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Couchbase Capella vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 13, 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)
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
102
Ranking in other categories
NoSQL Databases (2nd), Managed NoSQL Databases (1st), Vector Databases (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 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 3.2%, up from 0.1% 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 DB3.2%
Couchbase Capella1.3%
Other95.5%
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 way the nodes are managed is interesting."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"Azure Cosmos DB's resiliency is valuable. It is available in every Azure region, allowing quick information storage and retrieval. We can partition it to improve indexing, enabling us to retrieve information and recreate website content quickly."
"I would rate Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB a ten out of ten."
"I like the way you can create and delete records. You pass a JSON, and then it creates a record."
"Cosmos DB's greatest strengths are its easy setup and affordability, especially for those who understand its usage."
"I would rate Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB a ten out of ten."
"Latency and availability are incredible."
"The best features of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB are the way it maintains the data in partitions and its retention policies."
"The most valuable aspect of Cosmos DB is its performance."
 

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."
"Currently, it doesn't support cross-container joins, forcing developers to retrieve data from each container separately and combine it using methods like LINQ queries."
"We would like to see advancements in AI with the ability to benchmark vector search capabilities, ensuring it answers questions accurately. During our initial implementation, we faced challenges with indexing and sorting, which are natively available in other offerings but required specific configurations in Cosmos."
"There is room for improvement in Microsoft's maintenance aspect. For example, we had a major incident at the end of December where the entire South Central region was down for our application, causing many problems due to a lack of access to the database."
"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."
"An improvement could include increasing the document size or providing a method to manage larger sets efficiently. If they want to keep a 2 MB limit, they should provide a way to chain multiple documents in a systematic way so that developers do not have to figure out what to do when a document is larger than 2 MB."
"The solution cannot join two databases like Oracle or SQL Server."
"There's a little bit of a learning curve because I was new to Azure. But once you learn the tool, it's pretty straightforward."
"The model with autoscaling for RU is complicated to optimize RU consumption."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It is expensive. The moment you have high availability options and they are mixed with the type of multitenant architecture you use, the pricing is on the higher end."
"Azure Cosmos DB is generally a costly resource compared to other Azure resources. It comes with a high cost. We have reserved one thousand RUs. Free usage is also limited."
"I would rate Cosmos DB's cost at seven out of ten, with ten being the highest."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is moderately priced, where it is neither expensive nor cheap."
"The pricing model of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is a bit complex."
"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."
"Cost isn’t a big hurdle for us right now. The solution is not costly."
"Cosmos DB is a managed offering, so its cost is understandably higher."
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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
9%
 

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?
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

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.
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