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Amazon Timestream vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 2025

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 Timestream
Ranking in Managed NoSQL Databases
3rd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
5
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
7.2
Number of Reviews
84
Ranking in other categories
Database as a Service (DBaaS) (6th), NoSQL Databases (3rd), Vector Databases (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Managed NoSQL Databases category, the mindshare of Amazon Timestream is 9.7%, up from 9.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 15.5%, down from 18.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed NoSQL Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Sekhar Reddy B - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful for real-time analytics and monitoring application's health
We use the tool with AI for customer data analysis as part of our internal product. It's a medium effort for beginners to learn; it's not too easy but not too hard. Overall, I'd rate Amazon Timestream eight point five to nine out of ten based on my experience. Integrating it wasn't difficult, and we didn't face any challenges. My advice for new users is to choose the right dimension names for better query performance and structure their data correctly before indexing.
MichaelJohn - PeerSpot reviewer
Very efficient for application-facing scenarios
There are several areas for improvement. Firstly, having a local development emulator or simulator for Azure Cosmos DB would be beneficial. It would be very handy to have a Docker container that developers can use locally. Although, I know there is a free tier and so on and so forth, having a local environment would be nice. For example, 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 second improvement area is the IDE of choice. That means how you interact with Azure Cosmos DB. For example, with SQL Server, you have SQL Server Management Studio. I know there is a little bit of support for Azure Cosmos DB in Azure Data Studio, but it is not heavily advertised or it does not feel like first-class citizen support. Developer experience or developer tooling is missing in terms of interacting with the database. Better developer tools or an IDE for interacting with Azure Cosmos DB would enhance the developer experience. Lastly, there is some mixed messaging about what Azure Cosmos DB is, given its multiple APIs. There are so many Azure Cosmos DB APIs available. There is NoSQL. There are MongoDB, Gremlin, and others. There is still some mixed messaging for others who are new to Azure Cosmos DB about what Azure Cosmos DB is. Is this like MongoDB, but then there is also MongoDB in Azure Cosmos DB? I know it well, and I know that the default one is just NoSQL, but others I have interacted with over the last ten years or so get confused.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"What I like best is that the tool is easy to collect and store data and is fast and scalable. The fully managed database is easy to understand."
"You can quickly aggregate data from the last ten years with Amazon Timestream."
"Using Amazon Timestream has been seamless due to its integration within the AWS ecosystem and ease of use for the engineering team."
"The best things about Amazon Timestream are it's maintenance-free, customizable, and has no lag issues. It's always real-time."
"If you drop a message, the solution's technical support will definitely reply."
"The solution is stable."
"It's not a specific feature that I value, but the scalability of this system is the most impressive aspect."
"The high speed of Azure Cosmos DB compared to other competitors is remarkable."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB offers the response times needed for advanced analytics applications."
"Cosmos DB is a document database that stores data in JSON format for faster retrieval of unstructured data. I personally appreciate the speed, which is significantly better for unstructured data, especially since Cosmos DB had JSON as a data type early on."
"Our team has found the vCore index to be one of the most valuable features. We have tokenized and vectorized our entire database and stored this data in MongoDB collections with a vCore index, which works like magic for keyword selection."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is fast, and its performance is good compared to normal SQL DB."
"The querying language and the SDKs they've provided over the years have been phenomenal, giving us a significant advantage."
 

Cons

"The tool could be improved by increasing the batch size from one hundred records to five hundred or a thousand to speed up indexing."
"There are certain features that we would like to see added and we are collaborating with the product teams on these areas."
"There are disadvantages when it comes to time series databases since you can't delete anything from Amazon Timestream data."
"The solution could be improved by making it easier for new graduates like me to use. Better explanations of queries and how to use them with other AWS services would help."
"Arranging the database schema is a bit challenging."
"It is not as easy to use as DynamoDB."
"I would like to see Cosmos DB introduce a feature that would convert machine language to human-readable queries."
"One of the primary challenges with Cosmos DB as a non-relational data store is the careful data modeling required due to the lack of collection-level joins when using the SQL API."
"Our use case was a failure with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, and we do not have any other opportunity to use Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB."
"I do not have any specific suggestions for improvements at the moment. However, having more AI capabilities in the future would be beneficial."
"I would like the speed of transferring data to be improved."
"It would be beneficial if Cosmos supported batch and real-time use cases to make the system more seamless."
"There is room for improvement in terms of stability."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay over $10 million a year to Amazon."
"Amazon Timestream's pricing seems manageable to me."
"We don't see high costs with Amazon Timestream, which may vary by company."
"For 1GB of data, the solution charges $ 0.01 in the US region."
"Its price is in the middle, neither too low nor too high."
"Our experience with the pricing and setup cost is that it aligns with what we expect based on the pricing we see. However, I would absolutely like it to be less if possible."
"The pricing is perceived as being on the higher side. However, if you have large data operations, it might reduce costs due to performance efficiencies."
"Cosmos should be cheaper. We actually intend to stop using it in the near future because the price is too high."
"I would rate Cosmos DB's cost at seven out of ten, with ten being the highest."
"The pricing for Cosmos DB has improved, particularly with the new pricing for Autoscale."
"Its pricing structure is quite flexible."
"It is cost-effective. They offer two pricing models. One is the serverless model and the other one is the vCore model that allows provisioning the resources as necessary. For our pilot projects, we can utilize the serverless model, monitor the usage, and adjust resources as needed."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
7%
Legal Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon Timestream?
We are working on a few open change requests with the engineering teams on AWS's side. There are certain features that we would like to see added and we are collaborating with the product teams on ...
What is your primary use case for Amazon Timestream?
We use Amazon Timestream as a data historian for IT data. It stores all individual measurements of our customers' IoT devices for a certain period of time, allowing them to perform time-series-base...
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?
Azure Cosmos DB is generally a costly resource compared to other Azure resources. It comes with a high cost. We have reserved one thousand RUs. Free usage is also limited.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
I think Cosmos DB enhanced the benefits of NoSQL databases, offering query flexibility, partition management, and backup and restore options. These aspects are crucial, and perhaps improving the co...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
TomTom, KPMG Australia, Bosch, ASOS, Mercedes Benz, NBA, Zero Friction, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Kinectify
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Timestream vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.