Amazon Aurora vs CockroachDB comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cockroach are both solutions in the Relational Databases Tools category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.5, while Cockroach is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.4. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 2.9% mindshare in SQL, compared to Cockroach’s 4.1% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 83% of Cockroach users who would recommend it.

Amazon Aurora

Read 19 Amazon Aurora reviews

2,225 Views
2,181 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

CockroachDB

Read 12 CockroachDB reviews

2,405 Views
2,237 Comparison Views

83% willing to recommend

Amazon Aurora

CockroachDB

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

CockroachDB and Amazon Aurora are competitors in the cloud-based database management market. CockroachDB excels in distributed systems with its adaptable architecture, while Amazon Aurora shines with seamless AWS integration and strong multi-region deployment capabilities.

Features: CockroachDB offers high fault-tolerance, simple installation, and a distributed nature which allows geo-partitioning for enhanced data residency control, speed, and resiliency. Key features also include node syncing and automatic rebalancing. Amazon Aurora is noted for its robust scalability, auto-scaling, SQL standardization, and seamless AWS integration. It supports multi-region clusters, provides distinct endpoints for read and write operations, and offers continuous backups.

Room for Improvement: CockroachDB can enhance disaster recovery and failover features, improve PostgreSQL compatibility, and clarify serverless offerings. Its pricing and initial setup could also be more user-friendly. Amazon Aurora faces criticism for costliness. Enhancements in cryptography, standalone solutions, query performance insights, and integration with Oracle are needed. Predictability in update release patterns could improve user experience.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: CockroachDB supports both public and on-premises deployments, offering more flexibility for on-premise setups despite mixed reviews on technical support. Amazon Aurora operates primarily on cloud platforms supported by AWS infrastructure, excelling in AWS integration but requiring customer service improvements.

Pricing and ROI: CockroachDB's open-source cost model is seen as affordable, offering flexibility with a good return on investment, although some premium offerings are seen as costly. Amazon Aurora's managed service benefits reflect in its pricing, providing cost-effectiveness due to performance and AWS features, but price fluctuations based on usage and performance suggest potential for cost optimization.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Aurora vs. CockroachDB Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Aurora vs. CockroachDB

July 2025

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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 Aurora

Ranking in Relational Databases Tools

7th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

CockroachDB

Ranking in Relational Databases Tools

11th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of Amazon Aurora is 2.9%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CockroachDB is 4.1%, up from 2.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Relational Databases Tools

Featured Reviews

Adnan Shafiq

Associate Vice President - Database Management (Principal Solutions Architect) at Northbay

High availability and geographical redundancy ensure reliable performance and cost efficiency

Amazon Aurora ( /products/amazon-aurora-reviews ) provides up to fifteen to sixteen read replicas. It replicates data across multiple Availability Zones, ensuring high availability and geographical redundancy, which can be considered a GR instead of a DR. As a managed service, maintenance tasks like backup and restore are handled by AWS ( /products/amazon-aws-reviews ), saving my organization significant time and money. Additionally, its fast cloning feature allows us to create a new clone from a large database swiftly, similar to a zero-copy cloning feature in Snowflake ( /products/snowflake-reviews ). This makes Amazon Aurora a compelling choice for my organization.

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Dang Quy Tai

Student at Univerzita obrany

Geo-replication benefits with distributed setup and a helpful AI support chatbot

I am studying how to deploy CockroachDB and YugaByteDB, and learning some basic information about them. I am testing these databases as part of my school application to find a suitable database for our applications. Currently, I am using PostgreSQL, however, I want to try some distributed databases…

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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 provision of custom read and write endpoints eliminates the need for managing a separate proxy load balancer."

"The most valuable feature is that the maintainability is offloaded to the service provider. I don't have to maintain a database or do any administrative tasks, which comes in handy."

"The most valuable feature of Amazon Aurora is SQL standardization, it doesn't have its own syntax which is good. It has a lot of hands-off self-management type of activities, such as log rolling and auto-scaling."

"We had better control over the parameters that we could tweak in terms of intermediate storage and better indexing capabilities."

"One of the most valuable features is storage scaling."

"One of the standout features of Amazon Aurora is that we do not need to maintain disaster recovery or manage availability zones."

"Aurora's features that I find the most beneficial include its database backup strategy, performance options, and input-output operations."

"Amazon Aurora stands out for its ease of use in a managed environment, inbuilt security, continuous backups, numerous read replicas, multi-region automated replication, and seamless integration with other AWS services."

More Amazon Aurora pros

"The availability and the easy to use feature is the most valuable. The documentation is also good."

"The initial setup and deployment are simple."

"CockroachDB is highly reliable."

"The best feature of CockroachDB is the ability to keep the nodes in different locations."

"What I like best is its ability to solve data residency issues. The main advantage is auto geo partitioning, built into the product. This means we don't have to spin up separate servers in each region, which would be much more costly."

"The tool's most valuable feature is node syncing, which takes only 0.54 milliseconds."

"The product has valuable security features."

"The most valuable feature is that CockroachDB is a distributed database, which can deploy nodes running in different regions."

More CockroachDB pros

Cons

"The product's distributed query process for MySQL needs improvement."

"While Amazon Aurora meets your current scaling and storage needs, there is room for improvement in cryptography and scalability compared to other databases."

"A challenge I noticed is during migration from PostgreSQL RDS to Amazon Aurora. There are technical challenges, such as the inability to provision the database using a PostgreSQL snapshot directly."

"The pricing could improve. It should be reduced."

"It would have been helpful if they had provided some benchmarking numbers."

"I would like to see performance insights on the database based on the queries. Currently, we use SolarWinds as the monitoring tool. I would like to leverage SolarWinds’ performance insights in AWS services. SolarWinds gives larger insights when we run performance issues."

"It is a bit costly. The features are quite good, and I wouldn't say it requires any technical improvements. But from a cost perspective, some clients wouldn't go for Aurora because of that."

"Room for improvement might be in the UI, integrations, or data working capabilities for better user experience."

More Amazon Aurora cons

"I think the engine itself could be improved. If you miss a partition key, it should be able to be modeled. This is where AI could be really helpful. For example, if a user is from Australia, the system should know to look for their data there first instead of searching in the US or another continent."

"I would like CockroachDB to have more compatibility with PostgreSQL, especially with the connection string and technical integrations."

"CockroachDB needs to improve store processes."

"The initial setup and pricing could be improved."

"The closer they can make CockroachDB to being completely compatible with Postgres, the better. It's almost compatible, but not completely. If it was, it would be nice to just be able to use Postgres libraries without any fiddling."

"We are looking for more features to support distributed high availability and geo-partitioning."

"The product must improve its disaster recovery features."

"Cockroach does not support all types of protocols. I need to improve it myself to support a CouchDB on my network."

More CockroachDB cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is quite expensive."

"There is no need to buy a license for the product. We can pay as per the use case."

"The tool’s pricing depends on the instance type. For cost optimization purposes, we use the result instance category."

"I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, with ten being expensive."

"The price could be lower compared to its competitors."

"It is an expensive solution."

"I've used CockroachDB at a small scale on the free accounts because we are only testing."

"The pricing is good but can be made cheaper. I would rate the pricing a five out of ten."

"The solution's pricing is not cheap. However, the good thing is that customers are willing to pay for it if they want it."

"The platform is affordable even for the enterprise version. It provides value for investment in terms of performance."

"The product's price depends on the user's company and the contract model they enter into with CockroachDB. Depending on the contract model one enters into with CockroachDB, the product may or may not be expensive."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

25%

Computer Software Company

14%

Government

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

35%

Computer Software Company

13%

Educational Organization

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Aurora?

Aurora's compatibility with MySQL or PostgreSQL benefited our database management. The migration from on-premise MySQL to Aurora was similar, so we didn't need to change our source code.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Aurora?

Amazon Aurora is not very expensive as other solutions with similar features from other vendors come at almost the same cost. I rated it as two to three on a scale where ten is very expensive.

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What needs improvement with Amazon Aurora?

Amazon Aurora should upgrade its base PostgreSQL ( /products/postgresql-reviews ) versions more frequently and offer all PostgreSQL extensions. Keeping extensions up-to-date with PostgreSQL release...

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What do you like most about CockroachDB?

The subset of SQL that my client is using is completely supported.

See all answers

What needs improvement with CockroachDB?

I would like CockroachDB to have more compatibility with PostgreSQL, especially with the connection string and technical integrations.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for CockroachDB?

See all answers

Comparisons

SQL Server vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 28% of the time

Oracle Database vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 19% of the time

Citus Data vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 8% of the time

MariaDB vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 8% of the time

IBM Db2 Database vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 5% of the time

More Amazon Aurora Competitors

Neon vs CockroachDB

Compared 26% of the time

Citus Data vs CockroachDB

Compared 15% of the time

YugabyteDB vs CockroachDB

Compared 10% of the time

Oracle Database vs CockroachDB

Compared 9% of the time

SurrealDB vs CockroachDB

Compared 3% of the time

More CockroachDB Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Aurora

July 2025

Download Amazon Aurora product report

Buyer's Guide

CockroachDB

July 2025

Download CockroachDB product report

Overview

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.

Amazon Aurora is up to five times faster than standard MySQL databases and three times faster than standard PostgreSQL databases. It provides the security, availability, and reliability of commercial databases at 1/10th the cost. Amazon Aurora is fully managed by Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), which automates time-consuming administration tasks like hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.

Amazon Aurora features a distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system that auto-scales up to 64TB per database instance. It delivers high performance and availability with up to 15 low-latency read replicas, point-in-time recovery, continuous backup to Amazon S3, and replication across three Availability Zones (AZs).

Visit the Amazon RDS Management Console to create your first Aurora database instance and start migrating your MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database built on a transactional and strongly-consistent key-value store. It scales horizontally; survives disk, machine, rack, and even datacenter failures with minimal latency disruption and no manual intervention; supports strongly-consistent ACID transactions; and provides a familiar SQL API for structuring, manipulating, and querying data.

CockroachDB is inspired by Google’s Spanner and F1 technologies, and it’s completely open source.

Cockroach

Sample Customers

Dow Jones, Arizona State University, Verizon, Capital One, United Nations, Nielsen, Autodesk, Fanduel

Baidu, Kindred, Tierion, Heroic Labs, Gorgias

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Aurora vs. CockroachDB

July 2025

Free Report: Amazon Aurora vs. CockroachDB

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