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 #1 with an average rating of 8.2, while Google is ranked #8 with an average rating of 9.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 19.1% mindshare in DS, compared to Google’s 5.5% 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 57 Amazon RDS reviews

3,520 Views
3,485 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Google Cloud Spanner

Read 5 Google Cloud Spanner reviews

890 Views
819 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: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud Spanner

September 2025

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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)

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Google Cloud Spanner

Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)

8th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon RDS is 19.1%, down from 25.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Cloud Spanner is 5.5%, up from 3.8% 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	19.1%
Google Cloud Spanner	5.5%
Other	75.4%

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

Featured Reviews

Samuel Ebite

AICE Graduate at alx_africa

Ensure high availability with robust encryption and seamless backups

Amazon RDS provides data encryption using services like KMS, crucial for securing high-sensitive data and meeting compliance requirements such as HIPAA or PCI DSS. The best practices we've employed with RDS help design a well-architected framework, encompassing security, encryption, scalability with multi-availability zone deployment, and operational excellence with automated backups. RDS features, such as reserved instances, storage auto-scaling, monitoring with technologies like CloudWatch, and proxies, contribute to cost optimization. The solution enhances security with IAM authentication and offers high availability to end users.

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Saurav Krishna

Data Engineering and AI Intern at .3Lines Venture Capital

A stable but expensive solution that needs to look into the horizontal scaling feature

The tool needs to improve horizontal scaling. I have been using the product for a year. Google Cloud Spanner is stable. My company has 15-20 users for the product. The tool's deployment is easy. The solution is expensive. You need to look at the data set and company requirements. I rate…

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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 fulfills PCI requirements, which is a valuable feature for us."

"The product is very, very easy to use."

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

"It is stable, scalable, and easy to deploy."

"The solution has unique features like backup and recovery, and snapshots. It upgrades automatically. The solution offers easy analytics concerning performance metrics. Its reliability and scalability are very good. The tool's most valuable features are disaster recovery, high availability and scalability."

"Relational databases excel in extensive normalization, eliminating data redundancy and efficiently structuring tables which leads to a clear and efficient relationship between tables using primary keys."

"The most valuable feature is that it is a fully managed database, where they handle most of the administrative tasks and leaves the users more time to concentrate on business."

"The provisioning is much faster. You don't have to prepare hardware or install software. You just need to create an instance and you have a database."

More Amazon RDS pros

"It is a very scalable solution."

"Google Cloud Spanner is stable."

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

"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."

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

Cons

"I would like to see improvements in the tool's automatic restart."

"The solution's connectivity and response logs could be improved."

"A lot of the features are disabled by default. The solution should enable more features. I understand this could cause challenges to management for many clients using RDS, however."

"You can only get access from the sales support. That means if you want to buy something or renew your subscription or upgrade, all these services are easily available. Yet, if you would like to get some technical support, you have to pay for it. You have to pay for an additional subscription."

"The solution could improve by adding a sandbox environment and more security."

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

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

"In the next release, it would be great to have access to core parameters to improve or tweak the performance."

More Amazon RDS cons

"The tool lacks to offer AI features."

"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."

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

"The cost can be a bit high."

"The tool needs to improve horizontal scaling."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"if you don't know how to optimize and use your tool properly, the cost might hurt you."

"Amazon RDS is not a very expensive solution."

"It is less expensive than SQL Server. We pay based on the usage on a monthly basis."

"The solution is fairly priced."

"The price of Amazon RDS is reasonable."

"The product is expensive."

"We are paying for a service license."

"The solution's price is good."

More Amazon RDS pricing and cost advice

"It is expensive."

"Google Cloud Spanner is an expensive solution."

"The solution is expensive."

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

University

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	22
Midsize Enterprise	14
Large Enterprise	23

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?

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 cluster...

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 do you like most about Google Cloud Spanner?

Google Cloud Spanner is stable.

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...

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Comparisons

MongoDB Atlas vs Amazon RDS

Compared 21% of the time

Google Cloud SQL vs Amazon RDS

Compared 17% of the time

Oracle Database as a Service vs Amazon RDS

Compared 15% of the time

Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs Amazon RDS

Compared 13% of the time

Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer vs Amazon RDS

Compared 6% of the time

More Amazon RDS Competitors

MongoDB Atlas vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 19% of the time

SingleStore vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 10% of the time

Redis vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 9% of the time

Oracle Database as a Service vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 9% of the time

Google Cloud SQL vs Google Cloud Spanner

Compared 7% of the time

More Google Cloud Spanner Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS

October 2025

Download Amazon RDS product report

Buyer's Guide

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

September 2025

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

September 2025

Free Report: Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud Spanner

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