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Amazon Aurora vs SAP SQL Anywhere 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
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Database Management Systems (DBMS) (6th)
SAP SQL Anywhere
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
35th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of Amazon Aurora is 3.2%, up from 2.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP SQL Anywhere is 1.4%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Relational Databases Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon Aurora3.2%
SAP SQL Anywhere1.4%
Other95.4%
Relational Databases Tools
 

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.
Crewmem67 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Consultant at College Notre Dame de Nazareth
Reliable and able to expand but needs to be more secure
It is not as good as a SQL Server. I prefer to work with the SQL Server for Microsoft or Oracle. These are better as there are some comments on SQL Anywhere that makes me feel that I'm blocked. We'd like to have them update to a new version. They should update more often. I find I can't move to a new version without running tests as there are chances of bugs that can get into my system. The initial setup is not simple or straightforward, and it took a while to deploy. It is not as secure as it could be. This is an aspect they need to improve. There needs to be more encryption.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"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."
"Aurora's features that I find the most beneficial include its database backup strategy, performance options, and input-output operations."
"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."
"The main benefits my company receives from Amazon Aurora are performance and cost."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to do multiple-read and single-write. These are the kinds of features that we were interested in, and Aurora takes care of that natively."
"The provision of custom read and write endpoints eliminates the need for managing a separate proxy load balancer."
"We had better control over the parameters that we could tweak in terms of intermediate storage and better indexing capabilities."
"The most valuable features of SAP SQL Anywhere are the ease of use and the user interface is intuitive."
"It's a great product to use if you are already have an integration with SAP's ERP/CRM systems."
"SQL Anywhere is easy and it did not cost as much as SQL Microsoft."
"We've found the solution very reliable overall. It's very fast."
"SAP SQL Anywhere is very helpful."
"The auto-backup replication is a perfect feature. That is the feature I liked the most."
"It works well in general."
 

Cons

"When using the serverless version of Amazon Aurora, I encountered issues such as the inbuilt query editor not being available."
"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."
"There should be constant changes, which can be challenging to keep up with annually."
"The pricing could improve. It should be reduced."
"Amazon can make better access levels and reduce costs for Amazon Aurora."
"While Amazon Aurora meets your current scaling and storage needs, there is room for improvement in cryptography and scalability compared to other databases."
"There are tuning challenges."
"Amazon Aurora should upgrade its base PostgreSQL versions more frequently and offer all PostgreSQL extensions."
"It is not as secure as it could be; there needs to be more encryption and we can find passwords very easily."
"It is not as secure as it could be."
"Performance issues when syncing the MBO packages to the server."
"The interface is not easy in comparison to the SQL Server. It could be more user-friendly."
"A problem we are experiencing now is when doing a backup in SQL 2012 and 14 there's a problem with the license."
"We have had some stability issues with SAP SQL Anywhere, but I am not sure if it is an application or network issue. We sometimes have a large amount of data being queried and it cannot handle it."
"SAP SQL Anywhere needs to incorporate functionalities like SAP S/4HANA."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is quite expensive."
"The price could be lower compared to its competitors."
"It is an expensive solution."
"I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, with ten being expensive."
"The tool’s pricing depends on the instance type. For cost optimization purposes, we use the result instance category."
"There is no need to buy a license for the product. We can pay as per the use case."
"SQL Anywhere cost us about $400."
"SAP SQL Anywhere is affordable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Healthcare Company
11%
University
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
University
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise14
No data available
 

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.
Ask a question
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Also Known As

No data available
Sybase SQL Anywhere
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Dow Jones, Arizona State University, Verizon, Capital One, United Nations, Nielsen, Autodesk, Fanduel
AOK Bundesverband, Surgutneftegas Open Joint Stock Company, Molson Coors Brewing Company, City of Buenos Aires, ASR Group, Citrix, EarlySense, Usha International Limited, Automotive Resources International, Wªrth Group, Takisada-Osaka Co. Ltd., Coelba, RZD Russian Railways, National Basketball Association, TALLY WEiJL
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Aurora vs. SAP SQL Anywhere and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.