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Couchbase Capella vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 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

Couchbase Capella
Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)
14th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB
Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
87
Ranking in other categories
NoSQL Databases (3rd), Managed NoSQL Databases (1st), Vector Databases (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category, the mindshare of Couchbase Capella is 0.6%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 1.4%. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Database as a Service (DBaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

SupriyaKulkarni - PeerSpot reviewer
Good GUI, easy to learn, and simple to install
The architecture is complex. I do understand that. However, the GUI is very user-friendly. Sometimes all these things are a little difficult to understand for a person who is not experienced in Couchbase. There is a constant requirement to upgrade the versions. We need to constantly keep on upgrading the latest version for the newest one. Currently, we are dealing with an issue where some of the servers are on the 6.5 version, and a few have moved to 7.5. So we are in a mixed mode right now. We are having a high IO issue on our servers, which we are already dealing with. We have these cases with Couchbase, with Red Hat, et cetera. We feel like this constant need to upgrade is something that is very mundane yet a very difficult task. If you have three clusters, which have around thirty nodes, the data is quite sensitive. Whenever there is Couchbase upgrade that is going on, we see that our SR is dropped. The purchase rate and success rate drop. This affects our business and the clients. Rebalancing could be improved. I find it to be a very slow process when it comes to rebalancing the clusters. If you talk about other architectures like Oracle, they are pretty fast. Couchbase is a little slower. Rebalancing, taking the node out, doing the upgrade, putting it back, rebalancing it, is a very difficult and cumbersome. For Oracle, we have been running on version 19.5 for the past five years. There were absolutely no issues. Yet for Couchbase, every six months, we have to go do the upgrade.
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

"The way the nodes are managed is interesting."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"The high speed of Azure Cosmos DB compared to other competitors is remarkable."
"The availability and latency of Azure Cosmos DB are excellent."
"The connectors, such as the MongoDB connector and the integration with SQL, are incredibly valuable."
"The speed is impressive, and integrating our power-up database with Kafka was an improvement."
"For modern applications, I would recommend Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB."
"The querying language and the SDKs they've provided over the years have been phenomenal, giving us a significant advantage."
"The speed is impressive, and integrating our power-up database with Kafka was an improvement."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is a good solution for distributed application requirements. We can perform multi-modeling."
 

Cons

"The product could be improved by including a log section for tracking activities, enhancing database integration, and providing more transparency regarding pricing and monitoring activities."
"Rebalancing could be improved."
"Continuing to educate customers on how they can take better advantage of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB without having to completely rewrite their entire application paradigm would be beneficial."
"Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL has a less developed interface and fewer SQL commands than MongoDB, and its community support is also smaller."
"There aren't any specific areas that need improvement, but if there were a way to achieve the right cosine similarity score without extensive testing, that would be very beneficial."
"One area for improvement is the ease of writing SQL queries and stored procedures in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB. Writing an SQL query and a stored procedure on top of that is a little challenging."
"One area for improvement is the ease of writing SQL queries and stored procedures in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB."
"It would be ideal if we could integrate Cosmos DB with our Databricks. At this point, that's not possible."
"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."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's pricing model is complicated, which people don't understand."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The solution is very expensive."
"Its price is very good for the basic stuff. When you go to a more complicated use case, especially when you need replication and availability zones, it gets a little costly."
"Cosmos DB is expensive compared to any virtual machine based on conventional RDBMS like MySQL or PostgreSQL."
"Its cost is transparent. Pricing depends on the transaction and data size, but overall, it is cheaper compared to hosting it on your corporate network due to other factors like power consumption."
"The pricing model of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is a bit complex."
"Microsoft provides fair pricing."
"When we've budgeted for our resources, it's one of the more expensive ones, but it's still not very expensive per month."
"Azure is a pay as you go subscription."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Legal Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
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 Couchbase Capella?
The architecture is complex. I do understand that. However, the GUI is very user-friendly. Sometimes all these things are a little difficult to understand for a person who is not experienced in Cou...
What is your primary use case for Couchbase Capella?
The solution is basically used to support our ordering system, which generates a huge number of orders for our customers.
What advice do you have for others considering Couchbase Capella?
We are Counchbase customers. Depending on your application, it is good to use Couchbase where you have high OLTP systems where you know there will be constant data loading, deleting, et cetera, hap...
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?
Its cost is transparent. Pricing depends on the transaction and data size, but overall, it is cheaper compared to hosting it on your corporate network due to other factors like power consumption. C...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
I had a challenging experience implementing the emulator with a Mac. I had to install the emulator in a Docker container because it is not natively compatible. A significant amount of time was spen...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
TomTom, KPMG Australia, Bosch, ASOS, Mercedes Benz, NBA, Zero Friction, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Kinectify
Find out what your peers are saying about Couchbase Capella vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,190 professionals have used our research since 2012.