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Amazon Aurora vs Microsoft Azure HorizonDB comparison

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Executive Summary

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
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Database Management Systems (DBMS) (6th)
Microsoft Azure HorizonDB
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
30th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Database as a Service (DBaaS) (20th)
 

Featured Reviews

SivashankarRajaram - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Cloud database has delivered high performance and cost savings for data recovery and growth
Amazon can make better access levels and reduce costs for Amazon Aurora. A cost reduction would support multiple teams to adopt this solution since the cost is currently higher. Comparatively, we have the feature of scaling and everything we need. If you launch PostgreSQL on-premises, you need to have a separate DBA for maintenance and everything. If Amazon reduces the cost of Amazon Aurora, it would support large team adoption. A great feature to see in the next version of Amazon Aurora would be improvements in vectorization. In our PostgreSQL, we have pg_vector that helps with vectorizing many of the tables and that is used for data science projects. If Amazon improves this vectorization, it would be much more useful for data science and AI projects.
Alex Park - PeerSpot reviewer
AVP - Business Analysis - FX Options at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Data platform has transformed analytics and now provides seamless storage and insight on user behavior
Microsoft Azure HorizonDB scales perfectly. It automatically scales whenever there is a load on the application. I have configured the deployment files on my projects, and the database is able to handle automatic scaling by itself, so I do not have to put much attention on that aspect. It scales down automatically as well. I monitored the scaling and scaling out one or two times during the initial stage when I was first including this database in my project. After the first and second times, I checked only the logs for automatic scaling and scaling out. I have not encountered any issue on the scaling side, and it provides consistent performance for both scaling and scaling out.

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."
"My overall experience with Amazon Aurora is very positive. I rate it ten out of ten for its reliability and efficiency."
"We have seen an increase in customer satisfaction and availability with the switch from RDS to Aurora."
"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."
"Aurora's features that I find the most beneficial include its database backup strategy, performance options, and input-output operations."
"They now offer some really good scaling and limitless versions that are available to me, which I find very impressive."
"Aurora is a key pillar for us, offering performance and availability."
"The migration process to Amazon Aurora is the best part; it's one of its key strengths, as we hardly had any hiccups during migration, which was very smooth and pretty straightforward given our data was mostly in English."
"Using Microsoft Azure HorizonDB provides better scalability and performance in terms of database administration."
"Since we are in the proof of concept phase, we have noticed some early improvements and potential benefits that stand out so far in terms of speed, reliability, and ease of management."
"Microsoft Azure HorizonDB has positively impacted my organization by reducing latency issues, improving performance, and providing a good recovery time."
"I appreciate the features that Microsoft Azure HorizonDB provides, particularly the seamless transformation of the database, data collection, and database access along with the analytics features."
 

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."
"Room for improvement might be in the UI, integrations, or data working capabilities for better user experience."
"AWS RDS doesn't provide an option to apply one-off patches, which can be critical for business due to unexpected product bugs."
"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."
"Sometimes mistakes can be easily made, and people can waste money by mistake if they do not know what they are doing."
"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."
"I don't use Amazon Aurora's global database feature; I just use the local feature."
"There are tuning challenges. The same methods used for tuning in RDS might not work in Aurora, and some functionalities available in MySQL may not be compatible with Aurora."
"One area I can identify for improvement is query performance during peak traffic situations."
"So far, I have not seen any return on investment from Microsoft Azure HorizonDB in terms of cost."
"Regarding needed improvements, I feel that we need more documentation on Microsoft Azure HorizonDB."
"I want to say that the costing of Microsoft Azure HorizonDB is too high and should be less."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, with ten being expensive."
"It is an expensive solution."
"The tool’s pricing depends on the instance type. For cost optimization purposes, we use the result instance category."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
University
12%
Healthcare Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

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. ...
What needs improvement with Amazon Aurora?
Amazon can make better access levels and reduce costs for Amazon Aurora. A cost reduction would support multiple teams to adopt this solution since the cost is currently higher. Comparatively, we h...
What is your primary use case for Amazon Aurora?
Amazon Aurora is a service provided by AWS, and we received support from AWS for our implementation. The direction we are moving toward is specifically Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure HorizonDB?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Microsoft Azure HorizonDB is that the pricing is good.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure HorizonDB?
Improvements for Microsoft Azure HorizonDB mean that we still have not gotten actual usage of real issues. We just started the proof of concept phase, so we might discover what the exact real issue...
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Azure HorizonDB?
My main use case for Microsoft Azure HorizonDB is that we were experiencing performance issues in Azure PostgreSQL flexible server, so we wanted to eliminate those issues and started using Microsof...
 

Comparisons

No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Dow Jones, Arizona State University, Verizon, Capital One, United Nations, Nielsen, Autodesk, Fanduel
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Aurora vs. Microsoft Azure HorizonDB and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
914,322 professionals have used our research since 2012.