as code. I am using the automatic tuning feature in Microsoft Azure SQL Database. We are using the new feature of data encryption in Microsoft Azure SQL Database with customer-managed keys only. The reliability and stability of Microsoft Azure SQL Database platform are rock-solid; it's as good, if not better, than what our on-premise stability has been from an uptime perspective.

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

"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 dashboard and performance are the most valuable features of Amazon RDS."

"The Amazon RDS features I found most valuable are snapshots and automatic backups."

"The product is very, very easy to use."

"Amazon RDS makes it easier for me to manage databases compared to traditional databases like MongoDB or local host servers."

"It significantly reduces database management overhead."

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

"Amazon RDS is easy to manage, and it has customizable performance, high availability, and duality."

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."

"It is a very scalable solution."

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

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

"Google Cloud Spanner is stable."

"The solution is quite straightforward to set up."

"In terms of ease of use, I found Microsoft Azure SQL Database as easy to use as the on-premises version; my experience was that it really was pretty seamless, I didn't have to learn any new SQL, and we're still able to access it using SSMS, the same similar interface, so it was a seamless transition."

"The features of Microsoft Azure SQL Database that I find most valuable are the ability to scale it up and down dynamically with customer load, which is necessary because during the day or business hours when there's more load, we need to scale it up and scale it back down at night for cost efficiency."

"The solution is quire more stable than other tools."

"The Power Virtual Agents help us go through documents and load data into SQL."

"It integrates well on the back end with our functions and logic apps."

"This solution provides more comfort to the end-user compared to a normal SQL server."

"Valuable features of Microsoft Azure SQL Database include its quick deployment capabilities, the ability to spin up an environment easily, and seamless integration with Microsoft products."

More Microsoft Azure SQL Database pros

Cons

"The solution could improve by adding a sandbox environment and more security."

"Amazon RDS could improve by having more sophisticated. I use other solutions that have better technology for more difficult tasks."

"In the next release, it would be great to see RDS provide connection pooling out of the box."

"Amazon RDS needs to have an overall dashboard where I can view all the tables in the form of pie charts and Gantt charts. The deployment is complex, and we would like to see automated scripts. It needs to incorporate performance insights."

"The Performance Monitor they have is a little clanky, at least in regards to the UI."

"I also don't think it's very scalable."

"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."

"User interface needs improvement for using IPS and CloudWatch to scale and utilize read replicas, enabling performance insights to view query formats where the bottlenecks occur, identifying the fixes, slow queries, and missing indexes, improving the security and monitoring with alerts."

More Amazon RDS cons

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

"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."

"The tool lacks to offer AI features."

"The tool needs to improve horizontal scaling."

"The cost can be a bit high."

"Adding users to Azure SQL could be easier. You need to script it out, but it would be nice if it had a UI where you can click and add them. It's not a major thing because we script things all the time, but it would be a minor thing that helps us."

"Although the solution integrates well into Azure’s ecosystem, it has limited capability and is incompatible with many third-party applications or tools."

"The solution can be improved by reducing the constraints available."

"We've noticed an unexpected increase in the cost of running the server over the past few months."

"Lacks some tools on the SQL Server for data virtualization."

"Microsoft Azure SQL Database could be improved by offering an easier way to view all existing roles in the database without needing complex queries found online."

"Its automation can be improved. SQL Server Agent was a very big part of the on-prem tools. While moving from on-prem to the cloud, redoing some of such tools was very cumbersome in Azure. There was a whole new set of technologies and methodologies. It should have easier automation-type features to be able to implement such tools. It should have almost a SQL agent type of substance built into that."

"The default 1433 port for communication should be customizable because most hacks or attacks are attempted when creating any application or database on the default port."

More Microsoft Azure SQL Database cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In my case, MySQL is free, and if there are any costs, then it is much less than other solutions since all such things usually come bundled with the hardware."

"We are paying for a service license."

"On a scale from one to ten, where ten is the most expensive, and one is the cheapest, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."

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

"if you don't know how to optimize and use your tool properly, the cost might hurt you."

"The cost depends on the kind of instance we use."

"The price of Amazon RDS is reasonable."

"The product is expensive."

More Amazon RDS pricing and cost advice

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

"Google Cloud Spanner is an expensive solution."

"It is expensive."

"The solution is expensive."

"The pricing is flexible and can be adapted based on our requirements but the pricing options are complex especially if we are using a VM."

"There is no licensing cost for the solution."

"We have a three-year contract. The cost was somewhere around $70-80,000 for the original deployment, which was about two years ago"

"The license is based on the number of users."

"It only has a subscription-based license."

"Offers options for paying the license on a yearly or a monthly basis."

"When you go with SQL Azure Database, you can create a small database, which is around $4 to $5 per month for development purposes."

"If we use a smaller or free-sized Microsoft Azure SQL Database, it is extremely cost-effective and much cheaper than on-premise enterprise licenses, which are expensive."

More Microsoft Azure SQL Database pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

University

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

13%

Healthcare Company

10%

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	22
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	23

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	59
Midsize Enterprise	17
Large Enterprise	61

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?

Currently, I cannot think of any major improvements. Perhaps more platforms in terms of database engine versions woul...

See all answers

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 ...

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Google Cloud Spanner?

The tool lacks to offer AI features. In the future, I would like the product to offer AI features to users. Nowadays,...

See all answers

What do you like most about SQL Azure?

The automated scalability feature of SQL Azure has proven to be highly beneficial, particularly when deployed in the ...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SQL Azure?

I would say I am at a basic experience level with the pricing, setup costs and licensing because while I am the admin...

See all answers

What needs improvement with SQL Azure?

I have no comments at the moment on how Microsoft Azure SQL Database can be improved. I have no comments on additiona...

See all answers

Comparisons

MongoDB Atlas vs Amazon RDS

Compared 20% of the time

Google Cloud SQL vs Amazon RDS

Compared 15% of the time

Oracle Database as a Service vs Amazon RDS

Compared 12% of the time

Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer vs Amazon RDS

Compared 5% of the time

Azure Database for PostgreSQL vs Amazon RDS

Compared 4% of the time

More Amazon RDS Competitors

Oracle Database as a Service vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 18% of the time

MongoDB Atlas vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 15% of the time

Yugabyte Platform vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 15% of the time

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 7% of the time

Redis vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 6% of the time

More Google Cloud Spanner Competitors

Google Cloud SQL vs Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Compared 20% of the time

MongoDB Atlas vs Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Compared 13% of the time

Azure Database for PostgreSQL vs Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Compared 7% of the time

vCloud Air vs Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Compared 3% of the time

More Microsoft Azure SQL Database Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS

January 2026

Download Amazon RDS product report

Buyer's Guide

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

January 2026

Download Google Cloud Spanner product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure SQL Database

January 2026

Download Microsoft Azure SQL Database product report

Also Known As

RDS

Google Spanner

No data available

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

Microsoft Azure SQL Database is a relational database-as-a-service that delivers predictable performance, scalability, business continuity, data protection, and near-zero administration to cloud developers and solution architects. This is the deep technical library for Azure SQL Database.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Edmodo

Streak, Optiva, Mixpanel

adnymics GmbH, LG CNS, Centrebet, netfabb GmbH, MedPlast, Accelera Solutions, Sochi Organizing Committee, realzeit GmbH

Buyer's Guide

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

January 2026

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