Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs Milvus comparison

Microsoft and The Milvus Project are both solutions in the Vector Databases category. Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.2, while The Milvus Project is ranked #8 with an average rating of 7.4. Microsoft holds a 4.0% mindshare in VD, compared to The Milvus Project’s 8.2% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of The Milvus Project users who would recommend it.

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Read 101 Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB reviews

5,308 Views
1,911 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Milvus

Read 5 Milvus reviews

2,920 Views
2,716 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Milvus

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 13, 2025

Azure Cosmos DB and Milvus are both strong competitors in the scalable and flexible data management solutions category. Azure Cosmos DB leads with global distribution capabilities and wide-ranging support for various data models, but Milvus is a frontrunner in vector data handling for AI and machine learning.

Features: Azure Cosmos DB offers global distribution, low-latency access, and multimodal support for key-value, graph, and document data models. It's designed for high availability and integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft services. Milvus excels with powerful vector search capabilities, support for distributed computing, and high scalability, specifically catering to AI/ML and analytics.

Room for Improvement: Azure Cosmos DB could improve in areas such as refining its cost management model, enhancing vector data handling capabilities, and improving user onboarding for non-Microsoft ecosystems. Milvus might benefit from expanding its customer support network, improving ease of use for less technically inclined users, and increasing integrations with third-party platforms.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Azure Cosmos DB is easy to deploy for organizations within the Microsoft ecosystem, boasting robust support and comprehensive resources. Milvus, being open-source, offers deployment flexibility through containerized solutions, though it requires a higher technical capability and lacks the extensive support network of Microsoft.

Pricing and ROI: Azure Cosmos DB utilizes a consumption-based pricing model, making it potentially costly if not monitored, but the benefits of global reach and performance can justify these costs. Milvus presents a cost-effective solution with lower initial setup costs, appealing to AI-driven organizations that focus on vector data analysis. While Azure Cosmos DB offers a higher ROI for general use cases, Milvus is advantageous in specialized AI/ML applications.

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

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus

July 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

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Ranking in Vector Databases

1st

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

101

Ranking in other categories

Database as a Service (DBaaS) (6th), NoSQL Databases (5th), Managed NoSQL Databases (1st)

Milvus

Ranking in Vector Databases

8th

Average Rating

7.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Open Source Databases (10th)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 4.0%. The mindshare of Milvus is 8.2%, down from 8.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vector Databases

Featured Reviews

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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Sameer Bhangale

Leader, Data Science Practice at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Provides quick and easy containerization, but documentation is not very user-friendly

Milvus' documentation is not very user-friendly and doesn't help me get started quickly. Chroma DB provides super user-friendly documentation, enabling new users to get started quickly. Chroma DB's setup doesn't have many dependencies, whereas Milvus usually comes with some dependencies because of the way it needs to be deployed. Unlike Milvus, it's very easy to do POCs with Chroma DB.

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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 searching capability is exceptional. It is very simple and incomparable to competitors."

"We value the replication and regional availability features that Cosmos DB provides. The replication includes read replicas and write replicas. The recent addition of vectorization and similarity comparisons add values for AI workloads. 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."

"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is its real-time analytics capabilities, which allow for turnaround times in milliseconds. This is crucial for applications like fraud detection."

"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."

"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB offers exceptional stability, boasting a reliability rating of 99.95 percent."

"It is easy to use because you don't need to know much about Cosmos DB or have prior experience."

"Latency and availability are incredible."

"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is easy to use and implement for application programmers."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pros

"I like the accuracy and usability."

"Milvus offers multiple methods for calculating similarities or distances between vectors, such as L2 norm and cosine similarity. These methods help in comparing different vectors based on specific use cases. For instance, in our use case, we find that the L2 distance works best, but you can experiment with different methods to find the most suitable one for your needs."

"The solution is well containerized, and since containerization is quick and easy for me, I can scale it up quickly."

"Milvus has good accuracy and performance."

"The best feature of Milvus was finding the closest chunk from a huge amount of data."

Cons

"The size of the continuation token in Azure Cosmos DB should be static rather than increasing with more data, as it can lead to application crashes."

"I hope they improve the service. Before last year, improvements on Cosmos DB were very slow."

"The solution cannot join two databases like Oracle or SQL Server."

"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."

"The size of the continuation token in Azure Cosmos DB should be static rather than increasing with more data, as it can lead to application crashes. They should use a static key size."

"There are some disadvantages as it is costly compared to other NoSQL databases."

"Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL has a less developed interface and fewer SQL commands than MongoDB, and its community support is also smaller."

"There aren't any specific areas that need improvement, but if there were a way to achieve the right cosine similarity score without extensive testing, that would be very beneficial."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB cons

"Milvus has higher resource consumption, which introduces complexity in implementation."

"Milvus' documentation is not very user-friendly and doesn't help me get started quickly."

"I've heard that when we store too much data in Milvus, it becomes slow and does not work properly."

"Milvus could make it simpler. Simplifying the requirements and making it more accessible. It could be more user-friendly."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"From a startup point of view, it appears to be expensive. If I were to create my startup, it would not have the pricing appeal compared to the competition, such as Supabase. All those other databases are well-advertised by communities. I know there is a free tier with Azure Cosmos DB. It is just not well advertised."

"Cosmos DB is cost-effective when starting but requires careful management."

"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."

"Its pricing structure is quite flexible."

"Cosmos DB gave us three accounts for $400. We pay according to the usage."

"The cost is the biggest limitation of this solution."

"The price of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB could be a bit lower."

"Cosmos DB is expensive compared to any virtual machine based on conventional RDBMS like MySQL or PostgreSQL."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pricing and cost advice

"Milvus is an open-source solution."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Legal Firm

13%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

20%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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?

Pricing is a complex process at the enterprise level. While I'm not handling the pricing directly, through stakeholder meetings and conversations, we understood that having everything in a single p...

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What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?

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 mo...

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What do you like most about Milvus?

I like the accuracy and usability.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Milvus?

Milvus could be improved how it could automatically generate insights from the data it holds. Milvus maintains embedding information and knows the relationships between data points. It would be use...

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What is your primary use case for Milvus?

Milvus is primarily used in RAG, which involves retrieving relevant documents or data to augment the generation of new content. Milvus helps convert text and other data into a vector space, and the...

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Comparisons

Chroma vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 12% of the time

Pinecone vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon DynamoDB vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 7% of the time

Neo4j Graph Database vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 5% of the time

Qdrant vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 5% of the time

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB Competitors

LanceDB vs Milvus

Compared 17% of the time

Elastic Search vs Milvus

Compared 14% of the time

OpenSearch vs Milvus

Compared 9% of the time

Supabase Vector vs Milvus

Compared 8% of the time

Cassandra vs Milvus

Compared 1% of the time

More Milvus Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

July 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Open Source Databases

July 2025

Download Milvus product report

Also Known As

Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB

No data available

Overview

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

Milvus is a powerful tool for efficiently storing and retrieving large-scale vectors or embeddings. It is widely used in applications such as similarity search, recommendation systems, image and video retrieval, and natural language processing.

With its fast and accurate search capabilities, scalability, and support for multiple programming languages, Milvus is suitable for a wide range of industries and use cases.

Users appreciate its efficient search capabilities, ability to handle large-scale data, support for various data types, and user-friendly interface.

Milvus enables easy retrieval of information from vast datasets, regardless of the data format, and is praised for its high performance and scalability. The intuitive and easy-to-use interface is also highlighted as a valuable aspect of the platform.

The Milvus Project

Sample Customers

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

1. Alibaba Group 2. Tencent 3. Baidu 4. JD.com 5. Meituan 6. Xiaomi 7. Didi Chuxing 8. ByteDance 9. Huawei 10. ZTE 11. Lenovo 12. Haier 13. China Mobile 14. China Telecom 15. China Unicom 16. Ping An Insurance 17. China Life Insurance 18. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China 19. Bank of China 20. Agricultural Bank of China 21. China Construction Bank 22. PetroChina 23. Sinopec 24. China National Offshore Oil Corporation 25. China Southern Airlines 26. Air China 27. China Eastern Airlines 28. China Railway Group 29. China Railway Construction Corporation 30. China Communications Construction Company 31. China Merchants Group 32. China Evergrande Group

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus

July 2025

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