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Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs ScyllaDB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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 NoSQL Databases
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
109
Ranking in other categories
Database as a Service (DBaaS) (4th), Managed NoSQL Databases (1st), Vector Databases (1st)
ScyllaDB
Ranking in NoSQL Databases
4th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the NoSQL Databases category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 6.3%, up from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ScyllaDB is 7.3%, down from 10.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
NoSQL Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB6.3%
ScyllaDB7.3%
Other86.4%
NoSQL Databases
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2724105 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Director of Product Management at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Provides super sharp latency, excellent availability, and the ability to effectively manage costs across different tenants
For integrating Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB with other Azure products or other products, there are a couple of challenges with the current system. 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. The areas for improvement in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB are vector pricing and vector indexing patterns, which are unintuitive and not well described. I would also like to see the parameters of Fleet Spaces made more powerful, as currently, it's somewhat lightweight. I believe they've made those changes intentionally to better understand the cost model. However, we would like to take a more aggressive approach in using it. One of the most frustrating aspects of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB right now is that you can only store one vector per document. Additionally, you must specify the configuration of that vector when you create an instance of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB. Once the database is set up, you can't change the vector configuration, which is incredibly limiting for experimentation. You want the ability to try different settings and see how they perform, as there are numerous use cases for storing more than one vector in a document. While interoperability within the vector database is acceptable—for example, I can search for vectors—I still desire a richer set of configuration options.
Manikandan Gunasekaran - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Engineering at Ola
Reliable data management with great reliability and performance
From a sales pitch standpoint, it needs to deliver on promises of better ROI and compaction. Additionally, ticketing and support systems could be improved due to the time it takes to get answers. There's also an issue with compatibility when attempting to switch back from the enterprise to the community version.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 best feature is the velocity to make a query."
"Our customer is very satisfied with it."
"Switching to the cloud significantly improved scalability, flexibility, and uptime."
"I truly recommend Cosmos DB because it is a serverless product."
"We achieved a strong return on investment."
"For example, we have people spread across multiple locations; if they update data in Australia, we can access it in another location within a fraction of a second."
"I like the scalability, there aren't any constraints for posting in the geolocation, and I also like the SQL architecture."
"The performance and scalability are good, and we hardly see any major issues with ScyllaDB."
"ScyllaDB is very fast, and I can use it for so many things."
"Firstly, if I update something, it's most likely to finish within milliseconds."
"It is lightweight, and it requires less infrastructure."
"The performance aspects of Scylla are good, as always... A good point about Scylla is that it can be used extensively."
"ScyllaDB allows fine-tuning of the table structure. Speed is probably the most critical factor because we perform a lot of heavy data ingestion. One of its core features is its ability to handle high volumes and maintain speed when accessing data. Additionally, high availability and partitioning are built-in features of ScyllaDB."
"ScyllaDB is fast and reliable. It has good performance."
"The best features of ScyllaDB are how it synchronizes data and its failover system. There's a unique formula to decide the number of nodes you need and the minimum required, which I find helpful. It also offers encryption and supports APIs, making it great for distributed systems and scaling databases across different regions. While it's easy to use, having prior experience helps configure it properly. There are many configurations; if you don't understand them, you might mess up the design. So, understanding your system's needs, like whether it requires more read or write operations, is crucial for setting up the correct configuration."
 

Cons

"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."
"The challenge for us is always scale."
"The current data analytics of Cosmos DB is inefficient for large-scale queries due to its transactional design."
"The one thing that I have been working on with Microsoft with regard to this is the ability to easily split partitions and have it do high-performance cross-partition queries. That is the only place where either our data size or our throughput has grown beyond one partition, so being able to do cross-partition queries efficiently would be my number one request."
"I have to say technical support is not very good as it takes too long. Sometimes it can take them two or three days to respond to your ticket."
"I would like the speed of transferring data to 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."
"At this stage, we would like more enterprise support. We use MongoDB a lot, and we're trying to get rid of MongoDB, so I would like to see more features in the Cosmos DB API for MongoDB space."
"The documentation of Scylla is an area with shortcomings and needs to be improved."
"ScyllaDB needs to improve its handling of transactions."
"It seems we have better options available. So probably don't go for ScyllaDB. The reason is, first, it's very high. It's not as straightforward as, like, Postgres or ClickHouse to set up. It requires a complex setup."
"From a sales pitch standpoint, it needs to deliver on promises of better ROI and compaction."
"If you don't have the best computing resources, then it's not easy to set up. In such cases, we have to run ScyllaDB in developer mode."
"The documentation is not well established for new developers."
"Some of the regular commands in NoSQL do not work."
"We faced several challenges while integrating ScyllaDB into our AWS environment. One common issue was that a security port wasn’t opened on one node, preventingdata synchronization across clusters. We noticed the data wasn’t syncing correctly when we saw different record counts in other regions. After investigating, we found that the port was closed in one AWS region. Once we opened the port, the data synchronization across all nodes resumed as expected."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is not expensive."
"The solution is a bit on the expensive side."
"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 pricing for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is good. Initially, it seemed like an expensive way to manage a NoSQL data store, but so many improvements that have been made to the platform have made it cost-effective."
"Cosmos DB is a highly cost-optimized solution when used correctly."
"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 and licensing model was initially difficult to understand, but as soon as I learned what was going on and how it was priced, it was pretty easy."
"It is cost-efficient as long as you understand the right setup to optimize usage. Knowing the data needs of the organization and adjusting the Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB usage accordingly helps save costs, but if you don't know, you could end up spending more than necessary."
"It's free."
"I believe that there is a yearly licensing cost and that it's expensive."
"It is an expensive tool compared to its competitor."
"The paid version of ScyllaDB is not that expensive. The main advantage of the paid version is direct support from the ScyllaDB team, which can resolve issues faster—typically within a day, compared to two to three days with the free version. The paid version also offers better guidance and support, while the free version has good documentation and is more high-level. I’d rate their support team nine out of ten because of the quick responses from their community."
"It's a bit expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Legal Firm
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise58
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise8
 

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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's pricing model has aligned with my budget expectations because I can tune the RU as I need to, which helps a lot. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's dynamic auto-scale or server...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
I have not utilized Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB multi-model support for handling diverse data types. I'm not in the position to decide if clients will use Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB or any other datab...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Scylla?
From what I’ve seen (and experienced), ScyllaDB pricing is very dependent on how you deploy it, and that’s where most of the confusion comes from.
What needs improvement with Scylla?
From a sales pitch standpoint, it needs to deliver on promises of better ROI and compaction. Additionally, ticketing and support systems could be improved due to the time it takes to get answers. T...
What is your primary use case for Scylla?
We dump a lot of our data, such as every entry created with respect to when a user rides a scooter, every record gets updated to ScyllaDB. It is used as a single source of truth and it manages mass...
 

Also Known As

Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

TomTom, KPMG Australia, Bosch, ASOS, Mercedes Benz, NBA, Zero Friction, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Kinectify
IBM, Investing.com, mParticle, Comcast, GE, Fanatics, Ola, CERN, adgear, Samsung
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. ScyllaDB and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.