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Amazon Aurora vs MariaDB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
5.0
Switching to Amazon Aurora saves costs nearly 30% over RDS while improving performance, reliability, and manpower efficiency by 50%.
Sentiment score
6.3
MariaDB users experience varied ROI, with savings and efficiency gains, plus benefits like support, flexibility, and open-source enhancements.
Using Amazon Aurora has saved us significantly in terms of manpower costs, with nearly fifty percent savings compared to an on-premises solution.
Digital Services & Engagement Senior Manager at AXA
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.6
Amazon Aurora offers varying support quality; enterprise users get prompt help, while free trial users experience limited assistance.
Sentiment score
6.3
MariaDB offers responsive support, but users often rely on in-house teams and community resources due to strong documentation.
Technical support from Amazon is rated very highly.
Digital Services & Engagement Senior Manager at AXA
The initial support could improve by having engineers familiarize themselves with the issue content to provide more specialized assistance from the start.
Associate Vice President - Database Management (Principal Solutions Architect) at Northbay
They came and tuned our queries with one-to-one assistance.
Architect at LTIMindtree
Compared to MongoDB, there are some platform deficiencies, but the support team shouldn't bear that burden.
Co-Founder at Vsigma IT Labs Pvt Ltd
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Amazon Aurora excels in scalability, seamlessly auto-scaling for dynamic environments, though AWS's pricing model has limitations.
Sentiment score
6.9
MariaDB is scalable, reliable for various applications, but may require configuration and enhancements for large datasets and cloud integration.
This scalability is critical as it allows for runtime expansion, which is essential for businesses moving from on-premises to the cloud.
Associate Vice President - Database Management (Principal Solutions Architect) at Northbay
Regarding scalability and the ability to scale, I would give it a 9.5 out of ten.
Principal Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Amazon Aurora is stable with occasional minor issues, offering high availability and reliability for MySQL and PostgreSQL engines.
Sentiment score
7.8
MariaDB is highly rated for stability, handling thousands without downtime, needing minimal maintenance but precise tuning for large instances.
I would rate the stability of Amazon Aurora as a nine out of ten.
Principal Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It offers a stable environment, ensuring consistent performance.
Associate Vice President - Database Management (Principal Solutions Architect) at Northbay
We haven't found issues with the stability of MariaDB.
Co-Founder at Vsigma IT Labs Pvt Ltd
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon Aurora users seek better pricing, expanded support, smoother migrations, and improvements in performance, scalability, and developer resources.
MariaDB needs better integration, scalability, UI, stability, support, replication, compatibility, and cost-effective licensing to enhance enterprise functionality.
A cost reduction would support multiple teams to adopt this solution since the cost is currently higher.
Principal Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Keeping extensions up-to-date with PostgreSQL releases would enhance Aurora's functionality.
Associate Vice President - Database Management (Principal Solutions Architect) at Northbay
There are technical challenges, such as the inability to provision the database using a PostgreSQL snapshot directly.
Digital Services & Engagement Senior Manager at AXA
MariaDB is scalable and easy to scale.
Co-Founder at Vsigma IT Labs Pvt Ltd
Oracle is very advanced compared to MariaDB, and those advanced features are not available in MariaDB.
Architect at LTIMindtree
 

Setup Cost

Amazon Aurora provides flexible, cost-effective pricing with notable performance benefits, though some consider it expensive compared to self-managed solutions.
Enterprise buyers praise MariaDB for its cost-effectiveness and flexibility, often choosing the free version to avoid licensing fees.
The pricing for Amazon Aurora is different from DocumentDB because DocumentDB is cheaper.
Data & Solution Archtect at Enkel
The pricing is reasonable and not overly expensive.
Digital Services & Engagement Senior Manager at AXA
Amazon Aurora is not very expensive as other solutions with similar features from other vendors come at almost the same cost.
Associate Vice President - Database Management (Principal Solutions Architect) at Northbay
MariaDB is in the pricey range, especially for huge databases handling terabytes of data.
Co-Founder at Vsigma IT Labs Pvt Ltd
 

Valuable Features

Amazon Aurora offers automated maintenance, high scalability, and compatibility, ideal for diverse databases and efficient FinOps management.
MariaDB is a reliable, scalable open-source database excelling in performance, compatibility, and support for diverse environments and analytics.
The functions I have found most valuable in Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL are features that are not available in normal RDS PostgreSQL, particularly for scaling and restoration purposes in the event of failure.
Principal Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It replicates data across multiple Availability Zones, ensuring high availability and geographical redundancy, which can be considered a GR instead of a DR.
Associate Vice President - Database Management (Principal Solutions Architect) at Northbay
Amazon Aurora offers a 99.9% SLA compared to PostgreSQL. This ensures a high level of availability for our applications.
Digital Services & Engagement Senior Manager at AXA
Encryption is available in MariaDB, so we are secure for transmitting data without concern about moving over networks.
Architect at LTIMindtree
Configuration, setup, and schema design are good features in MariaDB.
Co-Founder at Vsigma IT Labs Pvt Ltd
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Aurora
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Database Management Systems (DBMS) (6th)
MariaDB
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
8th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
61
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of Amazon Aurora is 3.2%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of MariaDB is 3.7%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Relational Databases Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon Aurora3.2%
MariaDB3.7%
Other93.1%
Relational Databases Tools
 

Featured Reviews

SivashankarRajaram - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Cloud database has delivered high performance and cost savings for data recovery and growth
Amazon can make better access levels and reduce costs for Amazon Aurora. A cost reduction would support multiple teams to adopt this solution since the cost is currently higher. Comparatively, we have the feature of scaling and everything we need. If you launch PostgreSQL on-premises, you need to have a separate DBA for maintenance and everything. If Amazon reduces the cost of Amazon Aurora, it would support large team adoption. A great feature to see in the next version of Amazon Aurora would be improvements in vectorization. In our PostgreSQL, we have pg_vector that helps with vectorizing many of the tables and that is used for data science projects. If Amazon improves this vectorization, it would be much more useful for data science and AI projects.
AB
Co-Founder at Vsigma IT Labs Pvt Ltd
Has supported web application data needs but requires design adjustments to manage complex queries efficiently
Complex queries in MariaDB where the query needs to parse thousands of lines or data values face some performance issues. For small and medium-size volume, it is pretty good. If it goes beyond certain data and complex queries, we see performance issues. We tried the advanced replication feature between different regions, replicating data specifically residing on MariaDB to two different regions of MariaDB data, and there were some technical snags in terms of slowness and longer processing time. Point-in-time recovery in MariaDB is good for small databases. When data volume increases beyond 5 GB or 10 GB per day or runs into double-digit GBs, we found some performance issues. For data below 10 GB, it works fine. Performance is the primary focus area for MariaDB, particularly during transactions or complex query jobs where slow performance is observed. MariaDB is scalable and easy to scale.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
University
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise26
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Aurora?
The pricing for Amazon Aurora is different from DocumentDB because DocumentDB is cheaper. However, when you manage the administration more closely, you can control costs better with Amazon Aurora. ...
What needs improvement with Amazon Aurora?
I would like to see some tutorials from Amazon for Aurora because I'm too new to it. I believe Amazon can make more tutorials for the product since there's a lot of reading required, and a short tu...
What is your primary use case for Amazon Aurora?
The migration process to Amazon Aurora is the best part; it's one of its key strengths, as we hardly had any hiccups during migration, which was very smooth and pretty straightforward given our dat...
What do you like most about MariaDB?
The integration with other products is seamless.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for MariaDB?
MariaDB is in the pricey range, especially for huge databases handling terabytes of data. The cost depends on the volume of data and different features enabled during configuration, such as backup ...
What needs improvement with MariaDB?
Sometimes, complex queries that were supported in Oracle are not available in MariaDB. Advanced indexing is not available. Oracle is very advanced compared to MariaDB, and those advanced features a...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Dow Jones, Arizona State University, Verizon, Capital One, United Nations, Nielsen, Autodesk, Fanduel
Google, Wikipedia, Tencent, Verizon, DBS Bank, Deutsche Bank, Telefónica, Huatai Securities
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Aurora vs. MariaDB and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.