Amazon Neptune vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft are both solutions in the Managed NoSQL Databases category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.3, while Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.3. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 7.2% mindshare in MND, compared to Microsoft’s 16.4% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Amazon Neptune

Read 4 Amazon Neptune reviews

769 Views
769 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Read 109 Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB reviews

9,934 Views
3,676 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Amazon Neptune

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 19, 2025

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB and Amazon Neptune compete in the database services category. Azure Cosmos DB seems to have the upper hand in global distribution and multi-model support, whereas Amazon Neptune shines in graph database functionality with its robust feature set.

Features: Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB offers dynamic global distribution, multi-model support across SQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Graph API, and automatic indexing for seamless data organization. Amazon Neptune specializes in graph database capabilities, supporting complex graph models like Property Graph and RDF/SPARQL. Its ability to handle intricate relationships efficiently makes it ideal for graph-oriented applications.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Azure Cosmos DB facilitates easy integration with Azure services, enabling rapid global deployment with minimal configuration efforts. In contrast, Amazon Neptune requires more detailed configuration, benefiting those seeking advanced graph functionality. Azure Cosmos DB provides proactive customer support, while Amazon Neptune offers comprehensive documentation for self-service troubleshooting.

Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB utilizes a dynamic pricing model based on throughput, storage, and data transfer, ensuring predictable costs and potentially delivering better ROI through efficient scalability and reduced operational overhead. Amazon Neptune's pricing depends on instance usage and storage, offering flexibility but potentially resulting in higher costs with extensive usage.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Neptune vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Neptune vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

December 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 880,685 peers since 2012

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

8th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

4.5

Number of Reviews

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

6.9

Number of Reviews

109

Ranking in other categories

Database as a Service (DBaaS) (4th), NoSQL Databases (2nd), Vector Databases (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Managed NoSQL Databases category, the mindshare of Amazon Neptune is 7.2%, down from 15.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 16.4%, down from 17.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Managed NoSQL Databases Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB	16.4%
Amazon Neptune	7.2%
Other	76.4%

Managed NoSQL Databases

Featured Reviews

Reviewer3028812

Back End Developer at Zeta

Multiple graph models and languages support lead to efficient use, yet community growth brings challenges

The onboarding part and documentation where we could ideally use Amazon Neptune is excellent. Amazon Neptune as a product by AWS is exceptional because it supports multiple graph models such as RDF and property graph. It also has support for multiple querying languages such as Gremlin, SparkQL, and OpenCypher. It is very comprehensive in supporting every requirement we had at Zetta. Amazon Neptune's best features include its multiple servers, each supporting different languages such as OpenCypher, SparkQL, and RDF. For the same RDF graph or property graph, we could use multiple languages to query on different servers. This is exceptional because we have one graph DB with two endpoints exposed where we could interact with different languages on the same graph. Additionally, Amazon has a Sagemaker Jupyter Notebook which interacts with the Amazon Neptune database itself, providing a clean UI for representing nodes since the Jupyter Notebook has predefined graph representation capabilities through queries.

Read full review

reviewer2724105

Senior Director of Product Management at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

Provides super sharp latency, excellent availability, and the ability to effectively manage costs across different tenants

For integrating Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB with other Azure products or other products, there are a couple of challenges with the current system. Right now, the vectors are stored as floating-point numbers within the NoSQL document, which makes them inefficiently large. This leads to increased storage space requirements, and searching through a vast number of documents in the vector database becomes quite costly in terms of RUs. While the integration works well, the expense associated with it is relatively high. I would really like to see a reduction in costs for their vector search, as it is currently on the expensive side. The areas for improvement in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB are vector pricing and vector indexing patterns, which are unintuitive and not well described. I would also like to see the parameters of Fleet Spaces made more powerful, as currently, it's somewhat lightweight. I believe they've made those changes intentionally to better understand the cost model. However, we would like to take a more aggressive approach in using it. One of the most frustrating aspects of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB right now is that you can only store one vector per document. Additionally, you must specify the configuration of that vector when you create an instance of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB. Once the database is set up, you can't change the vector configuration, which is incredibly limiting for experimentation. You want the ability to try different settings and see how they perform, as there are numerous use cases for storing more than one vector in a document. While interoperability within the vector database is acceptable—for example, I can search for vectors—I still desire a richer set of configuration options.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Relational databases are never good at identifying patterns in graphs or other similar relationships, whereas Amazon Neptune is."

"Amazon Neptune as a product by AWS is exceptional because it supports multiple graph models such as RDF and property graph, and it also has support for multiple querying languages such as Gremlin, SparkQL, and OpenCypher, making it very comprehensive in supporting every requirement we had at Zetta."

"The initial setup is actually simple."

"What I like about Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is that it's easy to do data ingestion and use the data in different applications. If you talk about business intelligence such as the Power BI tool, it's easy to connect because both are Microsoft products. With Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, it's easy to connect and do data ingestion."

"I would rate Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB a ten out of ten."

"Since it's a managed service, Azure backend handles scalability. From a user's perspective, we don't need to worry about scalability."

"One of the nice features is the ability to auto-scale"

"I like the way you can create and delete records. You pass a JSON, and then it creates a record."

"The best feature about Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is its interface, which is awesome for accessing data."

"The high speed of Azure Cosmos DB compared to other competitors is remarkable."

"Specifically, we are using the MongoDB API, so we leverage it in that way. I like the flexibility that it offers. My team does not have to spend time building out database tables. We can get going fairly quickly with being able to read and write data into a MongoDB collection that is hosted inside Azure Cosmos DB."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pros

Cons

"We had a strict time constraint, and it took many sleepless nights to find information in the documentation."

"In my scenario, the integration wasn't easy because ................in Java."

"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."

"A limitation in Azure Cosmos DB is the 2 MB document size. Developers need more systemic support in chaining multiple documents if more than 2 MB is required."

"Customer service and technical support from Microsoft have been all right. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give them probably a six, maybe a hard seven at most."

"One area for improvement is the ease of writing SQL queries and stored procedures in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB."

"An improvement would be a more robust functionality around updating elements on a document, or some type of procedural updates that don't require pulling the entire document."

"Right now, the vectors are stored as floating-point numbers within the NoSQL document, which makes them inefficiently large. This leads to increased storage space requirements, and searching through a vast number of documents in the vector database becomes quite costly in terms of RUs. While the integration works well, the expense associated with it is relatively high. I would really like to see a reduction in costs for their vector search, as it is currently on the expensive side."

"It would be ideal if we could integrate Cosmos DB with our Databricks. At this point, that's not possible."

"Sometimes, the solution's access request takes time, which should be improved."

"The cost is a concern. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB did not decrease our total cost of ownership. From the standpoint of the old way of doing DBA operations, it did, but our cloud cost increased significantly."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS are on par for pricing and Google has been raising its prices."

"The pricing model of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is a bit complex."

"This cost model is beneficial because it allows for cost control by limiting resource units (RUs), which is ideal. However, for our needs, we can't engage with their minimum pricing, which ranges from 100 to 1,000 RUs. At the bare minimum, we need to use 4,000 RUs for a customer. I would like to find a way to gain some advantages from the lowest tier, particularly the ability to scale down if necessary. It would be helpful to have more flexibility in cost management at the lower end."

"Cosmos DB gave us three accounts for $400. We pay according to the usage."

"It's expensive. I would rate it a seven out of ten for pricing."

"The Cosmos DB pricing model, initially quite complicated, became clear after consulting with Azure Advisor, allowing us to proceed with confidence."

"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is moderately priced, where it is neither expensive nor cheap."

"Cosmos DB is a PaaS, so there are no upfront costs for infrastructure. There are only subscriptions you pay for Azure and things like that. But it's a PaaS, so it's a subscription service. The license isn't perpetual, and the cost might seem expensive on its face, but you have to look at the upkeep for infrastructure and what you're saving."

"There is a licensing fee."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Managed NoSQL Databases solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

880,685 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

13%

University

13%

Insurance Company

Legal Firm

13%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	33
Midsize Enterprise	21
Large Enterprise	58

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Neptune?

The cost aspects were managed by our SRE team who provisioned the instances. The pricing structure is similar to how EC2 instance pricing varies. I was informed that it was somewhat expensive, thou...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon Neptune?

The main issue was the limited community of Amazon Neptune users, which meant everything needed to be explored independently. Although this was adventurous, it required more time investment in the ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Amazon Neptune?

We managed traffic at Zetta, and traffic would be moving between multiple services in our microservice architecture. Because of this setup, we were using Amazon Neptune to understand how many reque...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's pricing model has aligned with my budget expectations because I can tune the RU as I need to, which helps a lot. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's dynamic auto-scale or server...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?

I have not utilized Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB multi-model support for handling diverse data types. I'm not in the position to decide if clients will use Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB or any other datab...

See all answers

Comparisons

Neo4j AuraDB vs Amazon Neptune

Compared 28% of the time

Amazon DynamoDB vs Amazon Neptune

Compared 14% of the time

MongoDB Atlas vs Amazon Neptune

Compared 12% of the time

Amazon DocumentDB vs Amazon Neptune

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon Timestream vs Amazon Neptune

Compared 9% of the time

More Amazon Neptune Competitors

Pinecone vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 7% of the time

Chroma vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 7% of the time

Neo4j Graph Database vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 6% of the time

Amazon DynamoDB vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 6% of the time

Milvus vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 3% of the time

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Neptune

January 2026

Download Amazon Neptune product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

January 2026

Download Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB product report

Also Known As

No data available

Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB

Overview

Amazon Neptune is a fast, reliable, fully managed graph database service that makes it easy to build and run applications that work with highly connected datasets. The core of Amazon Neptune is a purpose-built, high-performance graph database engine optimized for storing billions of relationships and querying the graph with milliseconds latency. Amazon Neptune supports popular graph models Property Graph and W3C's RDF, and their respective query languages Apache TinkerPop Gremlin and SPARQL, allowing you to easily build queries that efficiently navigate highly connected datasets. Neptune powers graph use cases such as recommendation engines, fraud detection, knowledge graphs, drug discovery, and network security.

Amazon Neptune is highly available, with read replicas, point-in-time recovery, continuous backup to Amazon S3, and replication across Availability Zones. Neptune is secure with support for HTTPS encrypted client connections and encryption at rest. Neptune is fully managed, so you no longer need to worry about database management tasks such as hardware provisioning, software patching, setup, configuration, or backups.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB offers scalable, geo-replicated, multi-model support with high performance and low latency. It provides seamless Microsoft service integration, benefiting those needing flexible NoSQL, real-time analytics, and automatic scaling for diverse data types and quick global access.

Azure Cosmos DB is designed to store, manage, and query large volumes of both unstructured and structured data. Its NoSQL capabilities and global distribution are leveraged by organizations to support activities like IoT data management, business intelligence, and backend databases for web and mobile applications. While its robust security measures and availability are strengths, there are areas for improvement such as query complexity, integration with services like Databricks and MongoDB, documentation clarity, and performance issues. Enhancements in real-time analytics, API compatibility, cross-container joins, and indexing capabilities are sought after. Cost management, optimization tools, and better support for local development also require attention, as do improvements in user interface and advanced AI integration.

What are the key features of Azure Cosmos DB?

Scalability: Effortlessly handles scaling for large workloads.
Geo-replication: Provides global data access with low latency.
Multi-model Support: Compatible with diverse data types.
NoSQL Flexibility: Offers a non-relational database experience.
Real-time Analytics: Facilitates data-driven decision-making.
Automation: Simplifies scaling and maintenance processes.

What benefits can users expect from Cosmos DB?

High Performance: Ensures rapid processing and low latency.
Ease of Use: Features a user-friendly interface enhancing deployment speed.
Seamless Integration: Connects effortlessly with Microsoft services.
Security: Offers robust measures to protect data integrity.
Consistent Availability: Ensures continuous access to data worldwide.

Industries use Azure Cosmos DB to support business intelligence and IoT data management, using its capabilities for backend databases in web and mobile applications. The platform's scalability and real-time analytics benefit sectors like finance, healthcare, and retail, where managing diverse datasets efficiently is critical.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Intuit, Pearson, Samsung, Ignition One, Lifeomic, Blackfynn, Paysense

TomTom, KPMG Australia, Bosch, ASOS, Mercedes Benz, NBA, Zero Friction, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Kinectify

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Neptune vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

December 2025

Free Report: Amazon Neptune vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Neptune vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

880,685 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Amazon Neptune vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB report.

See our list of best Managed NoSQL Databases vendors.

We monitor all Managed NoSQL Databases reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.