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Amazon Neptune vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 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 Neptune
Ranking in Managed NoSQL Databases
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB
Ranking in Managed NoSQL Databases
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
78
Ranking in other categories
Database as a Service (DBaaS) (6th), NoSQL Databases (3rd), Vector Databases (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Managed NoSQL Databases category, the mindshare of Amazon Neptune is 16.9%, up from 12.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 17.6%, down from 19.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed NoSQL Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Matthew Spieth - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful pattern identification, price well, and straightforward implementation
Relational databases are never good at identifying patterns in graphs or other similar relationships, whereas Amazon Neptune is. Amazon Neptune is good for identifying fraud and many banks are using it. For example, know that I go to certain places all the time that are connected with nodes and edges, such as gas stations, shops, and Amazon. Since people are creatures of habit, the banks can use those nodes and edges to make a model of where I like to shop and spend money. If they see something pop up that's out of character for me, then they know immediately that it is possible fraud. They can determine this because a purchase I made was somewhere I never go or because of geography.
Bhaskar Bhatt - PeerSpot reviewer
The interface is user-friendly and seamlessly connects with other cloud offerings, making integration with other services easy
Our team has found the vCore index to be one of the most valuable features. We have tokenized and vectorized our entire database and stored this data in MongoDB collections with a vCore index, which works like magic for keyword selection. Additionally, the interface is user-friendly and seamlessly connects with other Azure offerings, making integration with other services easy. The learning curve was short. Our experts understand data well, but they had to build knowledge of the AI stack. It took a little bit of learning. However, it was easy to understand. In a couple of weeks, they could do everything. The vector database is the core feature we use. Our data was not accurate, and we wanted to create a ChatGPT-type functionality where the user could ask a question in plain English like, "Show me the top 10 vegan companies in the US." But the vegan is not tagged as "vegan." It could be "plant-based," so you add that keyword. Then, it's not the end of it. Things are tagged as soya milk," "oat milk," etc. There was no other way to solve our problem with hallucination and deal with a huge volume of structured and unstructured data. The only option is to vectorize. And we looked at several vector databases, but none came close. The vector database integrates seamlessly. When we use the cosine similarity search and retrieve the keywords. These keywords then eventually feed into our SQL query formation. After that, we use OpenAI to summarize everything. It seamlessly integrates with everything.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The initial setup is actually simple."
"Relational databases are never good at identifying patterns in graphs or other similar relationships, whereas Amazon Neptune is."
"The speed is impressive, and integrating our power-up database with Kafka was an improvement."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB offers exceptional stability, boasting a reliability rating of 99.95 percent."
"The features most valuable to us in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB are the auto scale and change feed. These features allow us to do some operations that are not possible with SQL Server."
"Azure Cosmos DB helped improve the quality of our search results."
"The fact that scalability can be achieved by simply configuring availability zones is very attractive."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's most valuable feature is latency."
"The most valuable features of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB include the TTL, the ability to scale up and down as needed, and geo-replication, which comes out of the box."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is its real-time analytics capabilities, which allow for turnaround times in milliseconds. This is crucial for applications like fraud detection."
 

Cons

"Amazon Neptune could improve by spreading more awareness for others to have an understanding of the solution because the technology is fairly new. The developer community and larger community do not understand it yet."
"In my scenario, the integration wasn't easy because ................in Java."
"Better documentation on how to integrate with other components would be helpful because I was struggling with this."
"The solution cannot join two databases like Oracle or SQL Server."
"We would like to see advancements in AI with the ability to benchmark vector search capabilities, ensuring it answers questions accurately. During our initial implementation, we faced challenges with indexing and sorting, which are natively available in other offerings but required specific configurations in Cosmos."
"It would be beneficial if Cosmos supported batch and real-time use cases to make the system more seamless."
"The size of the continuation token in Azure Cosmos DB should be static rather than increasing with more data, as it can lead to application crashes. They should use a static key size."
"The size of the continuation token in Azure Cosmos DB should be static rather than increasing with more data, as it can lead to application crashes."
"In that scenario, two things can be improved."
"The auto-scaling feature adjusts hourly. We have many processes that write stuff in batches, so we must ensure that the load is spread evenly throughout the hour. It would be much easier if it were done by the minute. I'm looking forward to the vector database search that they are adding. It's a pretty cool new feature."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS are on par for pricing and Google has been raising its prices."
"Cosmos DB gave us three accounts for $400. We pay according to the usage."
"For the cloud, we don't pay for the license, but for the on-prem versions, we do pay."
"The cost is the biggest limitation of this solution."
"Cosmos DB is a managed offering, so its cost is understandably higher."
"Cost isn’t a big hurdle for us right now. The solution is not costly."
"Cosmos should be cheaper. We actually intend to stop using it in the near future because the price is too high."
"The RU's use case determines our license fees."
"The tool is not expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
8%
University
6%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Neptune?
When taken as part of the whole AWS contract, it was cheaper, but as a single service, Neptune was more expensive compared to Neo4j.
What needs improvement with Amazon Neptune?
Some improvements could be made by introducing a UI that would clearly show the vertices and connections, which would make it easier to visualize and debug. Additionally, the need for downtime duri...
What is your primary use case for Amazon Neptune?
So, I'm not using it currently, but when I was working with my last organization, which was a gaming company, we used Amazon Neptune for real-time fraud detection. We maintained user data, mobile d...
What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
The initial setup is simple and straightforward. You can set up a Cosmos DB in a day, even configuring things like availability zones around the world.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
Azure Cosmos DB's pricing is competitive, though there is a need for more personalized pricing models to accommodate small applications without incurring high charges. A suggestion is to implement ...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
For streaming platforms, Azure Cosmos DB could improve efficiency in data storage. Indexing can also be better. Enhanced capabilities are necessary to manage increased data amounts more effectively...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Intuit, Pearson, Samsung, Ignition One, Lifeomic, Blackfynn, Paysense
TomTom, KPMG Australia, Bosch, ASOS, Mercedes Benz, NBA, Zero Friction, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Kinectify
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Neptune vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
830,596 professionals have used our research since 2012.