Amazon Aurora vs MariaDB comparison

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Amazon Aurora

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

MariaDB and Amazon Aurora compete in the database category. Amazon Aurora appears to have an upper hand due to its superior cloud-integration features and managed environment efficiencies.

Features: MariaDB is known for its flexibility and ease of use, driven by its open-source nature. It supports ColumnStore and Connect Engine, enhancing analytic workloads. Users can adjust performance parameters in real-time. Amazon Aurora offers a managed environment with compatibility for MySQL and advanced features like auto-scaling and high availability. Its integration with AWS services and fault tolerance are strong advantages.

Room for Improvement: MariaDB needs better scalability, redundancy, BI tool integrations, and improved stability for handling large-scale data. Amazon Aurora could improve its pricing model, offer better performance insights, and focus more on developer needs. While AWS management is beneficial, there is room for improvement in cryptography, scalability features, and cost management.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: MariaDB is commonly deployed on-premises, offering ease of setup with low external support needs, relying significantly on community support. Amazon Aurora thrives in cloud environments, supported by AWS’s robust infrastructure, offering significant benefits in deployment and integration with cloud services.

Pricing and ROI: MariaDB's open-source offering reduces costs, advantageous for budget-conscious operations, although enterprise versions require licensing. Amazon Aurora is costly but cost-effective for enterprises valuing cloud features and reduced administrative efforts. Both databases offer operational efficiencies and cost savings providing significant ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Aurora vs. MariaDB Report (Updated: April 2025).

Amazon Aurora vs. MariaDB

April 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

Amazon Aurora

Ranking in Relational Databases Tools

7th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

MariaDB

Ranking in Relational Databases Tools

5th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Open Source Databases (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of Amazon Aurora is 3.1%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of MariaDB is 6.8%, down from 9.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Relational Databases Tools

Featured Reviews

Adnan Shafiq

Associate Vice President - Database Management (Principal Solutions Architect) at Northbay

High availability and geographical redundancy ensure reliable performance and cost efficiency

Amazon Aurora ( /products/amazon-aurora-reviews ) provides up to fifteen to sixteen read replicas. It replicates data across multiple Availability Zones, ensuring high availability and geographical redundancy, which can be considered a GR instead of a DR. As a managed service, maintenance tasks like backup and restore are handled by AWS ( /products/amazon-aws-reviews ), saving my organization significant time and money. Additionally, its fast cloning feature allows us to create a new clone from a large database swiftly, similar to a zero-copy cloning feature in Snowflake ( /products/snowflake-reviews ). This makes Amazon Aurora a compelling choice for my organization.

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KumarManish

Senior Technical Manager at Johnson Controls, Inc.

Easy to deploy, cost-effective, and integrates seamlessly with other products

We had planned for an RDBMS version and not NoSQL. We use MariaDB Galera Cluster. It's a good product. It is cheap, scalable, performs well, and is efficient. We use GCP’s BigQuery for machine learning. We must follow the best practices of the tool. We missed some best practices like the storage engine and InnoDB. It was very difficult to identify why we were having performance issues. Then, we realized that some of our tables were still on MyISAM, the default storage engine. When we switched it back to the InnoDB, it was very smooth. InnoDB is the recommended one. We must follow the best practices given in the documentation during the initial setup. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

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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

"Aurora's compatibility with MySQL or PostgreSQL benefited our database management. The migration from on-premise MySQL to Aurora was similar, so we didn't need to change our source code."

"My overall experience with Amazon Aurora is very positive. I rate it ten out of ten for its reliability and efficiency."

"Aurora is a key pillar for us, offering performance and availability."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to do multiple-read and single-write. These are the kinds of features that we were interested in, and Aurora takes care of that natively."

"Amazon Aurora is built on community databases and AWS has added additional features to it, allowing customers to have enterprise-level features at a lower cost."

"We had better control over the parameters that we could tweak in terms of intermediate storage and better indexing capabilities."

"The most valuable feature of Amazon Aurora is SQL standardization, it doesn't have its own syntax which is good. It has a lot of hands-off self-management type of activities, such as log rolling and auto-scaling."

"The provision of custom read and write endpoints eliminates the need for managing a separate proxy load balancer."

More Amazon Aurora pros

"It is a stable solution."

"The solution's high availability is its most valuable aspect."

"The solution's features have effectively met our operational requirements as a standard SQL database."

"The documentation is quite straightforward."

"What I like best about MariaDB is that it is open-source and reliable."

"MariaDB is a user-friendly solution. Performance wise, it's better than SQL. With SQL, I would need to write a number of queries. In contrast, MariaDB is light."

"It is a scalable solution. It easily scales up and scales down."

"MariaDB is scalable."

More MariaDB pros

Cons

"It would have been helpful if they had provided some benchmarking numbers."

"The product's distributed query process for MySQL needs improvement."

"The pricing could improve. It should be reduced."

"A challenge I noticed is during migration from PostgreSQL RDS to Amazon Aurora. There are technical challenges, such as the inability to provision the database using a PostgreSQL snapshot directly."

"There is improvement needed to have more developer focus. Additionally, it would be helpful to have a stand-alone solution outside of Amazon. Amazon has a tendency to favor developing web-based clients, which may not always provide the fastest or most responsive solution as desired."

"I would like to see more AI-related features in future releases."

"Amazon Aurora should upgrade its base PostgreSQL versions more frequently and offer all PostgreSQL extensions."

"There are tuning challenges."

More Amazon Aurora cons

"Document caching is an area of concern in the product, where improvements are required to help MariaDB improve on the previous queries as they are retained, and you can roll back to them."

"Maria DB has to improve from a management perspective."

"The PL/SQL performance is slow if you have big batch jobs running overnight."

"Data continuity could be improved."

"The features available are very basic."

"When we have had issues with accidental computer shutdown or a power outage, our MariaDB database was corrupted."

"MariaDB's GUI is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required."

"The stability could always continue to be improved upon."

More MariaDB cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is no need to buy a license for the product. We can pay as per the use case."

"The price could be lower compared to its competitors."

"The tool’s pricing depends on the instance type. For cost optimization purposes, we use the result instance category."

"I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, with ten being expensive."

"It is quite expensive."

"It is an expensive solution."

"MariaDB is a free-to-use solution."

"MariaDB is an open-source software, meaning I don't need to pay for the product."

"It is free of charge."

"The solution is free, but if you want the enterprise version you will need to pay for some licenses but the cost is less than other solutions, such as Oracle."

"The price could be less expensive."

"I rate the product's price a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price, and ten is high price since there are some support costs involved, even though it isn't an open-source solution."

"There is a monthly subscription to use MariaDB."

"We pay for a yearly license."

More MariaDB pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

29%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Aurora?

Aurora's compatibility with MySQL or PostgreSQL benefited our database management. The migration from on-premise MySQL to Aurora was similar, so we didn't need to change our source code.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Aurora?

Amazon Aurora is not very expensive as other solutions with similar features from other vendors come at almost the same cost. I rated it as two to three on a scale where ten is very expensive.

What needs improvement with Amazon Aurora?

Amazon Aurora should upgrade its base PostgreSQL ( /products/postgresql-reviews ) versions more frequently and offer all PostgreSQL extensions. Keeping extensions up-to-date with PostgreSQL release...

What do you like most about MariaDB?

The integration with other products is seamless.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for MariaDB?

I have found the price of commercial MariaDB to be pretty steep, although not as high as Oracle. Customers often prefer the Community Edition because it's free.

What needs improvement with MariaDB?

The only potential area for improvement could be the pricing model, which might benefit from being more flexible or a bit cheaper.

SQL Server vs Amazon Aurora

Comparisons

Compared 34% of the time

Oracle Database vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 23% of the time

Citus Data vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 7% of the time

YugabyteDB vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 7% of the time

CockroachDB vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 5% of the time

More Amazon Aurora Competitors

SQL Server vs MariaDB

Compared 24% of the time

Firebird SQL vs MariaDB

Compared 23% of the time

PostgreSQL vs MariaDB

Compared 13% of the time

Oracle Database vs MariaDB

Compared 10% of the time

CockroachDB vs MariaDB

Compared 2% of the time

More MariaDB Competitors

Product Reports

Download Amazon Aurora product report

Amazon Aurora

May 2025

Download MariaDB product report

May 2025

Overview

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.

Amazon Aurora is up to five times faster than standard MySQL databases and three times faster than standard PostgreSQL databases. It provides the security, availability, and reliability of commercial databases at 1/10th the cost. Amazon Aurora is fully managed by Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), which automates time-consuming administration tasks like hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.

Amazon Aurora features a distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system that auto-scales up to 64TB per database instance. It delivers high performance and availability with up to 15 low-latency read replicas, point-in-time recovery, continuous backup to Amazon S3, and replication across three Availability Zones (AZs).

Visit the Amazon RDS Management Console to create your first Aurora database instance and start migrating your MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

MariaDB is an open source relational database created by the original founders of MySQL. It is considered one of the most popular and trusted database servers throughout the world. MariaDB is a valued component found in most cloud offerings and is the default in many Linux tools. It is also widely used by Wikipedia, WordPress, and Google, among other well-known sites. Maria DB easily melds data into concise information from a vast array of applications, such as banking, online shopping, websites, and more.

MariaDB was originally created to improve MySQL performance. It is the most widely chosen database server due to the solution being super fast, robust, user-friendly, and easily scalable. MariaDB also offers a substantial ecosystem of plugins, storage engines, and numerous other valuable tools that make it very attractive for a significant offering of use cases.

The solution’s newest functionalities include compatibility with Oracle Database and Temporal Data Tables, and advanced clustering with Galera Cluster 4, which make it easier for users to research data history from any point in the past. Additionally, the most recent versions include JSON and GIS features. MariaDB is committed to staying an open source solution.

MariaDB Features

More storage: MariaDB works with more storage engines than MySQL and most other database servers available. Some storage options include, but are not limited to ARCHIVE, MERGE, CSV, MEMORY, BLACKHOLE, MyISAM, ColumnStore, MyRocks, and Cassandra.
Super fast: MariaDB offers faster authentication checks. The FlushSSL permits SSL certificates to be reloaded without a server restart, resulting in huge time savings.
Improved testing: MariaDB offers an extending testing suite that runs faster and can test more than ever before. Bugs can be easily fixed and invalid tests removed.
Genuinely open source: Every code in MariaDB is GPL, LGPL, or BSD. Client libraries [for Windows (ODBC), Java (JDBC), or C] allow linking to closed source software. All fixed bug cases and development plans are completely public. MariaDB is a community-developed solution representing the true spirit of open source products.

Reviews from Real Users

Faustine C., Engineering Supervisor- Corporate Data Solutions and Services at TZ Telecoms Corporation, shares, “The software provides a lot of information on what is happening inside the database. For most performance parameters it is easy to know if something is not right in the configuration or optimization which helps engineers take remedial fine-tuning measures. For example, if the database is underperforming it is easy to know which performance parameter can be adjusted to handle the workload. It is difficult to troubleshoot database issues if many performance parameters can not be monitored or debugged which is the case with some database management systems. It provides great monitoring of data storage, processing, and performance stability which is really important for real-time data storage and processing. It's a user-friendly product.”

A PeerSpot user who is a Senior Engineer at a tech services company relates, “ The solution's high availability is its most valuable aspect. We have found the product to be stable and the initial setup is pretty simple. I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten. I'm very happy with it overall. I would recommend the solution to others. It's easy to find details about the product online and to learn about it.”

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