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CockroachDB vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.7
CockroachDB's serverless model provides cost-effective, versatile cloud solutions, offering significant savings and operational advantages over separate environments.
Sentiment score
6.1
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB reduces total cost through dynamic scaling, eliminating dedicated admins, and offering global distribution efficiency.
Getting an MVP of that project would have taken six to eight months, but because we had an active choice of using Azure Cosmos DB and other related cloud-native services of Azure, we were able to get to an MVP stage in a matter of weeks, which is six weeks.
You can react quickly and trim down the specs, memory, RAM, storage size, etc. It can save about 20% of the costs.
When I have done comparisons or cost calculations, I have sometimes personally seen as much as 25% to 30% savings.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.0
CockroachDB customer service is mixed; technical support quality varies, with users praising the AI chatbot, but responsiveness needs improvement.
Sentiment score
6.7
Feedback on Azure Cosmos DB's support varies, highlighting fast assistance with premium plans but inconsistency and delays otherwise.
The issue was resolved efficiently.
Premier Support has deteriorated compared to what it used to be, especially for small to medium-sized customers like ours.
The response was quick.
I would rate customer service and support a nine out of ten.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.0
CockroachDB excels in scalability and resource management, praised for seamless scaling from small to large, supporting diverse needs efficiently.
Sentiment score
7.8
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB offers scalable solutions with auto-scaling and partitioning, managing large workloads efficiently while reducing costs.
The system scales up capacity when needed and scales down when not in use, preventing unnecessary expenses.
We like that it can auto-scale to demand, ensuring we only pay for what we use.
We have had no issues with its ability to search through large amounts of data.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.6
CockroachDB is stable overall, highly rated for reliability but faces challenges with protocol issues and large, complex workloads.
Sentiment score
7.6
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is highly stable, reliable, and globally robust, offering strong performance and low latency despite minor issues.
We have multiple availability zones, so nothing goes down.
Azure Cosmos DB would be a good choice if you have to deploy your application in a limited time frame and you want to auto-scale the database across different applications.
I would rate it a ten out of ten in terms of availability and latency.
 

Room For Improvement

CockroachDB requires improvements in documentation, compatibility, UI features, disaster recovery, latency optimization, integration, and cost efficiency for global deployment.
Azure Cosmos DB needs better cost models, performance, documentation, query capabilities, integration, analytics, security, and operational features.
For multi-region deployment, CockroachDB requires at least three plus replicas across data centers to achieve strong consistency across regions, which increases infrastructure costs including compute, storage, and networking.
We must ensure data security remains the top priority.
You have to monitor the Request Units.
The dashboard could include more detailed RU descriptions, IOPS, and compute metrics.
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users find CockroachDB affordable and reliable, with flexible pricing options appealing despite some perceiving high costs.
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's pricing is complex yet flexible, offering scalability and cost-effectiveness with efficient resource management.
Initially, it seemed like an expensive way to manage a NoSQL data store, but so many improvements that have been made to the platform have made it cost-effective.
Cosmos DB is expensive, and the RU-based pricing model is confusing.
Cosmos DB is great compared to other databases because we can reduce the cost while doing the same things.
 

Valuable Features

CockroachDB provides easy setup, fault tolerance, scalability, and security, while supporting PostgreSQL compatibility for optimal performance across regions.
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB offers scalable, secure, and high-performance features with seamless integration, enhancing application efficiency and global user satisfaction.
CockroachDB's geo-distribution feature is superior to traditional databases.
The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is its real-time analytics capabilities, which allow for turnaround times in milliseconds.
Performance and security are valuable features, particularly when using Cosmos DB for MongoDB emulation and NoSQL.
The performance and scaling capabilities of Cosmos DB are excellent, allowing it to handle large workloads compared to other services such as Azure AI Search.
 

Categories and Ranking

CockroachDB
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Relational Databases Tools (10th)
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
103
Ranking in other categories
Database as a Service (DBaaS) (4th), NoSQL Databases (2nd), Managed NoSQL Databases (1st), Vector Databases (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

Antonio Tringali - PeerSpot reviewer
Open source with extensive documentation and a University for training
I am a freelancer. A client of mine wanted a solution that would allow them to scale yet not abandon the familiar PostgreSQL front-end (and rewrite a part of their source code). Scalability aside, CockroachDB is a fine way forward from PostgreSQL and is not changing the client source code part of the system. If you are lucky and you do not use newer features from recent versions of PostgreSQL or PostgreSQL extensions, it's fine. There are nice-to-have features for big organizations like regional tables. At the moment, my client simply does not use these. However, the serverless offer from CockroachDB is reacting well as data grows.
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.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
31%
Computer Software Company
12%
Educational Organization
8%
Retailer
6%
Legal Firm
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise55
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about CockroachDB?
The subset of SQL that my client is using is completely supported.
What needs improvement with CockroachDB?
The platform should provide a UI feature where users have the ability to manage it. The CockroachDB platform should have a chatbot where users can inquire about pricing or seek solutions for querie...
What is your primary use case for CockroachDB?
We have been using CockroachDB for the last two years. From 2023, we started working on a product similar to Google Capture. We decided to work with CockroachDB with Hasura. Hasura is a UI for the ...
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?
The pricing for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is good, but there is a developer factor to consider. It could be economical or expensive depending on usage. Guidance about query consumption of Request U...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
In terms of improvement for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, while it eliminates the burden of managing database infrastructure, we realized it might not be possible to use various models simultaneously ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Baidu, Kindred, Tierion, Heroic Labs, Gorgias
TomTom, KPMG Australia, Bosch, ASOS, Mercedes Benz, NBA, Zero Friction, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Kinectify
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