Amazon RDS vs Microsoft Azure SQL Database comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft are both solutions in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.3, while Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.7. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 24.7% mindshare in DS, compared to Microsoft’s 15.9% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Amazon RDS

Read 54 Amazon RDS reviews

4,861 Views
4,099 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Read 117 Microsoft Azure SQL Database reviews

5,959 Views
2,686 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Amazon RDS

Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 12, 2024

Amazon RDS and Microsoft Azure SQL Database are strong players in the cloud database market. Based on the comparisons, each product has distinct advantages that cater to different needs.

Features: Amazon RDS offers automated backups, ease of scalability, and high availability. Microsoft Azure SQL Database has advanced machine learning capabilities, integration with other Azure services, and built-in security features.

Room for Improvement: Amazon RDS could improve its support, reduce downtime during maintenance, and enhance its performance analytics. Microsoft Azure SQL Database needs better performance analytics, improved documentation for complex setups, and more intuitive user interfaces.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon RDS is easier to deploy and integrates well with AWS services, but its customer service receives mixed reviews. Microsoft Azure SQL Database has a straightforward deployment process and an effective support team, especially for enterprises already using Azure.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon RDS offers competitive pricing with good ROI for small and medium businesses, but costs can increase with higher usage. Microsoft Azure SQL Database is more expensive but the added features and integration justify the cost, providing good ROI for enterprises needing comprehensive solutions.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon RDS vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database

April 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

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)

1st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

117

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon RDS is 24.7%, down from 27.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure SQL Database is 15.9%, down from 18.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

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.

Read full review

Charley Hanania

Data Platform Specialist at QS2 AG - Quality Software Solutions

It is very easy to implement, manage, and offers great insights into what is happening inside the engine

Microsoft Azure SQL Database is integrated into other Azure capabilities and has a great foundation being on SQL Server with a long history of security, performance, and usability from a DBA perspective. Once you've set up a server, adding databases is easy. There's a minor challenge with having data in separate databases that you want to connect like we do on premises. I'm looking forward to using some of these new AI-driven functions that have come out around vectorization. Having the data closer to my transactional databases or data makes it easy to augment and enhance the Database and applications I currently use. It's great that Azure SQL now seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Fabric. It's a first-tier service in the cloud that connects to web applications and other databases. The data transformation orchestration capabilities within Database Factory and similar capabilities make it effortless to move that stuff forward.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Being able to change the size of an RDS MySQL instance is amazing."

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

"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."

"Amazon RDS is easy to manage, and it has customizable performance, high availability, and duality."

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

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

"It significantly reduces database management overhead."

"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."

More Amazon RDS pros

"The product's initial setup phase is very easy."

"We're a Microsoft customer, so it fits in with everything else we work with."

"What I like the most is the processes and the easiness of deployments."

"We have multiple applications running for our customers that we can integrate into Azure SQL."

"We have come from hosting on-premise for customers, or they've done it themselves with SQL. We've now taken a cloud offering for the equivalent services of standard database management and the inbuilt backup and restore offerings. The scalability is probably the biggest feature that we are benefiting from by being in the cloud."

"Azure SQL Database is very quick and easy to use."

"Its cost benefit is most valuable because you are charged per data unit instead of licensing. You can easily migrate your on-premise SQL to the cloud with a managed instance. That's what it is designed to do. It is easy to take your on-premise or older SQL instance and move it to the cloud. It makes it easy to get off your on-premise SQL and start utilizing the cost benefit of the cloud."

"The backup solution in Azure is great, the firewall settings in SQL are very easy to use and work very well. Additionally, the turning process is very good and has improved the SQL services and queries."

More Microsoft Azure SQL Database pros

Cons

"The running cost could be improved."

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

"The product's high price is an area of concern where improvements are required."

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

"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."

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

"If Amazon RDS can be provided as a service platform, it would be beneficial for years. Instead of focusing on infrastructure, they can assist backend engineers and those with varying technical expertise in utilizing it effectively. It would be helpful if Amazon could provide a more predictable pricing strategy."

More Amazon RDS cons

"Service Broker should be added in Azure Cloud. Service Broker is currently available only in the on-premises version."

"A potential area for improvement could be integrating with third-party clouds."

"I want the pricing to be improved."

"Certain features available commercially may not be applicable in our gov cloud."

"In terms of improvement, making Microsoft Azure SQL Database faster would cater to big companies that require speed."

"They could improve Azure SQL by adding some of the features available on-prem, such as cross-database queries and the ability to run particular jobs. We need to migrate those to something else, like a function or logic app."

"This solution would be improved with the inclusion of better self-service tools."

"Their support is nice but their responses aren't effective."

More Microsoft Azure SQL Database cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Amazon RDS is expensive."

"The solution is expensive."

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

"Amazon RDS is less expensive than other solutions."

"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."

"The solution's price is good."

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

More Amazon RDS pricing and cost advice

"I would like it to be cheaper, but comparatively, it is reasonably priced."

"Its price can definitely be lower. It is pretty pricey."

"There is no licensing cost for the solution."

"We have the licensing fee, and we are also paying a third party to maintain it with an SLA. There is no infrastructure cost, but its running costs are higher than expected. There is the cost of the Azure cloud, which is pricier than expected, but it is not specific to SQL Azure. It is specific to the cloud. You expect it to be cheaper, but it is more expensive to run it."

"It is expensive for us. We are looking for something less expensive and thinking of migrating the whole system."

"I recommend considering a pay-as-you-go pricing model initially."

"The price in general of Azure SQL could improve."

"Microsoft Azure SQL Database is not cheap."

More Microsoft Azure SQL Database pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

University

Educational Organization

72%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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?

One key improvement would be adding support for multi-storage paradigms, including columnar support, as seen in TiDB. The serverless support with Aurora could also be enhanced. Additionally, having...

See all answers

What do you like most about SQL Azure?

The automated scalability feature of SQL Azure has proven to be highly beneficial, particularly when deployed in the cloud.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SQL Azure?

The pricing of Microsoft Azure SQL Database is not cheap, affecting user uptake. A gradual reduction in price could improve accessibility and user numbers, making it easier for users to adopt the s...

See all answers

What needs improvement with SQL Azure?

Pricing could be improved to make Microsoft Azure SQL Database ( /products/microsoft-azure-sql-database-reviews ) more accessible. A reduction in price might encourage more users and bring more pro...

See all answers

Comparisons

MongoDB Atlas vs Amazon RDS

Compared 27% of the time

Google Cloud SQL vs Amazon RDS

Compared 21% of the time

Oracle Database as a Service vs Amazon RDS

Compared 18% of the time

Google Cloud Spanner vs Amazon RDS

Compared 5% of the time

Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer vs Amazon RDS

Compared 5% of the time

More Amazon RDS Competitors

Google Cloud SQL vs Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Compared 38% of the time

MongoDB Atlas vs Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Compared 16% of the time

Oracle Database as a Service vs Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Compared 7% of the time

vCloud Air vs Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Compared 3% of the time

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Compared 3% of the time

More Microsoft Azure SQL Database Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS

May 2025

Download Amazon RDS product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure SQL Database

April 2025

Download Microsoft Azure SQL Database 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)

Microsoft Azure SQL Database is a relational database-as-a-service that delivers predictable performance, scalability, business continuity, data protection, and near-zero administration to cloud developers and solution architects. This is the deep technical library for Azure SQL Database.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Edmodo

adnymics GmbH, LG CNS, Centrebet, netfabb GmbH, MedPlast, Accelera Solutions, Sochi Organizing Committee, realzeit GmbH

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database

April 2025

Free Report: Amazon RDS vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database

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