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Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pros and cons

Vendor: Microsoft

4.1 out of 5

103 reviews
95% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is a highly scalable platform supporting integration with existing tools. It delivers speed with low latency, enabling enhanced query capabilities. Geo-replication ensures reliability, while multiple APIs enhance versatility. However, users face complex pricing, limited technical support, and integration challenges. Backup and restore need improvement, and indexing can be costly. Despite global capabilities, buyers should consider these complexities when evaluating Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB for their needs.

Buyer's Guide

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Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is highly valued for its scalability, allowing seamless adaptation to various concurrency and data update demands.

The platform offers excellent latency and high availability, providing real-time access and ensuring optimal performance for critical applications.

Users appreciate the flexible schema support, which simplifies data management and integration across different data models and use cases.

The robust security features and reliability of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, including geo-replication, enhance data protection and global accessibility.

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB allows for efficient data storage and retrieval, particularly with its ability to handle large volumes of unstructured data quickly.

CONS

Query complexity in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB can be challenging and requires improvement, particularly for non-traditional use cases and integration with MongoDB.

Documentation and support for integration with other services, such as Databricks, are insufficient, and many users report difficulty understanding the pricing model.

The pricing model of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is complicated and expensive compared to competitors, and auto-scaling features could offer more granular control.

The lack of seamless integration with other databases and support for cross-container joins complicates the data retrieval process.

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's documentation, particularly around indexing and RU consumption, is inadequate and needs enhancement to make it more cost-effective for users.

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB Pros review quotes

reviewer2542083

CEO at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees

Sep 9, 2024

Change feed is a pretty amazing feature. Once you make the changes, they are quickly read for you, and then you also have geo-replication. You can do a lot of things in your region, and the same regions can be replicated all over the world.

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Chief Technology Officer at Portnox

Sep 17, 2024

We chose Azure Cosmos DB initially because of the type of data that we needed to store. We have a schema that is very nondeterministic and flexible. It is always changing based on whatever data we need to acquire from different devices, so we needed a document store with a flexible schema.

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

Oct 25, 2024

The most valuable feature of Azure Cosmos DB is its scalability. That is the biggest reason I use Azure Cosmos DB.

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Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

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Lead Cloud Architect at Solliance, Inc

Oct 24, 2024

The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is its ability to handle concurrency and consistency.

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Founder and CEO at Amped Data Solutions

Sep 30, 2024

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.

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CTO at Zero Friction

Sep 26, 2024

It gives us a lot of flexibility. The scaling is instantaneous as well. You immediately have all the resources available.

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reviewer2724105

Senior Director of Product Management at Sitecore

Jun 18, 2025

The efficiency of search capabilities is significant, particularly when it comes to the flexibility of conducting in-depth, almost recursive searches that are both efficient and cost-effective.

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CTO at Kinectify

Sep 9, 2024

The querying language and the SDKs they've provided over the years have been phenomenal, giving us a significant advantage.

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AK

Aditya Jitendra Kshirsagar

Software Engineer at BrowserStack

Apr 25, 2025

The best part of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is that with the default configuration and the Azure functional pipeline, if your go-to cloud provider is Microsoft Azure, the whole integration is seamless.

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CTO at MarketOnce

Dec 16, 2024

The fact that scalability can be achieved by simply configuring availability zones is very attractive.

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Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB Cons review quotes

reviewer2542083

CEO at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees

Sep 9, 2024

In the long run, there should be an addition of more features, especially because this space is evolving quickly. It all boils down to how many more features you are adding, how many integrations you are supporting, and how many more APIs you have that are standard APIs.

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Chief Technology Officer at Portnox

Sep 17, 2024

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.

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

Oct 25, 2024

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.

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Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

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Learn what your peers think about Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: October 2025.

872,655 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Lead Cloud Architect at Solliance, Inc

Oct 24, 2024

The first one is the ability to assign role-based access control through the Azure portal for accounts to have contributor rights.

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Founder and CEO at Amped Data Solutions

Sep 30, 2024

It is easy to use, but optimization has been a mixed experience. It has been more of trying to figure out how to do so. We have not found much support there, so we have to come up with our own way of optimizing it in different ways. That is one area of improvement.

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CTO at Zero Friction

Sep 26, 2024

There are multiple approaches to implementing multitenant architecture on Azure Cosmos DB, but there is still no single or best-recommended approach when you have a big variance in the size of your tenants. That is something that still needs to be worked on.

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reviewer2724105

Senior Director of Product Management at Sitecore

Jun 18, 2025

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.

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CTO at Kinectify

Sep 9, 2024

Azure Cosmos DB could be better for business intelligence and analytical queries.

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AK

Aditya Jitendra Kshirsagar

Software Engineer at BrowserStack

Apr 25, 2025

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.

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CTO at MarketOnce

Dec 16, 2024

An improvement could include increasing the document size or providing a method to manage larger sets efficiently. If they want to keep a 2 MB limit, they should provide a way to chain multiple documents in a systematic way so that developers do not have to figure out what to do when a document is larger than 2 MB.

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