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Amazon RDS vs Google Cloud Spanner comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

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
59
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 October 2026, in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon RDS is 12.7%, down from 19.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Cloud Spanner is 7.3%, up from 5.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Database as a Service (DBaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon RDS12.7%
Google Cloud Spanner7.3%
Other80.0%
Database as a Service (DBaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Donny Trijatmiko - PeerSpot reviewer
Dev Ops Engineer at MyRobin.ID
Managed databases have simplified recovery and high availability for AI recruitment workloads
The features of Amazon RDS that I have found most valuable and useful so far are its fully managed service, point-in-time restore, and other serverless features such as snapshots and backups, which have eased my job to manage databases. The automated backups of Amazon RDS help in data recovery by mitigating disaster recovery. I can revert to the nearest time if there is any data corruption or other issues, and this helps tremendously. I assess Amazon RDS's read replica feature for improving application performance as good. For standby nodes in Amazon RDS, I am using them for high failover, and so far it has been performing well. I have used Amazon RDS's Multi-AZ deployments, and it helps enhance data availability by providing high failover. It enhances high availability for my application as well.
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

"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten...Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"With RDS, everything is turnkey and always available."
"One of the most valuable features is that it is serverless, so we don't have to worry about scaling."
"It's a fully managed database, so that makes our life easier from the operational standpoint. That is the key, basically."
"The solution's customer service is excellent."
"The solution’s scalability, usability, and availability are valuable to us."
"The product is very, very easy to use."
"I appreciate how Amazon RDS allows me to choose the kind of database I want."
"It is a very scalable solution."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"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 application deployment in the cloud is the best feature of the infrastructure."
"We can scale the solution if we need to."
 

Cons

"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."
"Amazon RDS should have a more user-friendly graphical user interface and include better database management options."
"In the next release, it would be great to see RDS provide connection pooling out of the box."
"With my limited experience, I have noticed that documentation management could be improved. It could be better."
"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."
"Amazon RDS could improve by having more sophisticated. I use other solutions that have better technology for more difficult tasks."
"Some of the features will not be there. For example, some on-premises things we want to set up will not be supported there. There are some challenges that they are fixing."
"If we do not keep track of our costs, we might face some problems."
"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 tool lacks to offer AI features."
"The tool needs to improve horizontal scaling."
"The cost can be a bit high."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"if you don't know how to optimize and use your tool properly, the cost might hurt you."
"Amazon RDS could improve by reducing the price."
"The price of Amazon RDS is reasonable."
"Amazon RDS is not a very expensive solution."
"The platform pricing is on the higher side, but given its capabilities and ease of use, it remains competitive."
"I would rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten."
"The cost of using this solution is similar to that of having your own data center."
"Licensing fees are paid on an annual basis."
"Price-wise, I heard that Google Cloud Spanner is on the higher side."
"The solution is expensive."
"It is expensive."
"Google Cloud Spanner is an expensive solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
24%
Healthcare Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business23
Midsize Enterprise16
Large Enterprise24
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon RDS?
I think Amazon RDS can be improved or enhanced if it can be implemented with other monitoring tools such as Percona. Currently, I am trying to add Percona monitoring for monitoring in addition to i...
What is your primary use case for Amazon RDS?
Amazon RDS is typically used for AI applications. I am developing it for an AI recruitment agent and for collecting data for HRIS, Software as a Service for a workforce as a service, and storing data.
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...
 

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: September 2026.
916,771 professionals have used our research since 2012.