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 #1 with an average rating of 8.2, while Google is ranked #8 with an average rating of 9.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 19.1% mindshare in DS, compared to Google’s 5.5% 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 57 Amazon RDS reviews

3,520 Views
3,485 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Google Cloud Spanner

Read 5 Google Cloud Spanner reviews

890 Views
819 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Read 118 Microsoft Azure SQL Database reviews

3,076 Views
3,045 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 Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, MongoDB and others in Database as a Service (DBaaS).

To learn more, read our detailed Database as a Service (DBaaS) Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

September 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:

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon RDS is 19.1%, down from 25.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Cloud Spanner is 5.5%, up from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure SQL Database is 13.0%, down from 17.6% 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 (%)
Amazon RDS	19.1%
Microsoft Azure SQL Database	13.0%
Google Cloud Spanner	5.5%
Other	62.4%

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.

Read full review

Saurav Krishna

Data Engineering and AI Intern at .3Lines Venture Capital

A stable but expensive solution that needs to look into the horizontal scaling feature

The tool needs to improve horizontal scaling. I have been using the product for a year. Google Cloud Spanner is stable. My company has 15-20 users for the product. The tool's deployment is easy. The solution is expensive. You need to look at the data set and company requirements. I rate…

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Charley Hanania

Data Platform Specialist at QS2 AG - Quality Software Solutions

It is very easy to implement, manage, and offers great insights into what is happening inside the engine

Microsoft Azure SQL Database is integrated into other Azure capabilities and has a great foundation being on SQL Server with a long history of security, performance, and usability from a DBA perspective. Once you've set up a server, adding databases is easy. There's a minor challenge with having data in separate databases that you want to connect like we do on premises. I'm looking forward to using some of these new AI-driven functions that have come out around vectorization. Having the data closer to my transactional databases or data makes it easy to augment and enhance the Database and applications I currently use. It's great that Azure SQL now seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Fabric. It's a first-tier service in the cloud that connects to web applications and other databases. The data transformation orchestration capabilities within Database Factory and similar capabilities make it effortless to move that stuff forward.

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

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

"The scalability is the best, and I have no issues with the ability to scale."

"Amazon RDS is a scalable solution."

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

"It is easy to use, flexible, and powerful."

"I use Amazon RDS to store and manage data securely. It helps me retrieve information and gain insights from the data that comes in for my business or specific applications."

"Amazon RDS gives us the ability to select as many tools, replicas, regions, and zones as we want."

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

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."

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

"Google Cloud Spanner is stable."

"It is a very scalable solution."

"Some of the best features of Microsoft Azure SQL Database are its scalability, pricing, and ease of setup."

"SQL Azure can integrate well with other Microsoft Windows services."

"Because the solution is cloud-based it's highly manageable, it makes maintenance of logs, space, storage and backups much easier compared to a traditional SQL server installation."

"It has significantly streamlined our disaster recovery plans, making it much more straightforward to spin up new instances as opposed to setting up a new VM with all necessary packages. The normal cost of our VMs with storage has been significantly reduced."

"The initial setup was straightforward. We did not migrate from an existing system but implemented it from scratch and did not require Microsoft support. We were building Power Platform apps using SharePoint databases and Excel. And after that, we realized that we had to integrate it with SQL. It wasn't too hard, and our partners have people with experience."

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

"We like the ease of integrating it with our on-premises environment. We use a hybrid model. We have a SQL Server on-premises, and we have an integration with the cloud version. We do CPU or disk intensive processes on-premises. For accessibility, we offload onto the cloud. When you do a lot of IO and things like that in the cloud, Microsoft charges for the CPU activity."

"The solution is a fairly mature product. It provides good stability."

More Microsoft Azure SQL Database pros

Cons

"The only thing that needs improvement would be the pricing of the solution."

"I like using Amazon RDS because it offers quick operations for me. However, there are times when understanding how to use some of the services can be challenging, even with documentation. If I could add a feature, I'd improve navigation for related services."

"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."

"In the next release, it would be great to have access to core parameters to improve or tweak the performance."

"One notable improvement that could enhance the database management experience, particularly during migration scenarios, is the accessibility of the root user."

"Currently, speaking of Microsoft SQL on RDS, you don't have a full option to be able to use it directly on RDS. So, it needs improvement."

"There are a few aspects of database management that have room for improvement. There are a few parameters in the solution that are a bit unclear at our end as it's not understandable."

"It would be better if it integrated seamlessly with Microsoft products. Our clients use the Microsoft Tally application server. We already tried to create a reputation from, for example, an on-premises environment from our client to Amazon RDS using Microsoft Tally server, and we couldn't do that because we didn't have a strong user in RDS. We couldn't create a reputation from an on-premises environment from the Microsoft Tally server to RDS. I think that it would be a good implementation, and it would help us with this case."

More Amazon RDS cons

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

"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."

"The tool needs to improve horizontal scaling."

"The tool lacks to offer AI features."

"Pricing could be improved to make Microsoft Azure SQL Database more accessible."

"Their availability in the Middle East and Asia regions needs to improve."

"The way it has been designed, in the on-premises deployments, the underlying Windows OS is highly scalable but has a very large resource requirement. A lot of power-related and memory-related things are there, which I have not seen in the RHEL and Oracle. I have not tried SQL on RHEL EXEC. On Windows, infrastructure-wise, a very large workload is running on the SQL. This issue is related to Windows, not SQL."

"Microsoft Azure SQL Database would benefit from enhanced documentation, along with ongoing improvements to scalability and cost-effectiveness."

"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."

"I think this product can improve its integrations with business intelligence software. The integrations are always cumbersome due to the approvals, passwords, et cetera."

"The solution could improve by allowing the export of the data more seamlessly. It is difficult to copy and back up data."

"I would like to see integration with Snowflake."

More Microsoft Azure SQL Database cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"AWS is becoming pretty expensive because cheap or absolutely free services have become paid services. Amazon RDS is not an expensive product, but Amazon's ecosystem is becoming increasingly expensive."

"The solution’s pricing could be cheaper."

"The solution is expensive."

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

"The solution's pricing needs improvement."

"The solution is expensive."

"Amazon RDS is not a very expensive solution."

"Licensing fees are paid on an annual basis."

More Amazon RDS pricing and cost advice

"The solution is expensive."

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

"Google Cloud Spanner is an expensive solution."

"It is expensive."

"You can use it for smaller instances and pay less. You can also go for the premium product with all the security, scalability, and business continuity features, but you have to pay a premium amount."

"Its price can definitely be lower. It is pretty pricey."

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

"The solution is expensive."

"We pay less than $1000 monthly in licensing fees. There are no additional costs."

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

"It only has a subscription-based license."

"When looking at the long-term expenses associated with running software on an on-premises server, the costs are almost equivalent but when we include insurance for devices, onsite fees for servers, and other related costs, we may find that this is a cost-effective solution."

More Microsoft Azure SQL Database pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

12%

University

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	22
Midsize Enterprise	14
Large Enterprise	23

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	55
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	50

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?

I don't really see any disadvantages of Amazon RDS. With Oracle, I think AWS doesn't provide the RAC stability. If yo...

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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 ...

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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...

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?

The pricing of Microsoft Azure SQL Database is not cheap, affecting user uptake. A gradual reduction in price could i...

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What needs improvement with SQL Azure?

I have used the Microsoft Azure SQL Database for two years now, and I don't find it satisfactory. It's slow and expen...

See all answers

Comparisons

MongoDB Atlas vs Amazon RDS

Compared 22% of the time

Google Cloud SQL vs Amazon RDS

Compared 17% of the time

Oracle Database as a Service vs Amazon RDS

Compared 15% of the time

Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer vs Amazon RDS

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Database for PostgreSQL vs Amazon RDS

Compared 4% of the time

More Amazon RDS Competitors

MongoDB Atlas vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 20% of the time

SingleStore vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 11% of the time

Redis vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 9% of the time

Oracle Database as a Service vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 9% of the time

Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 4% of the time

More Google Cloud Spanner Competitors

Google Cloud SQL vs Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Compared 24% of the time

MongoDB Atlas vs Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Compared 17% of the time

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Compared 7% of the time

Azure Database for PostgreSQL vs Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Compared 7% of the time

More Microsoft Azure SQL Database Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS

October 2025

Download Amazon RDS product report

Buyer's Guide

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

September 2025

Download Google Cloud Spanner product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure SQL Database

September 2025

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)

September 2025

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