Amazon RDS vs Google Cloud SQL 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 #6 with an average rating of 7.8. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 14.8% mindshare in DS, compared to Google’s 8.5% 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 58 Amazon RDS reviews

3,594 Views
3,486 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Google Cloud SQL

Read 23 Google Cloud SQL reviews

1,988 Views
1,968 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon RDS

Google Cloud SQL

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 2, 2025

Amazon RDS and Google Cloud SQL are competitive products in the database as a service category. Amazon RDS appears to have the upper hand with robust features and reliability, while Google Cloud SQL excels in cost efficiency and ease of management.

Features: Amazon RDS offers support for a wide range of databases, automated management, and high availability, enhancing microservices architecture integration. It also provides scalability and performance optimization across multiple engines. Google Cloud SQL ensures robust data safety with redundancy options and offers automated scaling, minimizing operational concerns. It focuses on flexible customization potential but covers fewer on-premises enterprise features than RDS.

Room for Improvement: Amazon RDS users encounter migration challenges and limited shell access, hindering deep database management. Some features could be enabled by default for user convenience. Google Cloud SQL requires enhancement in supporting high I/O operations and improving documentation clarity. Better integration and analytics capabilities would strengthen its competitive position.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both Amazon RDS and Google Cloud SQL offer flexible deployment, accommodating public and hybrid cloud environments. Google Cloud SQL is notable for its user-friendly interface, while Amazon RDS receives mixed feedback on customer support quality, necessitating improvement in response times and support quality. Both services provide substantial documentation, although RDS charges additional support fees unless on premium plans.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon RDS is regarded as expensive but valuable, with potential ROI from reduced DBA workloads. Careful resource provisioning aids in managing costs. Google Cloud SQL is typically more affordable, aligning with industry standards, though additional costs arise from backup and replication requirements. Its predictable pricing model often leads to quicker ROI, aided by reduced management resource expenses.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud SQL Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud SQL

December 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)

2nd

Ranking in Relational Databases Tools

9th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Google Cloud SQL

Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)

6th

Ranking in Relational Databases Tools

19th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Database Management Systems (DBMS) (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon RDS is 14.8%, down from 25.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Cloud SQL is 8.5%, down from 16.8% 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	14.8%
Google Cloud SQL	8.5%
Other	76.7%

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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Victor Danso

Database Engineer at Springer Nature

Migration to cloud eases management but needs better support for high I/O operations

Google Cloud SQL needs to improve its support for high-end I/O operations. On-prem systems with high I/O capabilities perform better, as Google Cloud SQL takes more time to handle the same tasks. There is also difficulty in changing the time zone after the database is set up. Moreover, some features available in MSSQL on-prem are missing on Google Cloud SQL, affecting migration potential.

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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 gives us the ability to select as many tools, replicas, regions, and zones as we want."

"It offers an easy-to-use interface that allows me to monitor instances and update necessary features conveniently."

"The most valuable aspect of Amazon RDS is it is on the cloud."

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

"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's a fully managed database, so that makes our life easier from the operational standpoint. That is the key, basically."

"The scalability is the best, and I have no issues with the ability to scale."

"I found it to be a stable solution."

More Amazon RDS pros

"The most valuable features are that it's easy to use, simple, and user-friendly."

"The setup was straightforward. Just a couple of clicks, and we were done."

"Google Cloud SQL enhances our AI-driven projects by providing features like query optimization and scalability for efficiently processing large datasets."

"It is not the cool features that I find valuable, it is the stability of Google Cloud Platform."

"Google Cloud SQL is very easy to use and easy to set up; it brings the benefits of being simple to perform queries, store data that I needed to store, and extract data when I needed to extract it quite quickly, without having to set up a full database and queries around it."

"The deployment model allows for significant control and flexibility."

"I found its storage and security to be the most valuable. It was a good experience. It is also very stable and scalable, and its support is perfect."

"The most valuable feature for us is the Postgres on Google Cloud SQL since it supports most of the features we need."

More Google Cloud SQL pros

Cons

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

"The solution is a bit expensive."

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

"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."

"The backup and restore processes take more time compared to other providers. For instance, if DigitalOcean takes two minutes to restore or create a backup, AWS will take 2 to 3 minutes."

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

"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."

"For improvements, Amazon RDS could work on more features for multi-availability zone deployment to enhance higher availability, and on simplifying migration for those transitioning from on-premises to cloud environments."

More Amazon RDS cons

"They could improve documentation and dashboard stability for efficient user experience and database management."

"Google's technical support is good, but they tend to never reopen a case and to send us snippets from the publicly available documentation. It's not as helpful as you would expect, not just for Google Cloud SQL but for all of Google Cloud products."

"The product's user interface could be more user-friendly to improve the overall user experience."

"The only thing that could be better is the pricing."

"I am yet to explore a lot of features that are present in this solution. However, it would be good if more documentation is available for this solution. This would help us in preparing for the certification exam and understand it better. Currently, we don't have much documentation. We do the labs for 20 or 25 minutes, but we can't capture and download anything."

"I would like to see better availability of the product in different regions. It should also improve the security with encryption."

"Google Cloud SQL needs to improve its support for high-end I/O operations. On-prem systems with high I/O capabilities perform better, as Google Cloud SQL takes more time to handle the same tasks."

"The most challenging part is dealing with legacy data from your old systems and migrating it into the new setup, but once you've completed the data migration, it becomes quite convenient to use."

More Google Cloud SQL cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing fees are paid on an annual basis."

"The product is expensive."

"The cost of using this solution is similar to that of having your own data center."

"The price of Amazon RDS is reasonable."

"The cost depends on the kind of instance we use."

"AWS is becoming pretty expensive because cheap or absolutely free services have become paid services. Amazon RDS is not an expensive product, but Amazon's ecosystem is becoming increasingly expensive."

"I would rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten."

"The price of Amazon RDS is expensive."

More Amazon RDS pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is very much an important factor as to why we use this solution."

"You need to pay extra costs for backup and replication."

"While the platform’s pricing may be higher, it aligns with industry standards, considering the quality of service and features provided."

"It's really cheap. It wouldn't be more than, I believe it's around 50 euro per month for running a cloud SQL."

"It is not expensive, especially considering the significant reduction in database management time."

"From a financial perspective, Google Cloud SQL is on the cheaper side."

"The solution is affordable."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

University

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

12%

University

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	22
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	23

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	9

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 do you like most about Google Cloud SQL?

The implementation part of the product was easy.

See all answers

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

We have set up automated patch management for Google Cloud SQL, and it does on a daily basis what needs to be done, so it is pretty good overall for maintaining our database security.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Google Cloud SQL?

Sometimes the sharing with third parties or configuring that in Google Cloud SQL is not the most intuitive. From a user perspective, if Google Cloud SQL integrated AI directly into the query so tha...

See all answers

Comparisons

MongoDB Atlas vs Amazon RDS

Compared 21% of the time

Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs Amazon RDS

Compared 13% of the time

Oracle Database as a Service vs Amazon RDS

Compared 12% of the time

Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer vs Amazon RDS

Compared 5% of the time

Google Cloud Spanner vs Amazon RDS

Compared 5% of the time

More Amazon RDS Competitors

Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs Google Cloud SQL

Compared 31% of the time

MongoDB Atlas vs Google Cloud SQL

Compared 15% of the time

Oracle Database as a Service vs Google Cloud SQL

Compared 6% of the time

Google Cloud Spanner vs Google Cloud SQL

Compared 5% of the time

Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer vs Google Cloud SQL

Compared 4% of the time

More Google Cloud SQL Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS

January 2026

Download Amazon RDS product report

Buyer's Guide

Google Cloud SQL

January 2026

Download Google Cloud SQL product report

Also Known As

RDS

No data available

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)

Google Cloud SQL is a fully-managed database service that makes it easy to set up, maintain, manage, and administer your relational PostgreSQL and MySQL databases in the cloud. Google Cloud SQL offers high performance, scalability, and convenience. Hosted on Google Cloud Platform, Cloud SQL provides a database infrastructure for applications running anywhere.

Google

Sample Customers

Edmodo

BeDataDriven, CodeFutures, Daffodil, GenieConnect, KiSSFLOW, LiveHive, SulAm_rica, Zync

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud SQL

December 2025

Free Report: Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud SQL

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