Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs Milvus comparison

Microsoft and The Milvus Project are both solutions in the Vector Databases category. Microsoft is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.2, while The Milvus Project is ranked #6 with an average rating of 7.4. Microsoft holds a 2.5% mindshare in VD, compared to The Milvus Project’s 8.8% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of The Milvus Project users who would recommend it.

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Read 86 Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB reviews

1,166 Views
444 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Milvus

Read 5 Milvus reviews

2,390 Views
2,075 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Milvus

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB and Milvus compete in database solutions. Azure Cosmos DB appears to have the upper hand due to its robust global distribution and multi-data model support, while Milvus excels in managing high-dimensional vectors for AI applications.

Features: Azure Cosmos DB supports seamless multi-model data storage, automatic scaling, and global distribution, making it versatile for diverse workloads. Milvus specializes in high-performance vector data processing, crucial for AI-driven complex search scenarios and analytics, highlighting its focus on similarity search operations.

Room for Improvement: Azure Cosmos DB could enhance its handling of extremely large data sets and refine its cost management for high-demand applications. Its learning curve for new users unfamiliar with NoSQL could be reduced, and optimization for complex relational data operations could be improved. Milvus could benefit from expanding its user interface capabilities, improving documentation for beginners, and enhancing its integration with diverse programming ecosystems.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Azure Cosmos DB offers streamlined deployment with integration across Microsoft Azure, providing easy scalability and management supported by comprehensive global service. Milvus offers flexible deployment in containerized environments, catering to specific enterprise needs with available customer assistance.

Pricing and ROI: Azure Cosmos DB's pricing based on provisioned throughput appeals to large-scale, globally distributed operations, offering significant ROI in reliable data management. Milvus, being open-source, offers low initial setup costs and potential high ROI for high-dimensional data processing needed in AI applications.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus

March 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 848,270 peers since 2012

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

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Ranking in Vector Databases

3rd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Database as a Service (DBaaS) (6th), NoSQL Databases (3rd), Managed NoSQL Databases (1st)

Milvus

Ranking in Vector Databases

6th

Average Rating

7.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Open Source Databases (9th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 2.5%. The mindshare of Milvus is 8.8%, up from 8.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vector Databases

Featured Reviews

MichaelJohn

Director | Data & AI at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

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.

Read full review

Sameer Bhangale

Leader, Data Science Practice at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Provides quick and easy containerization, but documentation is not very user-friendly

Milvus' documentation is not very user-friendly and doesn't help me get started quickly. Chroma DB provides super user-friendly documentation, enabling new users to get started quickly. Chroma DB's setup doesn't have many dependencies, whereas Milvus usually comes with some dependencies because of the way it needs to be deployed. Unlike Milvus, it's very easy to do POCs with Chroma DB.

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 global synchronization feature of Azure Cosmos DB stands out as the most valuable for me."

"The latency and availability of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB are fantastic."

"Cosmos DB's greatest strengths are its easy setup and affordability, especially for those who understand its usage."

"The autoscale feature is the most useful for us."

"Cosmos is preferred because of its speed, robustness, and utilization. We have all the merchandising information in Cosmos DB, which provides concrete and optimized data when searching for new products on the site. It is faster than other relational databases."

"Azure Cosmos DB's resiliency is valuable. It is available in every Azure region, allowing quick information storage and retrieval. We can partition it to improve indexing, enabling us to retrieve information and recreate website content quickly."

"It gives us a lot of flexibility. The scaling is instantaneous as well. You immediately have all the resources available."

"Scaling the workloads is one of the key advantages of Cosmos, preventing the database from becoming a performance bottleneck."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pros

"The best feature of Milvus was finding the closest chunk from a huge amount of data."

"Milvus has good accuracy and performance."

"Milvus offers multiple methods for calculating similarities or distances between vectors, such as L2 norm and cosine similarity. These methods help in comparing different vectors based on specific use cases. For instance, in our use case, we find that the L2 distance works best, but you can experiment with different methods to find the most suitable one for your needs."

"I like the accuracy and usability."

"The solution is well containerized, and since containerization is quick and easy for me, I can scale it up quickly."

Cons

"The challenge for us is always scale."

"The initial setup was difficult."

"I don't think Cosmos DB has improved our organization. People are using it, but I'm not sure it's the best solution. For one, it's costly. Also, there are other issues with it. You cannot get all the records simultaneously. You can only get it in chunks of 1,500 maximum."

"We had some performance issues with a data segregation query. We worked closely with Microsoft to solve the problem of performance where, for example, one query had a delay of almost two or three minutes for this one use case. Microsoft tried to improve the product, but in the end, the solution was to change to MongoDB. MongoDB had better performance."

"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."

"For streaming platforms, Azure Cosmos DB could improve efficiency in data storage. Indexing can also be better. Enhanced capabilities are necessary to manage increased data amounts more effectively during searches."

"The RUs still appear to be a black box for everyone. Even though they explain read and write RUs, it remains unclear for many users."

"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."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB cons

"Milvus has higher resource consumption, which introduces complexity in implementation."

"I've heard that when we store too much data in Milvus, it becomes slow and does not work properly."

"Milvus could make it simpler. Simplifying the requirements and making it more accessible. It could be more user-friendly."

"Milvus' documentation is not very user-friendly and doesn't help me get started quickly."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its price is in the middle, neither too low nor too high."

"It is expensive. The moment you have high availability options and they are mixed with the type of multitenant architecture you use, the pricing is on the higher end."

"Because of the lack of understanding about RUs, the costs become unpredictable. It sometimes goes over the budget."

"The cost is the biggest limitation of this solution."

"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."

"Microsoft provides fair pricing."

"There is a licensing fee."

"Everything could always be cheaper. I like that Cosmos DB allows us to auto-scale instead of pre-provisioning a certain capacity. It automatically scales to the demand, so we only pay for what we consume."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pricing and cost advice

"Milvus is an open-source solution."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Vector Databases solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

848,270 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Legal Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

21%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?

Its pricing is not bad. It is good. We have a contract with Microsoft to use their technology. In my opinion, Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is a good option for the total cost of ownership.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Milvus?

I like the accuracy and usability.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Milvus?

Milvus could be improved how it could automatically generate insights from the data it holds. Milvus maintains embedding information and knows the relationships between data points. It would be use...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Milvus?

Milvus is primarily used in RAG, which involves retrieving relevant documents or data to augment the generation of new content. Milvus helps convert text and other data into a vector space, and the...

See all answers

Comparisons

Chroma vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 15% of the time

Pinecone vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon Neptune vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 7% of the time

Amazon DynamoDB vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 6% of the time

Neo4j AuraDB vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 5% of the time

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB Competitors

LanceDB vs Milvus

Compared 20% of the time

Elastic Search vs Milvus

Compared 16% of the time

OpenSearch vs Milvus

Compared 11% of the time

Faiss vs Milvus

Compared 10% of the time

MySQL vs Milvus

Compared 1% of the time

More Milvus Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

April 2025

Download Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB product report

Buyer's Guide

Open Source Databases

April 2025

Download Milvus product report

Also Known As

Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB

No data available

Overview

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database service providing scalability, user-friendliness, and seamless integration, suitable for managing large volumes of structured and unstructured data across diverse applications.

Azure Cosmos DB is renowned for its scalability, stability, and ease of integration, offering robust support for multiple data models and APIs. Its capacity for handling unstructured data efficiently and providing real-time analytics makes it ideal for applications requiring high performance and global distribution. With features like automatic failover and integration with Microsoft products, users benefit from cost optimization and secure data handling. Enhancement opportunities include simplifying queries, improving documentation, and expanding backup and analytics functionalities.

What are the most important features of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?

Scalability and Autoscaling: Efficiently handles growing data and user demands.
Multi-Model Support: Adapts to different data models seamlessly.
Global Distribution: Provides low-latency access across multiple regions.
Automatic Failover: Ensures high availability and reliability.
Integration with Microsoft Products: Offers seamless connectivity with Azure services.

What benefits should users look for in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB reviews?

Performance and Speed: Exceptionally fast processing for real-time data analytics.
Cost Optimization: Tools for managing expenses effectively.
Secure Data Handling: Implements strong data security measures.
Flexible Data Ingestion: Supports diverse data ingestion methods.

Azure Cosmos DB is frequently used in sectors like web, mobile, IoT, and analytics. It supports applications as a key-value store, processes real-time data, and enables global scalability with low-latency access. Its big data management capabilities and integration with Azure services enhance its utility across industries.

Microsoft

Milvus is a powerful tool for efficiently storing and retrieving large-scale vectors or embeddings. It is widely used in applications such as similarity search, recommendation systems, image and video retrieval, and natural language processing.

With its fast and accurate search capabilities, scalability, and support for multiple programming languages, Milvus is suitable for a wide range of industries and use cases.

Users appreciate its efficient search capabilities, ability to handle large-scale data, support for various data types, and user-friendly interface.

Milvus enables easy retrieval of information from vast datasets, regardless of the data format, and is praised for its high performance and scalability. The intuitive and easy-to-use interface is also highlighted as a valuable aspect of the platform.

The Milvus Project

Sample Customers

TomTom, KPMG Australia, Bosch, ASOS, Mercedes Benz, NBA, Zero Friction, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Kinectify

1. Alibaba Group 2. Tencent 3. Baidu 4. JD.com 5. Meituan 6. Xiaomi 7. Didi Chuxing 8. ByteDance 9. Huawei 10. ZTE 11. Lenovo 12. Haier 13. China Mobile 14. China Telecom 15. China Unicom 16. Ping An Insurance 17. China Life Insurance 18. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China 19. Bank of China 20. Agricultural Bank of China 21. China Construction Bank 22. PetroChina 23. Sinopec 24. China National Offshore Oil Corporation 25. China Southern Airlines 26. Air China 27. China Eastern Airlines 28. China Railway Group 29. China Railway Construction Corporation 30. China Communications Construction Company 31. China Merchants Group 32. China Evergrande Group

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus

March 2025

Free Report: Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

848,270 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus report.

See our list of best Vector Databases vendors.

We monitor all Vector Databases reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.