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Amazon Aurora vs MySQL 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
7.4
Switching to Amazon Aurora saved 30% in costs and improved performance, reducing operational expenses and enhancing customer satisfaction.
Sentiment score
6.6
MySQL offers cost-effective implementation with high ROI potential, enhancing productivity despite potential higher commercial version costs.
Using Amazon Aurora has saved us significantly in terms of manpower costs, with nearly fifty percent savings compared to an on-premises solution.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.6
Amazon Aurora offers responsive support for premium subscribers, with enterprise-level 24/7 assistance, though access varies for personal accounts.
Sentiment score
6.8
MySQL's open-source model encourages users to rely on community resources, though official support is valued for complex issues.
Technical support from Amazon is rated very highly.
The initial support could improve by having engineers familiarize themselves with the issue content to provide more specialized assistance from the start.
We have no issues and usually receive timely responses.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
Amazon Aurora seamlessly scales to meet high-performance demands, handling large data volumes efficiently, vital for growing businesses.
Sentiment score
6.8
MySQL scales well for small to medium apps, but larger databases require manual effort and third-party solutions for scalability.
This scalability is critical as it allows for runtime expansion, which is essential for businesses moving from on-premises to the cloud.
Meeting scalability requirements through cloud computing is an expensive affair.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Amazon Aurora maintains high reliability and performance, with occasional downtimes, quickly resolving initial bugs for minimal user interruptions.
Sentiment score
7.7
MySQL is praised for its stability and reliability, suitable for small to medium applications, despite some memory concerns.
It offers a stable environment, ensuring consistent performance.
We face certain integration issues, especially when we integrate the database with security solutions like IBM QRadar.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon Aurora users seek better pricing, Oracle integration, enhanced AI features, scalability, PostgreSQL extensions, and improved serverless query tools.
MySQL users seek better scalability, cloud integration, advanced features, improved performance, reliable clustering, and enhanced security and backup processes.
There are technical challenges, such as the inability to provision the database using a PostgreSQL snapshot directly.
Keeping extensions up-to-date with PostgreSQL releases would enhance Aurora's functionality.
It could be more beneficial if MySQL can enhance its data masking functionality in the same way it has improved data encryption.
Oracle could improve on scalability.
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users find Amazon Aurora's pricing reasonable, cost-effective compared to similar products, though costly versus self-managed solutions.
MySQL provides cost-effective solutions, appealing to enterprises with open-source options and commercial licenses based on business needs.
The pricing is reasonable and not overly expensive.
Amazon Aurora is not very expensive as other solutions with similar features from other vendors come at almost the same cost.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon Aurora offers scalability, AWS integration, high availability, speed, and features enhancing performance, cost-efficiency, and operational ease.
MySQL's open-source, cross-platform compatibility and ease of use make it ideal for startups due to scalability and cost-effectiveness.
Amazon Aurora offers a 99.9% SLA compared to PostgreSQL. This ensures a high level of availability for our applications.
It replicates data across multiple Availability Zones, ensuring high availability and geographical redundancy, which can be considered a GR instead of a DR.
With Oracle, we have to buy another solution for encryption and masking, but MySQL supports native encryption, which enhances our return on investment.
It allows programming, writing stored procedures, creating views, constraints, and triggers easily.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Aurora
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
7th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
MySQL
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
149
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (2nd)
 

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 MySQL is 8.4%, down from 8.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Relational Databases Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Harvinder Singh Bhogal - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy-to-manage platform with a valuable auto-scaling feature
The product is easy to manage. It enables low-latency replication from the master to replicate instances, keeping the lag consistently at 20 milliseconds or less. It can segregate read and write loads and provide high availability of applications. It has a valuable auto-scaling feature. The provision of custom read and write endpoints eliminates the need for managing a separate proxy load balancer. It ensures the ease of uploading snapshots in various data storage solutions like Amazon S3, Athena, Elasticsearch, etc. We can port or sync data to Elasticsearch if there is a huge amount of data that typical databases cannot process.
Patryk Golabek - PeerSpot reviewer
Good beginner base but it should have better support for backups
As for what can be improved, right now we don't use the MySQL cluster. There is a MySQL cluster that you can run in a standalone mode, like a single database or you can do it in a cluster master-slave implementation. The cluster is not the best when it comes to MySQL. That's why we switched to MariaDB. For that simple reason that the cluster there is better. It's more manageable and it's easier to work with. We decide what to use depending on the needs. For example, if we need to mount something in a cluster mode, we use MariaDB, which again, is a Dockerized solution with a Helm chart as well, and it's very easy for us to deploy and manage, and also to scale when you just increase the number of slave versions. So MySQL doesn't have that great support when it comes to clusters. You can definitely use MySQL for that too, both support clustering, but the MariaDB is better. Additional features that I would like to see included in the next release of this solution include better support for backups. Because if you go with the MySQL Percona version, it gives you the tools to back it up securely. The vanilla version of MySQL doesn't have that. It actually does have it, but it is just really poorly executed. I would improve the backup system as well as the encryption. To make it smoother right now takes too much work. It should be a little bit smoother to backup the encrypted data the way you want it and have the ability to push it anywhere you want. That is not part of it right now. Now it is a database, so you don't know what you're going to do with it. It's difficult. You're just going to come up with solutions. But I think you can generalize here and come up with really simple solutions, which we have already in MySQL. That's probably the one thing that I would try and push right now for people to switch. But people are still not biting, because if you go with the managed version, then all the backups are taken care of for you by Amazon or Google or Microsoft. Then you really don't care. But for us, since we're doing it locally, self-hosted, we would like to have better tools for locking up the data. Right now, one aspect that is also linked to backups is running things in a crosscheck with semi-managed solutions. This requires a bit of a context. Since we're running things within the clustered communities, we're kind of pushing the Cloud into the cluster. We also want to push some of the tools for the database into a cluster, as well. So these are what we call Kubernetes operators. And there's MySQL operators that were first developed by the community. Those kind give you the ability to backup data within the cluster. So now you have a fully managed solution running from your cluster. These are called MySQL Kubernetes operators. We are looking into those right now to upgrade our solution, which would mean that we can just execute our backup natively within Kubernetes, not via special scripts. This would make it much easier to actually deal with any kind of MySQL issues within the cluster, because it would be cluster-native. That's what the operators are for. I think Oracle just created a really good one. It surprised me that they have this. It's not because of Oracle, but they got pushed by the community and actually created the MySQL Operator for Kubernetes, and that's what we're moving towards. This is going to give you an ability to have a cloud-managed solution within the cluster. And then you can ask the MySQL Operator for the database. They'll partition the database and give it to you. So it will change the nature from you deploying it to you just asking the cluster to give you a database. It's a fully managed solution right from the cluster. So that's what we're heavily looking into right now. We'll be switching to using Kubernetes MySQL Operators. It's a high-availability cluster running within the Kubernetes cluster. Right now we're pretty good with that. It's working fine. We're trying to find some time to actually release that globally everywhere. That's where I am right now. But in terms of technology, if you give up Oracle, you just go to a MySQL operator. That's the one we're using, what we're actually looking at - to create, operate and scale mySQL and sell it within the cluster. This idea of having a cognitive MySQL becomes much easier to manage within the cluster, as well. So you don't have to go with the cloud solution with AWS or Google cloud or Amazon MySQL or the Microsoft version. The Oracle SuperCluster is the Oracle MySQL operator. That's what we we are looking into a lot right now. Mainly because it does backups on demand - it's so easy to backup. You can just tell Kubernetes to backup and you don't have to run special scripts or special extra software or codes to back it up. You can make the backup as you would do anything else. Send a backup or some other data source or insert an Elasticsearch into it here. Just say "Kubernetes, back it up" and you know Oracle has this adapters within the cluster to back it up for you taking increments or different companies. So that makes it really nice and easy to use and to deploy. With that kind of solution you can ask to class or petition the database how you want. So again, it changed the nature of the kind of push-to-pull second nature system. Are you pushing your containers to a cluster? You just say cluster, "give me a database" and the class gives you the base partition database, creates a database in a secure manner, gives the connection to the database, and you're done. Then you can back it up on a schedule on to any backup switches. It's much easier. So once this goes, it is going to be widely adopted, which it should be. But I think people might not have the tech skills right now. But once it's adaptive, maybe in a few more months, it's going to be the number one solution for everybody. In terms of what I'd like to see in the next release, one thing that's always missing is dash boarding. There's no real BI tool for MySQL, like there is in Yellowfin and all the different tools that you get. They all have MySQL connectors, but there's no specific BI tool for MySQL. Open source projects have sprung up, but they're more general purpose, like Postgress, a MySQL kind of database, a relational database. I don't see any really nice tool like Cabana for elastic searches that I can tell clients to use because it would be too technical for them. They would have to have more technical engagement with writing the course, drag and drop, and creating a graph like in Power BI where you just connect with DIA. So I'd like to see the grab and drag and drop tables, nice beautiful graphics, and pie charts. You don't necessarily have that with MySQL like you have other solutions, which are really cost prohibitive for some clients. It'd be nice to have an open source solution for that. Decent solutions. I mean decent that I can take to clients. It's so technical. They want to drag and drop.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
29%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
6%
Insurance Company
5%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
 

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...
Why are MySQL connections encrypted and what is the biggest benefit of this?
MySQL encrypts connections to protect your data and the biggest benefit from this is that nobody can corrupt it. If you move information over a network without encryption, you are endangering it, m...
Considering that there is a free version of MySQL, would you invest in one of the paid editions?
I may be considered a MySQL veteran since I have been using it since before Oracle bought it and created paid versions. So back in my day, it was all free, it was open-source and the best among sim...
What is one thing you would improve with MySQL?
One thing I would improve related to MySQL is not within the product itself, but with the guides to it. Before, when it was free, everyone was on their own, seeking tutorials and how-to videos onli...
 

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Sample Customers

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Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Aurora vs. MySQL and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.