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Amazon Aurora vs MariaDB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 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 Aurora
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
7th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
MariaDB
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
59
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of Amazon Aurora is 3.0%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of MariaDB is 6.6%, down from 9.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Relational Databases Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Adnan Shafiq - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
KumarManish - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to deploy, cost-effective, and integrates seamlessly with other products
We had planned for an RDBMS version and not NoSQL. We use MariaDB Galera Cluster. It's a good product. It is cheap, scalable, performs well, and is efficient. We use GCP’s BigQuery for machine learning. We must follow the best practices of the tool. We missed some best practices like the storage engine and InnoDB. It was very difficult to identify why we were having performance issues. Then, we realized that some of our tables were still on MyISAM, the default storage engine. When we switched it back to the InnoDB, it was very smooth. InnoDB is the recommended one. We must follow the best practices given in the documentation during the initial setup. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"One of the standout features of Amazon Aurora is that we do not need to maintain disaster recovery or manage availability zones."
"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."
"We had better control over the parameters that we could tweak in terms of intermediate storage and better indexing capabilities."
"The solution’s scalability is good since we don’t need to take a maintenance window during unpredictable workloads. I like the solution’s behind-the-scenes happenings. It is a great feature."
"One of the most valuable features is storage scaling."
"My overall experience with Amazon Aurora is very positive. I rate it ten out of ten for its reliability and efficiency."
"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."
"MariaDB has a straightforward initial setup with easy-to-understand documentation."
"MariaDB is a user-friendly solution. Performance wise, it's better than SQL. With SQL, I would need to write a number of queries. In contrast, MariaDB is light."
"The initial setup of MariaDB is simple enough."
"It is a stable solution."
"The solution runs very quickly. It's not slow at all."
"There is the need for a robust IDE for MongoDB. The existing PHP admin console doesn't meet the client's requirements effectively."
"Easy to use and available in most environments."
"We like the easy way that we can collect data from other databases."
 

Cons

"I would like to see more AI-related features in future releases."
"It would have been helpful if they had provided some benchmarking numbers."
"One of the most valuable features is storage scaling."
"The pricing could improve. It should be reduced."
"There are tuning challenges."
"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."
"In Oracle, tools like Veridata allow for comparing databases and certifying data accuracy, even offering repair capabilities, which are missing in Aurora. There should be a similar comparison tool in Aurora."
"Room for improvement might be in the UI, integrations, or data working capabilities for better user experience."
"It does not have tools for debugging procedures and functions."
"Lacks time series data and additional driving support would be helpful."
"Data continuity could be improved."
"The only potential area for improvement could be the pricing model, which might benefit from being more flexible or a bit cheaper."
"An improvement would be scaling it up to the levels of Oracle, especially when it comes to resilience, so that we can do higher transactions for two databases or power our operation."
"The maintenance and performance could be a bit better."
"MariaDB could be improved by adding more automation."
"MariaDB doesn't handle long or complex SQL queries quite as well as Oracle Database."
 

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 an expensive solution."
"There is no need to buy a license for the product. We can pay as per the use case."
"The price could be lower compared to its competitors."
"It is quite expensive."
"I rate the product's price a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price, and ten is high price since there are some support costs involved, even though it isn't an open-source solution."
"The product is not expensive."
"MariaDB is open-source and self-hosted."
"There is a monthly subscription to use MariaDB."
"It is an open-source solution."
"The licensing cost is approximately $4000.00 per year and the licensing is based on the software and the number of posts that you make."
"The price could be less expensive."
"The price of this solution represents a very good compromise between the cost and what it offers."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
6%
Insurance Company
5%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

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.
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.
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...
What do you like most about MariaDB?
The integration with other products is seamless.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for MariaDB?
I have found the price of commercial MariaDB to be pretty steep, although not as high as Oracle. Customers often prefer the Community Edition because it's free.
What needs improvement with MariaDB?
The only potential area for improvement could be the pricing model, which might benefit from being more flexible or a bit cheaper.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Dow Jones, Arizona State University, Verizon, Capital One, United Nations, Nielsen, Autodesk, Fanduel
Google, Wikipedia, Tencent, Verizon, DBS Bank, Deutsche Bank, Telefónica, Huatai Securities
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Aurora vs. MariaDB and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.