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Amazon Timestream vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

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 Timestream
Ranking in Managed NoSQL Databases
3rd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB
Ranking in Managed NoSQL Databases
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
92
Ranking in other categories
Database as a Service (DBaaS) (6th), NoSQL Databases (5th), Vector Databases (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Managed NoSQL Databases category, the mindshare of Amazon Timestream is 9.1%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 15.3%, down from 18.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed NoSQL Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Sekhar Reddy B - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful for real-time analytics and monitoring application's health
We use the tool with AI for customer data analysis as part of our internal product. It's a medium effort for beginners to learn; it's not too easy but not too hard. Overall, I'd rate Amazon Timestream eight point five to nine out of ten based on my experience. Integrating it wasn't difficult, and we didn't face any challenges. My advice for new users is to choose the right dimension names for better query performance and structure their data correctly before indexing.
MichaelJohn - PeerSpot reviewer
Very efficient for application-facing scenarios
There are several areas for improvement. Firstly, having a local development emulator or simulator for Azure Cosmos DB would be beneficial. It would be very handy to have a Docker container that developers can use locally. Although, I know there is a free tier and so on and so forth, having a local environment would be nice. For example, SQL Server is very portable. You can even install it on your machine. That is the number one thing that is missing in Azure Cosmos DB. The second improvement area is the IDE of choice. That means how you interact with Azure Cosmos DB. For example, with SQL Server, you have SQL Server Management Studio. I know there is a little bit of support for Azure Cosmos DB in Azure Data Studio, but it is not heavily advertised or it does not feel like first-class citizen support. Developer experience or developer tooling is missing in terms of interacting with the database. Better developer tools or an IDE for interacting with Azure Cosmos DB would enhance the developer experience. Lastly, there is some mixed messaging about what Azure Cosmos DB is, given its multiple APIs. There are so many Azure Cosmos DB APIs available. There is NoSQL. There are MongoDB, Gremlin, and others. There is still some mixed messaging for others who are new to Azure Cosmos DB about what Azure Cosmos DB is. Is this like MongoDB, but then there is also MongoDB in Azure Cosmos DB? I know it well, and I know that the default one is just NoSQL, but others I have interacted with over the last ten years or so get confused.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"If you drop a message, the solution's technical support will definitely reply."
"What I like best is that the tool is easy to collect and store data and is fast and scalable. The fully managed database is easy to understand."
"Using Amazon Timestream has been seamless due to its integration within the AWS ecosystem and ease of use for the engineering team."
"You can quickly aggregate data from the last ten years with Amazon Timestream."
"The best things about Amazon Timestream are it's maintenance-free, customizable, and has no lag issues. It's always real-time."
"For example, we have people spread across multiple locations; if they update data in Australia, we can access it in another location within a fraction of a second."
"The standout features are its ability to do data compression easily and the ability to scale horizontally."
"With Azure being our main cloud, the valuable features of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB include integration with other Azure products that we're using and governance inside Azure. For integration with other products inside the Azure cloud, it was a better choice."
"It is integral to our business because it helps manage schema and metadata for all our documents and customers. The AI insights we glean based on Azure OpenAI also end up in Cosmos DB. We need a NoSQL store because the schema is dynamic and flexible, so Cosmos DB is a great fit. It has four nines or possibly five nines availability, excellent geo-distribution, and auto-scaling."
"The ability to scale automatically is very valuable. Additionally, multi-region support automatically synchronizing to a different region for multi-region applications is a cool feature. It's more of a lift with other databases to configure that extra region and set up replication, even if it's on the cloud. With Azure, it's just a button click. It's that simple."
"It's highly scalable and supports consistency, security, and multiple security options."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is easy to use and implement for application programmers."
"The global synchronization feature of Azure Cosmos DB stands out as the most valuable for me."
 

Cons

"Arranging the database schema is a bit challenging."
"There are disadvantages when it comes to time series databases since you can't delete anything from Amazon Timestream data."
"There are certain features that we would like to see added and we are collaborating with the product teams on these areas."
"The tool could be improved by increasing the batch size from one hundred records to five hundred or a thousand to speed up indexing."
"The solution could be improved by making it easier for new graduates like me to use. Better explanations of queries and how to use them with other AWS services would help."
"One area for improvement is the ease of writing SQL queries and stored procedures in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB."
"The solution cannot join two databases like Oracle or SQL Server."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's pricing model is complicated, which people don't understand."
"Overall, it is a good resource. I am not aware of the background, but it seems to currently support only JSON documents."
"There are some disadvantages as it is costly compared to other NoSQL databases. It has a complex pricing model and has a strict partitioning strategy."
"Our use case was a failure with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, and we do not have any other opportunity to use Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB."
"Slight enhancements in integration interfaces, expanded dashboard functionalities, and broader use-case support would be beneficial."
"Overall, it works very well and fits the purpose regardless of the target application. However, by default, there is a threshold to accommodate bulk or large requests. You have to monitor the Request Units. If you need more data for a particular query, you need to increase the Request Units."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For 1GB of data, the solution charges $ 0.01 in the US region."
"We pay over $10 million a year to Amazon."
"Amazon Timestream's pricing seems manageable to me."
"We don't see high costs with Amazon Timestream, which may vary by company."
"Pricing, at times, is not super clear because they use the request unit (RU) model. To manage not just Azure Cosmos DB but what you are receiving for the dollars paid is not easy. It is very abstract. They could do a better job of connecting Azure Cosmos DB with the value or some variation of that."
"Cosmos DB is a managed offering, so its cost is understandably higher."
"Azure Cosmos DB's pricing is competitive, though there is a need for more personalized pricing models to accommodate small applications without incurring high charges. A suggestion is to implement dynamically adjustable pricing that accounts for various user needs."
"Everything could always be cheaper. I like that Cosmos DB allows us to auto-scale instead of pre-provisioning a certain capacity. It automatically scales to the demand, so we only pay for what we consume."
"Because of the lack of understanding about RUs, the costs become unpredictable. It sometimes goes over the budget."
"Cosmos DB's pricing structure has significantly improved in recent months, both in terms of its pricing model and how charges are calculated."
"Cosmos DB is cost-effective when starting but requires careful management."
"Cosmos DB is expensive, and the RU-based pricing model is confusing. Although they have a serverless layer, there are deficiencies in what I can define and assign to a database. Estimating infrastructure needs is not straightforward, making it challenging to manage costs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Construction Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Legal Firm
13%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon Timestream?
We are working on a few open change requests with the engineering teams on AWS's side. There are certain features that we would like to see added and we are collaborating with the product teams on ...
What is your primary use case for Amazon Timestream?
We use Amazon Timestream as a data historian for IT data. It stores all individual measurements of our customers' IoT devices for a certain period of time, allowing them to perform time-series-base...
What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
The initial setup is simple and straightforward. You can set up a Cosmos DB in a day, even configuring things like availability zones around the world.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
It is cost-efficient as long as you understand the right setup to optimize usage. Knowing the data needs of the organization and adjusting the Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB usage accordingly helps save...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
What is missing in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is definitely cold storage. We know it's coming, but that's currently what is missing—the possibility to park older data in a cold tier. Aside from the ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
TomTom, KPMG Australia, Bosch, ASOS, Mercedes Benz, NBA, Zero Friction, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Kinectify
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Timestream vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.