Amazon RDS vs Google Cloud Spanner comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google are both solutions in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.4, while Google is ranked #8 with an average rating of 10.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 12.6% mindshare in DS, compared to Google’s 7.8% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Google users who would recommend it.

Amazon RDS

Read 58 Amazon RDS reviews

3,802 Views
3,650 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Google Cloud Spanner

Read 5 Google Cloud Spanner reviews

1,281 Views
1,217 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon RDS

Google Cloud Spanner

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 12, 2024

Amazon RDS and Google Cloud Spanner are two leading database management solutions, each with distinctive strengths. Amazon RDS is noted for its ease of use and automated management, while Google Cloud Spanner offers superior scalability and global distribution.

Features: Amazon RDS is praised for its ease of use, automated backups, and support for multiple database engines. Google Cloud Spanner stands out for its horizontal scalability, global distribution, and strong consistency.

Room for Improvement: Amazon RDS users often request better performance monitoring tools, more transparent pricing, and enhanced tooling features. Google Cloud Spanner users desire improved compatibility with other database systems, enhanced user documentation, and an easier initial setup process.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon RDS users find its deployment process straightforward and quick but some report that customer service response times are lacking. Google Cloud Spanner deployment is noted for its complexity due to sophisticated configurations, yet customer service is often highlighted as responsive and helpful.

Pricing and ROI: Users report that Amazon RDS generally offers lower setup costs and a quick return on investment, while Google Cloud Spanner has higher initial costs but provides significant value for large-scale deployments due to its advanced features.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud Spanner Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud Spanner

March 2026

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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 RDS

Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Relational Databases Tools (9th)

Google Cloud Spanner

Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)

8th

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon RDS is 12.6%, down from 25.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Cloud Spanner is 7.8%, up from 4.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Database as a Service (DBaaS) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Amazon RDS	12.6%
Google Cloud Spanner	7.8%
Other	79.6%

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

Featured Reviews

reviewer2592669

Director Software Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

Positive experiences with database services, with minor room for feature enhancements observed

I don't really see any disadvantages of Amazon RDS. With Oracle, I think AWS doesn't provide the RAC stability. If you have Oracle installed in your own data centers, you can set up various clusters and we can set up the RACs, but in Amazon RDS, we cannot have the RAC feature of Oracle. They could add that feature. Amazon RDS has limitations regarding RAC. If we talk about installing Oracle in RDS, we cannot have the RAC, but if you deploy Oracle on GCP, then there is probably the RAC feature available. I observed that around two or three years back, but I'm not sure whether they have added the RAC feature in AWS. Amazon RDS is expensive compared to GCP. GCP also has the same features, and although it is quite extensive and feature-rich, I see Amazon RDS as slightly expensive compared to other clouds.

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LijomonJose

System Architect at UST Global EspaÃ±a

Offers good performance to users

The tool lacks to offer AI features. In the future, I would like the product to offer AI features to users. Nowadays, we are creating small acronyms for our SQL Server. We put some templates. If I just put your name and stop it, the entire cloud can be explored, but such features are not there in Google Cloud Spanner. As a layman rather than a developer, if I create a tool or a procedure. If I write a procedure and then when you describe a procedure, a dummy procedure will be written for you, and it will be available for you as a template in SQL Server, but such kind features are not there in Google Cloud Spanner.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Amazon RDS is very easy to use."

"It makes it easy to administer the database. It helps to scale your database by providing Read Replicas, which reduce transaction time. It is highly available and durable which helps in disaster recovery and management."

"It is very easy to set up initially."

"Amazon RDS is lightweight and flexible."

"It handles large-scale data migrations perfectly. Amazon RDS's performance is quite good. Charges are incurred after you utilize the service"

"The impact of Amazon RDS scalability and backup has been positive, with good vertical scaling, scale up and down, horizontal scaling, and storage scaling."

"The initial setup is straightforward, and technical support is good."

"The most valuable feature of Amazon RDS is its performance."

More Amazon RDS pros

"Google Cloud Spanner is stable."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is its scalability. Scalability comes with two options, among which Google Cloud Spanner can scale horizontally, compared to other relational databases that scale vertically."

"It is a very scalable solution."

"The application deployment in the cloud is the best feature of the infrastructure."

"We can scale the solution if we need to."

Cons

"In the next release, it would be great to see RDS provide connection pooling out of the box."

"As a customer of Amazon RDS, you don't have super-user privileges, and that is the only drawback where improvements are required."

"There are some use cases that might come up where we would want to understand the performance aspects better."

"Amazon has a policy of automatically restarting the server every seven days."

"Amazon cannot guarantee the stability of some extensions, and there is a need for different extensions to meet PCI requirements."

"The Performance Monitor they have is a little clanky, at least in regards to the UI."

"Currently, speaking of Microsoft SQL on RDS, you don't have a full option to be able to use it directly on RDS. So, it needs improvement."

"The technical support from Amazon could improve. I would rate them a six out of ten as they do not fully meet my expectations."

More Amazon RDS cons

"The cost can be a bit high."

"I want to improve the deployment of cameras and surveillance infrastructure."

"Google came up with something called Cloud Spanner Emulator, which fails to work like the real product if I want to develop some code and run a database locally on my machine."

"The tool lacks to offer AI features."

"The tool needs to improve horizontal scaling."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is expensive."

"In my case, MySQL is free, and if there are any costs, then it is much less than other solutions since all such things usually come bundled with the hardware."

"The solution is fairly priced."

"The solution’s pricing could be cheaper."

"The cost is manageable because you can see the expense associated with each instance and utilize tools for tagging and cost control."

"The prices for different regions are different."

"By using a combination of Reserve Instances and On-Demand pricing, you can reduce the cost."

"The solution's pricing needs improvement."

More Amazon RDS pricing and cost advice

"Price-wise, I heard that Google Cloud Spanner is on the higher side."

"It is expensive."

"The solution is expensive."

"Google Cloud Spanner is an expensive solution."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

University

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

12%

Healthcare Company

Media Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	22
Midsize Enterprise	16
Large Enterprise	22

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon RDS?

The product's installation phase is easy.

See all answers

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

The pricing for Amazon RDS is reasonable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon RDS?

Currently, I cannot think of any major improvements. Perhaps more platforms in terms of database engine versions would be beneficial. Right now, Amazon RDS supports MySQL and PostgreSQL, but there ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Google Cloud Spanner?

Google Cloud Spanner has all the features of a traditional relational database, including schemas, SQL queries, ACID transactions, and provides excellent integration and monitoring tools as well as...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Cloud Spanner?

Price-wise, I heard that Google Cloud Spanner is on the higher side. I am not sure if this is a rumor or if it's fake news, but I believe that having BigQuery and GCP together could be a little cos...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Google Cloud Spanner?

See all answers

Comparisons

MongoDB Atlas vs Amazon RDS

Compared 18% of the time

Google Cloud SQL vs Amazon RDS

Compared 13% of the time

Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs Amazon RDS

Compared 12% of the time

Oracle Database as a Service vs Amazon RDS

Compared 9% of the time

IBM Db2 on Cloud vs Amazon RDS

Compared 4% of the time

More Amazon RDS Competitors

Oracle Database as a Service vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 21% of the time

Yugabyte Platform vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 16% of the time

MongoDB Atlas vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 13% of the time

Yugabyte Cloud vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 10% of the time

Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 6% of the time

More Google Cloud Spanner Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS

February 2026

Download Amazon RDS product report

Buyer's Guide

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

February 2026

Download Google Cloud Spanner product report

Also Known As

RDS

Google Spanner

Overview

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient, resizeable capacity for an industry-standard relational database and manages common database administration tasks.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Cloud Spanner is the first and only relational database service that is both strongly consistent and horizontally scalable. With Cloud Spanner you enjoy all the traditional benefits of a relational database: ACID transactions, relational schemas (and schema changes without downtime), SQL queries, high performance, and high availability. But unlike any other relational database service, Cloud Spanner scales horizontally, to hundreds or thousands of servers, so it can handle the highest of transactional workloads. With automatic scaling, synchronous data replication, and node redundancy, Cloud Spanner delivers up to 99.999% (five 9s) of availability for your mission critical applications. In fact, Google’s internal Spanner service has been handling millions of queries per second from many Google services for years.

Google

Sample Customers

Edmodo

Streak, Optiva, Mixpanel

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud Spanner

March 2026

Free Report: Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud Spanner

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud Spanner and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.

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