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Amazon RDS vs Google Cloud Spanner comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 12, 2024

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
58
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
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon RDS is 11.9%, down from 24.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Cloud Spanner is 7.9%, up from 4.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Database as a Service (DBaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon RDS11.9%
Google Cloud Spanner7.9%
Other80.2%
Database as a Service (DBaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

BS
AWS Architect at Virtual University
Customer support and automated backups offer reliability while ease of deployment enhances user experience
The features of Amazon RDS that I have found most valuable include web and mobile applications, enterprise applications, data warehousing and analytics, and software as a service platforms, along with dev testing environments, disaster recoveries, and backups. The mobile app backend and development environment is also the best feature for database management for my customers. Database management is effective in Amazon RDS because it offers automated backups, high availability, read replicas, and support from multiple database engineers, while also providing security, monitoring and metrics, scalability. We are using snapshots and database migrations as well as performance optimization. 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 performance was good and availability helped with reducing downtime.
LJ
System Architect at UST Global España
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The biggest advantage of Amazon RDS, which is basically an AWS service, is that you can customize it."
"For me, RDS is a great solution. I like that Amazon RDS is a very simple solution to implement and to start using."
"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."
"RDS is stable, a cloud solution is always stable, and RDS servers are solid."
"It handles large-scale data migrations perfectly. Amazon RDS's performance is quite good. Charges are incurred after you utilize the service"
"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."
"I use Amazon RDS to store and manage data securely. It helps me retrieve information and gain insights from the data that comes in for my business or specific applications."
"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 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."
"Google Cloud Spanner is stable."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"The application deployment in the cloud is the best feature of the infrastructure."
"It is a very scalable solution."
"We can scale the solution if we need to."
 

Cons

"It would be helpful if they made it easier to migrate from an existing on-premises solution to the cloud-based service."
"Currently, we are using Fargate. Instead of that, we are planning to use EC2 instances, but we are facing some problems, and we are unable to enable NAT gateway for Elastic Load Balancer. When we enable auto-scaling, the instance count increases, and we get IP addresses dynamically. We need to whitelist the IPs of these instances, but there is no option to whitelist those IPs in Amazon RDS. We need one static IP that we can assign to ELB so that we can whitelist this IP."
"AWS support is decent, but it's not as good as before. Sometimes, we get junior staff who are unable to answer our questions. It also depends on the support team you get. Support based in Europe and Australia is better than US support. For example, European support is quick to deliver the right answer. US support handles routine maintenance issues, and it's mostly junior staff who don't know the product well."
"RDS doesn't have shell access."
"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."
"It would be better if it integrated seamlessly with Microsoft products."
"Technical support could be better."
"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 cost can be a bit high."
"The tool lacks to offer AI features."
"The tool needs to improve horizontal scaling."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing fees are paid on an annual basis."
"The price could be better."
"Amazon RDS could improve by reducing the price."
"The pricing of RDS is a little bit high compared to Microsoft... However, it is a good price compared to other solutions."
"The price of Amazon RDS is reasonable."
"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 cost is manageable because you can see the expense associated with each instance and utilize tools for tagging and cost control."
"I would rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten."
"The solution is expensive."
"Price-wise, I heard that Google Cloud Spanner is on the higher side."
"Google Cloud Spanner is an expensive solution."
"It is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
University
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
24%
Healthcare Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Media Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise16
Large Enterprise24
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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 ...
What is your primary use case for Amazon RDS?
I am a Solutions Architect, so I design solutions for our clients. Prior to this role, I was an implementation engineer, so I also implement solutions for our customers.
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...
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...
What needs improvement with Google Cloud Spanner?
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 ...
 

Also Known As

RDS
Google Spanner
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Edmodo
Streak, Optiva, Mixpanel
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud Spanner and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
896,099 professionals have used our research since 2012.