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 8.3, while The Milvus Project is ranked #8 with an average rating of 7.4. Microsoft holds a 5.0% mindshare in VD, compared to The Milvus Project’s 7.8% 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 103 Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB reviews

7,774 Views
3,187 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Milvus

Read 5 Milvus reviews

3,352 Views
3,084 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Milvus

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 19, 2025

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB and Milvus are both robust database solutions designed for varying business needs and workloads. Cosmos DB has the upper hand in global distribution and consistency, whereas Milvus specializes in vector similarity search, making it ideal for AI-driven applications.

Features: Azure Cosmos DB supports automatic scalability, global distribution, and multi-model data storage, enabling a versatile approach to database management. Milvus excels with its ability to perform high-performance vector similarity searches, tailored for AI and machine learning applications. Each solution uniquely targets specific areas, making them suited for different business scenarios.

Room for Improvement: Azure Cosmos DB could enhance its vector capabilities to better compete with specialized AI databases. It may also benefit from reduced pricing tiers for smaller deployments. Milvus, on the other hand, could improve its global distribution features and integrate more smoothly with cloud ecosystems. Additionally, expanding its customer support and offering packaged solutions for non-technical users could widen its appeal.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Azure Cosmos DB offers quick deployment within Microsoft's cloud ecosystem and strong support, benefiting businesses looking for ease of use and rich documentation. While Milvus provides an easy deployment process, it may require advanced technical knowledge due to its open-source nature. Milvus has scope to improve its support infrastructure.

Pricing and ROI: Azure Cosmos DB’s extensive features come with higher costs, affecting ROI depending on usage. Milvus, being open-source, offers a cost-effective alternative for businesses focusing on AI and machine learning applications. Its potential for higher ROI in AI-centric projects highlights its value proposition compared to traditional database offerings.

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

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus

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

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Ranking in Vector Databases

1st

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)

Milvus

Ranking in Vector Databases

8th

Average Rating

7.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Open Source Databases (8th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 5.0%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Milvus is 7.8%, down from 9.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vector Databases Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB	5.0%
Milvus	7.8%
Other	87.2%

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

"Cosmos is preferred because of its speed, robustness, and utilization. We have all the merchandising information in Cosmos DB, which provides concrete and optimized data when searching for new products on the site. It is faster than other relational databases."

"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is a Microsoft solution specifically, but we can develop with different developer kits for different databases."

"The solution is user friendly and Microsoft's technical support is good."

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

"I would recommend Cosmos. It made our lives a lot easier. There's not a big learning curve in order to understand the structure and how to use it."

"The most valuable features of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB include the TTL, the ability to scale up and down as needed, and geo-replication, which comes out of the box."

"Cosmos DB is a pretty stable solution. I would rate it a ten out of ten."

"Cosmos DB has helped our organization handle large amounts of data."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pros

"I like the accuracy and usability."

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

"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."

Cons

"In that scenario, two things can be improved."

"The UI needs enhancement. Unlike SQL, Cosmos DB's UI is not as straightforward, making it a bit challenging to use efficiently."

"The RUs still appear to be a black box for everyone. Even though they explain read and write RUs, it remains unclear for many users."

"One area for improvement is the ease of writing SQL queries and stored procedures in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB. Writing an SQL query and a stored procedure on top of that is a little challenging."

"Right now, the vectors are stored as floating-point numbers within the NoSQL document, which makes them inefficiently large. This leads to increased storage space requirements, and searching through a vast number of documents in the vector database becomes quite costly in terms of RUs. While the integration works well, the expense associated with it is relatively high. I would really like to see a reduction in costs for their vector search, as it is currently on the expensive side."

"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 would like to see Cosmos DB introduce a feature that would convert machine language to human-readable queries."

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

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB cons

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

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

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

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

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Everything could always be cheaper. I like that Cosmos DB allows us to auto-scale instead of pre-provisioning a certain capacity. It automatically scales to the demand, so we only pay for what we consume."

"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pricing is based on RUs. Reading 1 KB document costs one RU, whereas writing one document costs five RUs. Pricing for querying depends on the complexity of the query. If you increase the document size, it will automatically increase the RU cost."

"If you are a small organization or startup building from scratch without the Microsoft Startup Founder Club support, it could be expensive."

"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."

"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."

"The customer had a high budget, but it turned out to be a little bit cheaper than what they expected. I am not sure how much they have spent so far, but they are satisfied with the pricing."

"It seems to have helped significantly. We were using a different database system previously, and one of the reasons for acquiring Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB was cost."

"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."

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%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Computer Software Company

19%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Chroma vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

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

Google Cloud Bigtable vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 3% of the time

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LanceDB vs Milvus

Compared 15% of the time

Supabase Vector vs Milvus

Compared 11% of the time

Elastic Search vs Milvus

Compared 10% of the time

MongoDB Enterprise Advanced vs Milvus

Compared 9% of the time

MyScale vs Milvus

Compared 2% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

October 2025

Download Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB product report

Buyer's Guide

Open Source Databases

October 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

September 2025

Free Report: Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus

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