MarkLogic vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB comparison

Progress Software and Microsoft are both solutions in the NoSQL Databases category. Progress Software is ranked #19, while Microsoft is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.2. Progress Software holds a 1.7% mindshare in ND, compared to Microsoft’s 6.1% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Progress Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

MarkLogic

Read 2 MarkLogic reviews

323 Views
291 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Read 102 Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB reviews

7,050 Views
1,340 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

MarkLogic

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 13, 2025

MarkLogic and Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB are competing in the database solutions category. Based on data comparisons, Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB has the upper hand in scalability and integration due to its global distribution and API support.

Features: MarkLogic is known for its multi-model capabilities, unified transaction model, and enterprise-level security. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB provides a globally distributed database, low latency, and automatic scaling.

Ease Of Deployment and Customer Service: MarkLogic offers flexible deployment for on-premise or cloud setups, along with commendable customer support. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB ensures seamless cloud-native deployment and easy Azure service integration, though its support is less comprehensive.

Pricing and ROI: MarkLogic may involve a higher setup cost but yields significant ROI through data management. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is initially more cost-effective with pay-as-you-go pricing, ideal for cost-efficient scaling.

To learn more, read our detailed MarkLogic vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

MarkLogic vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

September 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

MarkLogic

Ranking in NoSQL Databases

19th

Average Rating

9.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Ranking in NoSQL Databases

2nd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

102

Ranking in other categories

Database as a Service (DBaaS) (5th), Managed NoSQL Databases (1st), Vector Databases (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the NoSQL Databases category, the mindshare of MarkLogic is 1.7%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 6.1%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

NoSQL Databases Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB	6.1%
MarkLogic	1.7%
Other	92.2%

NoSQL Databases

Featured Reviews

Beverly R. Jamison

IT Solutions Architect / Computer Scientist at Practical Semantics

Frequent updates, helpful search capabilities, and high quality support

MarkLogic's greatest asset is its strong engineering foundation. It was specifically designed with search capabilities in mind, and the developers placed a great emphasis on ensuring the quality of the indexing and all subsequent layers that were added. The solution has been good at providing the updates that were what we were hoping for. They frequently update the solution.

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MichaelJohn

Director | Data & AI at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

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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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The rules can show us if there are missing items, like titles, and we can add them in to ensure everything is filled and makes sense and there are no missing details."

"MarkLogic's greatest asset is its strong engineering foundation. It was specifically designed with search capabilities in mind, and the developers placed a great emphasis on ensuring the quality of the indexing and all subsequent layers that were added."

"One valuable feature of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is partitioning. Its performance is very nice."

"The solution's read capacity and write access functions are very fast so users don't have to wait when fetching or displaying data on a screen."

"It is a cloud-based solution that is easy to deploy, easy to access, and provides users with more features compared to other clouds like AWS and GCP."

"Specifically, we are using the MongoDB API, so we leverage it in that way. I like the flexibility that it offers. My team does not have to spend time building out database tables. We can get going fairly quickly with being able to read and write data into a MongoDB collection that is hosted inside Azure Cosmos DB."

"The benefits of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB were immediate for us."

"Overall, I would rate Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB a nine out of ten."

"Cosmos DB is a document database that stores data in JSON format for faster retrieval of unstructured data. I personally appreciate the speed, which is significantly better for unstructured data, especially since Cosmos DB had JSON as a data type early on."

"The speed is impressive, and integrating our power-up database with Kafka was an improvement."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pros

Cons

"One of the most common requests is to improve the user interface of the database. While it is primarily a database, there are other databases available that offer more user-friendly interfaces. The UI is good for developers but not for regular users. More visuals would be beneficial."

"The spreadsheet capabilities could be improved."

"One of the primary challenges with Cosmos DB as a non-relational data store is the careful data modeling required due to the lack of collection-level joins when using the SQL API."

"Continuing to educate customers on how they can take better advantage of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB without having to completely rewrite their entire application paradigm would be beneficial."

"The auto-scaling feature adjusts hourly. We have many processes that write stuff in batches, so we must ensure that the load is spread evenly throughout the hour. It would be much easier if it were done by the minute. I'm looking forward to the vector database search that they are adding. It's a pretty cool new feature."

"The topic of RU consumption needs better documentation. Now that Microsoft has partnered with different LLM organizations, such as OpenAI, a bot could guide us through different metrics present in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB."

"It would be ideal if we could integrate Cosmos DB with our Databricks. At this point, that's not possible."

"Better documentation on how to integrate with other components would be helpful because I was struggling with this."

"If you want to bring the data from AWS, you must pay data egress costs. That's a pain point."

"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."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"MarkLogic is a pricey option, but there are some advantages to its pricing structure. For medium-sized clients or departments within larger companies, it is possible to obtain a license for one or two nodes for less than a hundred thousand dollars. Additionally, if you only need to deploy a single node, you can do so for under fifty thousand dollars. This is in contrast to other high-quality software options that are only accessible to larger businesses, where the starting price can be upwards of two hundred thousand dollars."

"Pricing is mid- to high-end."

"With heavy use, like a large-scale IoT implementation, you could easily hit a quarter of a million dollars a month in Azure charges if Cosmos DB is a big part of it."

"Its pricing is not bad. It is good."

"Most customers like the flexibility of the pricing model, and it has not been an issue. They can start small, and the cost grows with adoption, allowing efficient management of the budget. Its pricing model has not been a concern at all for any of our customers. They understand it. It is simple enough to understand. Oftentimes, it is hard to forecast the RUs, but, in general, it has been fine."

"Cosmos DB is a PaaS, so there are no upfront costs for infrastructure. There are only subscriptions you pay for Azure and things like that. But it's a PaaS, so it's a subscription service. The license isn't perpetual, and the cost might seem expensive on its face, but you have to look at the upkeep for infrastructure and what you're saving."

"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."

"Its cost is transparent. Pricing depends on the transaction and data size, but overall, it is cheaper compared to hosting it on your corporate network due to other factors like power consumption."

"Our experience with the pricing and setup cost is that it aligns with what we expect based on the pricing we see. However, I would absolutely like it to be less if possible."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pricing and cost advice

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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

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	31
Midsize Enterprise	19
Large Enterprise	55

Questions from the Community

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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.

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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...

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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 ...

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Comparisons

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Compared 54% of the time

Neo4j Graph Database vs MarkLogic

Compared 23% of the time

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Compared 10% of the time

Pinecone vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 9% of the time

MongoDB Enterprise Advanced vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 7% of the time

Neo4j Graph Database vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 6% of the time

Amazon DynamoDB vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

NoSQL Databases

September 2025

Download MarkLogic product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

September 2025

Download Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB product report

Also Known As

No data available

Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB

Overview

MarkLogic is an operational and transactional Enterprise NoSQL database that is designed to integrate, store, manage and search SON and XML documents and semantic data (RDF Triples).

Progress Software

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database service providing scalability, user-friendliness, and seamless integration, suitable for managing large volumes of structured and unstructured data across diverse applications.

Azure Cosmos DB is renowned for its scalability, stability, and ease of integration, offering robust support for multiple data models and APIs. Its capacity for handling unstructured data efficiently and providing real-time analytics makes it ideal for applications requiring high performance and global distribution. With features like automatic failover and integration with Microsoft products, users benefit from cost optimization and secure data handling. Enhancement opportunities include simplifying queries, improving documentation, and expanding backup and analytics functionalities.

What are the most important features of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?

Scalability and Autoscaling: Efficiently handles growing data and user demands.
Multi-Model Support: Adapts to different data models seamlessly.
Global Distribution: Provides low-latency access across multiple regions.
Automatic Failover: Ensures high availability and reliability.
Integration with Microsoft Products: Offers seamless connectivity with Azure services.

What benefits should users look for in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB reviews?

Performance and Speed: Exceptionally fast processing for real-time data analytics.
Cost Optimization: Tools for managing expenses effectively.
Secure Data Handling: Implements strong data security measures.
Flexible Data Ingestion: Supports diverse data ingestion methods.

Azure Cosmos DB is frequently used in sectors like web, mobile, IoT, and analytics. It supports applications as a key-value store, processes real-time data, and enables global scalability with low-latency access. Its big data management capabilities and integration with Azure services enhance its utility across industries.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

ALM, American Psychological Association, American Society of Agronomy, Cond_ Nast, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Institute of Engineering and Technology, JWG Group, Lagardre Active, RSuite CMS, Wiley

TomTom, KPMG Australia, Bosch, ASOS, Mercedes Benz, NBA, Zero Friction, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Kinectify

Buyer's Guide

MarkLogic vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

September 2025

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