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Couchbase Capella vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 19, 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

Couchbase Capella
Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)
15th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB
Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
103
Ranking in other categories
NoSQL Databases (2nd), Managed NoSQL Databases (1st), Vector Databases (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category, the mindshare of Couchbase Capella is 1.3%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 3.4%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Database as a Service (DBaaS) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB3.4%
Couchbase Capella1.3%
Other95.3%
Database as a Service (DBaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

SupriyaKulkarni - PeerSpot reviewer
Good GUI, easy to learn, and simple to install
The architecture is complex. I do understand that. However, the GUI is very user-friendly. Sometimes all these things are a little difficult to understand for a person who is not experienced in Couchbase. There is a constant requirement to upgrade the versions. We need to constantly keep on upgrading the latest version for the newest one. Currently, we are dealing with an issue where some of the servers are on the 6.5 version, and a few have moved to 7.5. So we are in a mixed mode right now. We are having a high IO issue on our servers, which we are already dealing with. We have these cases with Couchbase, with Red Hat, et cetera. We feel like this constant need to upgrade is something that is very mundane yet a very difficult task. If you have three clusters, which have around thirty nodes, the data is quite sensitive. Whenever there is Couchbase upgrade that is going on, we see that our SR is dropped. The purchase rate and success rate drop. This affects our business and the clients. Rebalancing could be improved. I find it to be a very slow process when it comes to rebalancing the clusters. If you talk about other architectures like Oracle, they are pretty fast. Couchbase is a little slower. Rebalancing, taking the node out, doing the upgrade, putting it back, rebalancing it, is a very difficult and cumbersome. For Oracle, we have been running on version 19.5 for the past five years. There were absolutely no issues. Yet for Couchbase, every six months, we have to go do the upgrade.
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

"The initial setup was straightforward."
"The way the nodes are managed is interesting."
"The searching capability is exceptional. It is very simple and incomparable to competitors."
"Cosmos is preferred because of its speed, robustness, and utilization."
"The most valuable feature of Azure Cosmos DB is its scalability. That is the biggest reason I use Azure Cosmos DB."
"Azure Cosmos DB offers numerous data connectors that provide a platform for seamless integration with various platforms and visualization tools such as Power BI. It allows connection via multiple data connectors to integrate data in any desired format."
"Azure Cosmos DB offers efficient indexing and low search latency, making searching fast and efficient and ensuring peace of mind in database operations."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is fast, and its performance is good compared to normal SQL DB."
"Cosmos DB is effective at handling large queries."
"Our customer is very satisfied with it."
 

Cons

"Rebalancing could be improved."
"The product could be improved by including a log section for tracking activities, enhancing database integration, and providing more transparency regarding pricing and monitoring activities."
"There are no specific areas I believe need improvement as I am happy with what I am getting currently. However, I am open to new features in future versions, like possibly integrating AI features natively into Cosmos DB. Any improvement would be beneficial."
"I don't think Cosmos DB has improved our organization. People are using it, but I'm not sure it's the best solution. For one, it's costly. Also, there are other issues with it. You cannot get all the records simultaneously. You can only get it in chunks of 1,500 maximum."
"It would be nice to have more options to ingest the data, for example, more file options or more search options. Currently, you can use JSON, but if there were other file types you can use for data ingestion, that would be nice."
"The only area Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB can improve on is its documentation; while it is solid and very useful, enhancements in the indexing documentation would help users save costs and make it more cost-effective."
"One of our biggest pain points is the backup and restore functionality needs improvement."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB can be improved by providing more fine-grained control over certain aspects, such as connections and threads. There could be more control over how many connections are made."
"A minor improvement would be enabling batch operations through the UI. Currently, to delete all documents in a collection, we must use an API, which some of my team finds inconvenient for admin tasks."
"It is easy to use, but optimization has been a mixed experience. It has been more of trying to figure out how to do so. We have not found much support there, so we have to come up with our own way of optimizing it in different ways. That is one area of improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Cosmos DB is expensive compared to any virtual machine based on conventional RDBMS like MySQL or PostgreSQL."
"Right now, I have opted for the student subscription plan, for which Microsoft charges me around 100 USD. The pricing of the solution depends on the solution's usage."
"We are not consuming so much yet since we are at the beginning of using this solution. I would rate the pricing of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB a six out of ten."
"The pricing for Cosmos DB has improved, particularly with the new pricing for Autoscale."
"Its pricing is higher compared to solutions like Aerospike. However, it is justified because of the out-of-the-box features that are provided. The availability and resiliency that we have make it worth the price."
"The cost is the biggest limitation of this solution."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's licensing costs are monthly."
"It is cost-effective. They offer two pricing models. One is the serverless model and the other one is the vCore model that allows provisioning the resources as necessary. For our pilot projects, we can utilize the serverless model, monitor the usage, and adjust resources as needed."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Legal Firm
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise55
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Couchbase Capella?
The architecture is complex. I do understand that. However, the GUI is very user-friendly. Sometimes all these things are a little difficult to understand for a person who is not experienced in Cou...
What is your primary use case for Couchbase Capella?
The solution is basically used to support our ordering system, which generates a huge number of orders for our customers.
What advice do you have for others considering Couchbase Capella?
We are Counchbase customers. Depending on your application, it is good to use Couchbase where you have high OLTP systems where you know there will be constant data loading, deleting, et cetera, hap...
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?
In terms of budget, Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB offers multiple selection options from Azure, allowing us to choose services such as auto-scale and select how many RUs we need at any time. We typical...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
I expect improvements in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, particularly in the vector database area. In comparison to Databricks, there’s a functionality in Databricks that allows direct updates of the da...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
TomTom, KPMG Australia, Bosch, ASOS, Mercedes Benz, NBA, Zero Friction, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Kinectify
Find out what your peers are saying about Couchbase Capella vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
872,706 professionals have used our research since 2012.