Amazon Aurora vs LocalDB comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft are both solutions in the Relational Databases Tools category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.5, while Microsoft is ranked #14 with an average rating of 10.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 2.8% mindshare in SQL, compared to Microsoft’s 1.8% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Amazon Aurora

Read 20 Amazon Aurora reviews

1,854 Views
1,817 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

LocalDB

Read 6 LocalDB reviews

1,379 Views
1,379 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon Aurora

LocalDB

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

LocalDB and Amazon Aurora are competing in the database management systems category. Amazon Aurora seems to have the upper hand for high-performance applications due to its scalability and advanced features.

Features: LocalDB is a lightweight, easy-to-use setup ideal for smaller projects and individual developers, supporting simple configurations and offering the same client libraries as its larger counterparts. Amazon Aurora shines with high scalability, providing faster performance and maintenance-free capabilities. It offers automated multi-region fault tolerance and seamless integration with other AWS services.

Room for Improvement: LocalDB could benefit from more advanced features and increased scalability options to cater to larger projects. Enhancing its integration with non-Windows environments would also be advantageous. Amazon Aurora can improve by reducing complexity in deployment and offering clearer cost structures. More user-friendly management interfaces could enhance its already robust features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: LocalDB's straightforward deployment with minimal setup makes it ideal for quick projects and easy integration within Windows environments. Amazon Aurora, although more complex, offers a detailed deployment experience via AWS, supported by thorough documentation and extensive customer service. Its integration with AWS services facilitates efficient cloud operations.

Pricing and ROI: LocalDB offers a cost-effective solution with minimal setup expenses, serving individual developers and small businesses where high performance is less critical. Meanwhile, Amazon Aurora, despite higher costs, ensures significant ROI through reduced downtime and enhanced operational efficiency. Its pricing caters to organizations investing in scalable infrastructure with long-term benefits in mind.

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

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Aurora vs. LocalDB

September 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

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

LocalDB

Ranking in Relational Databases Tools

14th

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of Amazon Aurora is 2.8%, down from 4.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of LocalDB is 1.8%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Relational Databases Tools Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Amazon Aurora	2.8%
LocalDB	1.8%
Other	95.4%

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 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, 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. This makes Amazon Aurora a compelling choice for my organization.

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Srini-Dhanaraj

Founder & CEO at imfine.club

The database always has structured data, like rows, columns, and bases

LocalDB is an excellent solution for learners, beginners, and projects of negligible size; it is very good. Any startup can use a local database to start. Once they grow beyond its limits, they can migrate to a MS SQL server that's also available on-premises. I rate it ten out of ten.

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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

"My overall experience with Amazon Aurora is very positive. I rate it ten out of ten for its reliability and efficiency."

"Amazon Aurora's best features are about scaling up and scaling down, which is perfect."

"The most valuable features of Amazon Aurora include the global instance with the global writer endpoint, which allows failovers and instance switches without requiring changes in my code, thanks to the default global Route 53 endpoint."

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

"Amazon Aurora is built on community databases and AWS has added additional features to it, allowing customers to have enterprise-level features at a lower cost."

"Aurora is a key pillar for us, offering performance and availability."

"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."

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

More Amazon Aurora pros

"The solution is fast."

"The initial setup is very straightforward. The guidelines are very easy to follow. Maintenance is very easy and requires very little manpower."

"LocalDB is an excellent solution for learners, beginners, and projects of negligible size; it is very good."

"The initial setup was simple."

"The most valuable feature of LocalDBis the connection between the application and DB."

Cons

"There is improvement needed to have more developer focus. Additionally, it would be helpful to have a stand-alone solution outside of Amazon. Amazon has a tendency to favor developing web-based clients, which may not always provide the fastest or most responsive solution as desired."

"Amazon Aurora should upgrade its base PostgreSQL versions more frequently and offer all PostgreSQL extensions."

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

"I would like to see more AI-related features in future releases."

"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."

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

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

"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."

More Amazon Aurora cons

"It is only for a small amount of data. Local DB is made for the purpose of small-volume optics."

"The ALM features can be improved, but the database by itself is reliable."

"The solution needs to create a management tool. Right now, the solution has tools for creating a local installation, but it's too simplistic. We need something that's a bit more complex so that we can extend the tools with our scripts."

"The internal connection features of LocalDB could improve."

"The initial setup is complex and requires a skilled person."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"It is quite expensive."

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

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

"It is an expensive solution."

"The licensing cost is too high for LocalDB."

"The fees are fair."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

24%

Computer Software Company

16%

Government

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	13

No data available

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?

The pricing for Amazon Aurora is different from DocumentDB because DocumentDB is cheaper. However, when you manage the administration more closely, you can control costs better with Amazon Aurora. ...

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What needs improvement with Amazon Aurora?

I would like to see some tutorials from Amazon for Aurora because I'm too new to it. I believe Amazon can make more tutorials for the product since there's a lot of reading required, and a short tu...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for LocalDB?

It's free of cost.

See all answers

What needs improvement with LocalDB?

Technically speaking, you don't need to get any updates because it's not online. It's on-premise. So once it is installed, then you get a desktop-grade version. But the purpose of LocalDB is not th...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for LocalDB?

There were multiple systems, some planned, like the mainframe, the gold database, a website, and a manual Excel spreadsheet. These were the various data sources, and we wanted to bring everything i...

See all answers

Comparisons

SQL Server vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 20% of the time

Oracle Database vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 15% of the time

MariaDB vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 8% of the time

Citus Data vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 7% of the time

YugabyteDB vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 6% of the time

More Amazon Aurora Competitors

SQL Server vs LocalDB

Compared 73% of the time

MySQL vs LocalDB

Compared 19% of the time

MariaDB vs LocalDB

Compared 8% of the time

More LocalDB Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Aurora

September 2025

Download Amazon Aurora product report

Buyer's Guide

Relational Databases Tools

August 2025

Download LocalDB 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)

LocalDB is a lightweight version of the SQL Server Express Database Engine that is targeted for program development. LocalDB starts on demand and runs in user mode, so there is no complex configuration.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

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

AstraZeneca, Kienzle Automotive GmbH, Kodak Alaris, Unilever, Floatel International and Kongsberg Maritime, MyHero

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Aurora vs. LocalDB

September 2025

Free Report: Amazon Aurora vs. LocalDB

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