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Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs SkySQL comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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 Database as a Service (DBaaS)
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
110
Ranking in other categories
NoSQL Databases (1st), Managed NoSQL Databases (1st), Vector Databases (1st)
SkySQL
Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)
16th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 4.9%, up from 2.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SkySQL is 0.5%. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Database as a Service (DBaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB4.9%
SkySQL0.5%
Other94.6%
Database as a Service (DBaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Michael Hasenfang - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Platform Engineering - Infrastructure Systems and Automation at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Collecting compliance data has become more efficient while managing unstructured inputs for reporting
The features that I find most valuable within Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB are probably the cost, as the cost optimization is good. The storage and queryability are good for what we're doing; it's a lot of unstructured data, so having a platform to put that in and then be able to harvest that data out for the reporting we do is essential. In terms of cost saving, it was probably easily 30 to 40% cheaper than doing a standard SQL, which is what we saw just on piloting and getting in there. We were initially thinking 20 to 25%, but we were probably more at the 35 to 40%. We are using Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's hybrid search today. The value that it has added to my AI or search workloads is that I think it's optimized that process and made it easier. We have a lot of unstructured data coming from different dissimilar systems and different data sources, so correlating those things together and making sense of it has been very beneficial. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB has had pretty good performance with searching through large amounts of data; it's been fast, and we haven't seen a lot of performance degradation while building larger queries and bringing in a large set of data. The dynamic auto-scale or serverless model from Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB has helped reduce costs and operational effort; however, it's hard to quantify how that plays out since you're using a shared service. It shifts my focus away from building, managing, and upgrading to adding value.
Shubham-Agarwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager - Projects at Cognizant
Cloud database has reduced infrastructure effort and now lets us focus on clean transactional data
Currently, we have not identified significant improvement areas for SkySQL. However, enhanced AI functionality would be beneficial. We use AI in Snowflake but not in SkySQL. If SkySQL could write SQL queries automatically using AI or improve SQL query performance, this would be valuable for future use cases.When comparing SkySQL to other databases such as Databricks and Snowflake, these platforms offer more AI-related functionality and data lineage capabilities, allowing visibility of the complete data journey from source to target. SkySQL currently lacks data lineage functionality. Since we transform data using stored procedures and views, implementing data lineage functionality would help us track the complete journey of data from source through all intermediate transformation steps to the final layer. I rate SkySQL an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is easy to use and implement for application programmers."
"What I like about Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is that it's easy to do data ingestion and use the data in different applications. If you talk about business intelligence such as the Power BI tool, it's easy to connect because both are Microsoft products. With Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, it's easy to connect and do data ingestion."
"What I appreciate most are the latency and the access, which are guaranteed by the tool, which is really impressive."
"Big data, along with data analysis, is one of the valuable features."
"The most valuable feature of Azure Cosmos DB is its scalability. That is the biggest reason I use Azure Cosmos DB."
"Cosmos DB has helped our organization handle large amounts of data."
"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 gives us a lot of flexibility. The scaling is instantaneous as well. You immediately have all the resources available."
"SkySQL is easy to use and has reliable performance, offering scalability and fast execution."
"We never face performance issues, and backup and scalability are all managed automatically, which has significantly improved our SLA."
"Compared with all of these options, we concluded that SkySQL is one of the best solutions addressing those criteria."
"In my experience, the best feature that SkySQL offers is a fully managed database service which reduces operational overhead, along with its high availability and automatic failover for business-critical applications, and its scalability to handle growing data volumes and overloads, plus automated backups and disaster recovery capabilities."
 

Cons

"It would be ideal if we could integrate Cosmos DB with our Databricks. At this point, that's not possible."
"We had some performance issues with a data segregation query. We worked closely with Microsoft to solve the problem of performance where, for example, one query had a delay of almost two or three minutes for this one use case. Microsoft tried to improve the product, but in the end, the solution was to change to MongoDB. MongoDB had better performance."
"There is room for improvement in terms of stability."
"One of our biggest pain points is the backup and restore functionality needs improvement. They've gotten a little better in this area. SQL Server's long-term retention is amazing, and you can restore data from years ago. You need to open a support Microsoft ticket to restore your Cosmos DB backup, and it comes in on a different Cosmos account. It's just kind of a headache to restore data."
"Cosmos DB is expensive, and the RU-based pricing model is confusing."
"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."
"Cosmos DB should continue evolving in AI features. We expect Cosmos DB to lead on that. There is potential for improved security features, which is important for data storage, especially for Dell Technologies. We must ensure data security remains the top priority."
"The tool's pricing is expensive."
"When comparing SkySQL to other databases such as Databricks and Snowflake, these platforms offer more AI-related functionality and data lineage capabilities, allowing visibility of the complete data journey from source to target."
"It is still early in our evaluation of SkySQL, so we do not have major concerns, but if anything, we would like to see even better documentation, onboarding guidance, and monitoring capabilities to make adoption and ongoing management easier."
"More end-to-end deployment guides, additional reference architectures, dashboards, and more proactive performance tuning recommendations would make the platform even easier to adapt and manage."
"I believe one area for improvement would be more advanced monitoring and reporting features."
 

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."
"Azure is a pay as you go subscription."
"The Cosmos DB pricing model, initially quite complicated, became clear after consulting with Azure Advisor, allowing us to proceed with confidence."
"The solution is a bit on the expensive side."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is moderately priced, where it is neither expensive nor cheap."
"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."
"The pricing for Cosmos DB has improved, particularly with the new pricing for Autoscale."
"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."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Legal Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
32%
Construction Company
31%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Transportation Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise58
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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 primary use case for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
We have a very large team of developers who develop a solution for our customers. In the part where they need some infrastructure on Microsoft Azure, we deploy entire environments of different type...
What needs improvement with SkySQL?
Currently, we have not identified significant improvement areas for SkySQL. However, enhanced AI functionality would be beneficial. We use AI in Snowflake but not in SkySQL. If SkySQL could write S...
What is your primary use case for SkySQL?
SkySQL serves as our transactional layer where we store metadata for all our applications before moving data into our Snowflake database. We receive transactional data from various applications, st...
What advice do you have for others considering SkySQL?
Reducing our team size has significantly affected efficiency and costs for our organization. This cost efficiency benefit resulted from replacing two infrastructure team members since the infrastru...
 

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
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. SkySQL and other solutions. Updated: July 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.