Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

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
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
80
Ranking in other categories
Database as a Service (DBaaS) (6th), NoSQL Databases (3rd), Vector Databases (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Managed NoSQL Databases category, the mindshare of Amazon Timestream is 10.2%, up from 9.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 16.6%, down from 18.8% 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

"If you drop a message, the solution's technical support will definitely reply."
"The best things about Amazon Timestream are it's maintenance-free, customizable, and has no lag issues. It's always real-time."
"Using Amazon Timestream has been seamless due to its integration within the AWS ecosystem and ease of use for the engineering team."
"You can quickly aggregate data from the last ten years with Amazon Timestream."
"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."
"As a NoSQL database, it offers schema flexibility which simplifies design and reduces initial engineering overhead."
"Azure Cosmos DB's graph queries are its most valuable feature. Although I have not yet explored vector search, it's coming to Cosmos DB, and I plan to look into it. Having data in a flat file format in a document database speeds up processes, which is the primary purpose. Additionally, Cosmos DB's use of the Mongo platform makes it intuitive and cost-effective."
"Its wide support to the ecosystem is valuable. We can use this database with a lot of use cases, and that's one of the reasons why we prefer it. We have a lot of vendors, databases, and use cases, and wherever possible, we are trying to standardize databases. It is also secure."
"The solution is highly scalable."
"It's highly scalable and supports consistency, security, and multiple security options."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is scalable with multiple master files."
"Scaling the workloads is one of the key advantages of Cosmos, preventing the database from becoming a performance bottleneck."
"Specifically, we are using the MongoDB API, so we leverage it in that way. I like the flexibility that it offers. My team does not have to spend time building out database tables. We can get going fairly quickly with being able to read and write data into a MongoDB collection that is hosted inside Azure Cosmos DB."
 

Cons

"There are disadvantages when it comes to time series databases since you can't delete anything from Amazon Timestream data."
"The tool could be improved by increasing the batch size from one hundred records to five hundred or a thousand to speed up indexing."
"Arranging the database schema is a bit challenging."
"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."
"There are certain features that we would like to see added and we are collaborating with the product teams on these areas."
"The support tickets are not cheap."
"Because there is no local way of doing things, Azure Cosmos DB will always be considered expensive."
"I do not have any specific suggestions for improvements at the moment. However, having more AI capabilities in the future would be beneficial."
"A further simple application is required for Brazil."
"The query is a little complex. SQL server should have more options. But the query should be better."
"Microsoft's support services are inadequate, especially during critical incidents."
"The initial setup was difficult."
"We should have more freedom to tweak it and make our own queries for non-traditional use-cases."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Amazon Timestream's pricing seems manageable to me."
"We pay over $10 million a year to Amazon."
"Cosmos DB gave us three accounts for $400. We pay according to the usage."
"Cosmos DB's pricing structure has significantly improved in recent months, both in terms of its pricing model and how charges are calculated."
"The pricing model of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is a bit complex."
"The pricing and licensing model was initially difficult to understand, but as soon as I learned what was going on and how it was priced, it was pretty easy."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pricing is based on RUs. Reading 1 KB document costs one RU, whereas writing one document costs five RUs. Pricing for querying depends on the complexity of the query. If you increase the document size, it will automatically increase the RU cost."
"Cosmos DB is a managed offering, so its cost is understandably higher."
"Most customers like the flexibility of the pricing model, and it has not been an issue. They can start small, and the cost grows with adoption, allowing efficient management of the budget. Its pricing model has not been a concern at all for any of our customers. They understand it. It is simple enough to understand. Oftentimes, it is hard to forecast the RUs, but, in general, it has been fine."
"The cost is the biggest limitation of this solution."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Managed NoSQL Databases solutions are best for your needs.
839,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Construction Company
7%
Computer Software Company
12%
Legal Firm
11%
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?
Overall, it is a good resource. I am not aware of the background, but it seems to currently support only JSON documents. They could expand their scope to support other types of data, such as XML or...
 

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: January 2025.
839,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.