Amazon RDS vs Microsoft Azure SQL Database comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft 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 Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.7. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 26.1% mindshare in DS, compared to Microsoft’s 17.1% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Amazon RDS

Read 53 Amazon RDS reviews

6,202 Views
5,238 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Read 116 Microsoft Azure SQL Database reviews

8,141 Views
3,439 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Amazon RDS

Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 12, 2024

Amazon RDS and Microsoft Azure SQL Database are strong players in the cloud database market. Based on the comparisons, each product has distinct advantages that cater to different needs.

Features: Amazon RDS offers automated backups, ease of scalability, and high availability. Microsoft Azure SQL Database has advanced machine learning capabilities, integration with other Azure services, and built-in security features.

Room for Improvement: Amazon RDS could improve its support, reduce downtime during maintenance, and enhance its performance analytics. Microsoft Azure SQL Database needs better performance analytics, improved documentation for complex setups, and more intuitive user interfaces.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon RDS is easier to deploy and integrates well with AWS services, but its customer service receives mixed reviews. Microsoft Azure SQL Database has a straightforward deployment process and an effective support team, especially for enterprises already using Azure.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon RDS offers competitive pricing with good ROI for small and medium businesses, but costs can increase with higher usage. Microsoft Azure SQL Database is more expensive but the added features and integration justify the cost, providing good ROI for enterprises needing comprehensive solutions.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon RDS vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database

January 2025

Download the complete report

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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

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)

1st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

116

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon RDS is 26.1%, down from 28.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure SQL Database is 17.1%, down from 18.9% 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.

Read full review

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.

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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

"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."

"Amazon RDS is good for backups, auto-scanning, and disaster recovery. It's also appropriate for the office server."

"The most valuable feature is that it is a fully managed database, where they handle most of the administrative tasks and leaves the users more time to concentrate on business."

"Encryption is the most valuable feature."

"For me, RDS is a great solution. I like that Amazon RDS is a very simple solution to implement and to start using."

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

"It is stable, scalable, and easy to deploy."

"It significantly reduces database management overhead."

More Amazon RDS pros

"We have come from hosting on-premise for customers, or they've done it themselves with SQL. We've now taken a cloud offering for the equivalent services of standard database management and the inbuilt backup and restore offerings. The scalability is probably the biggest feature that we are benefiting from by being in the cloud."

"Azure Portal is most valuable."

"The data availability and speed are impressive, especially compared to legacy systems. The loading speeds are much faster on Azure SQL."

"The most valuable feature of SQL Azure is centralized authentication because I'm using the domain, user name, and password, for Microsoft 365 account with multifactor authentication and the security has been working well."

"We don't have to manage it much. It is managed by Microsoft, which makes it easy for us because there is no admin overhead for managing the servers. It is also easily scalable. During peak hours, it can scale higher."

"The hardware is all managed by Microsoft."

"SQL is a simpler database. We use it more than other databases."

"Microsoft Azure SQL Database is fairly easy to use and set up for our DBA teams, who use it for various applications and tools like RabbitMQ."

More Microsoft Azure SQL Database pros

Cons

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

"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 support team of Amazon RDS provides us with some links to go through whenever we face some issues, but it doesn't work for us."

"If Amazon RDS can be provided as a service platform, it would be beneficial for years. Instead of focusing on infrastructure, they can assist backend engineers and those with varying technical expertise in utilizing it effectively. It would be helpful if Amazon could provide a more predictable pricing strategy."

"The product's high price is an area of concern where improvements are required."

"As a customer of Amazon RDS, you don't have super-user privileges, and that is the only drawback where improvements are required."

"The setup might be a bit challenging for multi-level applications."

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

More Amazon RDS cons

"The management is entirely controlled by Microsoft, so there are some restrictions."

"Microsoft Azure SQL Database could improve by having better tooling in terms of connecting to other database platforms and better capabilities around programmable interfaces."

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

"I need Microsoft to allow their network to access open source technologies."

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

"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."

"There is room for improvement regarding the pricing structure."

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

More Microsoft Azure SQL Database cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Amazon RDS is reasonable."

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

"The solution is expensive."

"The solution's pricing needs improvement."

"The solution's price is good."

"The solution is fairly priced."

"Licensing fees are paid on an annual basis."

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

More Amazon RDS pricing and cost advice

"I am not aware of the exact pricing, but our monthly bill for Azure is around 80,000. It is less expensive than using SQL Server. It has the pay-as-you-go model, and the charges are based on the usage."

"It is reasonable."

"The solution is more cost-effective than Google BigQuery. Compared to Google BigQuery, downloading data can be more expensive."

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

"Compared to other providers, the pricing is definitely on the affordable side."

"I have an annual spend number, and it is in the hundred thousand dollar range. There are no additional costs to the standard licensing fees. Even though you have to look at the cost numbers of what you're going to be charged on a monthly basis, what you have to also remember is that your application may need a lot of rewriting and things like that. You get charged not just for the monthly costs but also for the transactions that occur. If your access to the data layer is not so efficient, your costs will go up because you're pulling far more data than you potentially need. These are hidden costs that nobody ever considers. If your application is not written very efficiently, you may actually increase your costs over on-prem versus cloud."

"It requires a license. As compared to its competitors, such as Oracle, it is affordable and reasonable."

"It's reasonably priced and when you compare it with other products in the cloud environment, it's cheaper."

More Microsoft Azure SQL Database pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

13%

University

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

72%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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?

I find the pricing of Amazon RDS fair, as AWS operates on a pay-for-what-you-use model. Auto scalability helps handle varying demand, making it cost-efficient without overprovisioning resources.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon RDS?

For improvements, Amazon RDS could work on more features for multi-availability zone deployment to enhance higher availability, and on simplifying migration for those transitioning from on-premises...

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 cloud.

See all answers

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

The price for running the server increased more than expected in recent months, and better alignment of pricing expectations is needed. Notably, costs related to IT staff coming into the office on ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with SQL Azure?

We're trying to manage our costs better. We've noticed an unexpected increase in the cost of running the server over the past few months. Addressing pricing clarity and alignment would help us. Als...

See all answers

Comparisons

MongoDB Atlas vs Amazon RDS

Compared 31% of the time

Google Cloud SQL vs Amazon RDS

Compared 23% of the time

Oracle Database as a Service vs Amazon RDS

Compared 16% of the time

Google Cloud Spanner vs Amazon RDS

Compared 4% of the time

Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer vs Amazon RDS

Compared 4% of the time

More Amazon RDS Competitors

Google Cloud SQL vs Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Compared 43% of the time

MongoDB Atlas vs Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Compared 16% of the time

Oracle Database as a Service vs Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Compared 7% of the time

vCloud Air vs Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Compared 2% of the time

IBM Db2 on Cloud vs Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Compared 2% of the time

More Microsoft Azure SQL Database Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS

January 2025

Download Amazon RDS product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure SQL Database

January 2025

Download Microsoft Azure SQL Database product report

Also Known As

RDS

No data available

Learn More

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Microsoft

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.

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.

Sample Customers

Edmodo

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

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database

January 2025

Free Report: Amazon RDS vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon RDS vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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