Amazon Aurora vs Oracle Database comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Oracle are both solutions in the Relational Databases Tools category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.4, while Oracle is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.2. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 3.3% mindshare in SQL, compared to Oracle’s 12.8% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Oracle users who would recommend it.

Amazon Aurora

Read 17 Amazon Aurora reviews

2,869 Views
2,554 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Oracle Database

Read 289 Oracle Database reviews

11,609 Views
9,638 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Amazon Aurora

Oracle Database

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

Oracle Database and Amazon Aurora compete in the enterprise database market. Oracle Database offers strong reliability and robustness which appear to give it the upper hand in large-scale complex environments.

Features: Oracle Database is known for high availability, scalability, and advanced security, ideal for complex enterprise requirements. It offers tools like Oracle RAC and Data Guard to ensure data integrity and reliability. Additionally, it boasts a strong diagnostic infrastructure and robust backup solutions. Amazon Aurora emphasizes ease of use and integration with AWS services while offering automatic backups and scalability. It supports multi-region clusters and delivers cost efficiency in cloud environments.

Room for Improvement: Oracle Database requires attention to its high licensing costs and complex configuration, alongside improving integration with open-source solutions. It also needs easier management functions for less experienced administrators. Amazon Aurora could further enhance its cryptographic features and reduce operational costs while improving query optimization and performance insights for better distributed query handling.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Oracle Database can be deployed on-premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid setups but demands skilled personnel for its complex deployment. The customer service exhibits inconsistent feedback, often noted for delayed support responses. Amazon Aurora's cloud-native design facilitates easier deployment via AWS infrastructure, with generally prompt customer service, though multi-region support could be better.

Pricing and ROI: Oracle Database is associated with high costs, often acting as a barrier to smaller enterprises despite delivering strong ROI through its reliable features. Amazon Aurora offers more budget-friendly options with a pay-as-you-go model, attracting businesses seeking scalability without significant initial investment, and it efficiently manages costs for those invested in AWS.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Aurora vs. Oracle Database Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Aurora vs. Oracle Database

March 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 845,040 peers since 2012

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

8th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Oracle Database

Ranking in Relational Databases Tools

2nd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

289

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of Amazon Aurora is 3.3%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Oracle Database is 12.8%, down from 15.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Relational Databases Tools

Featured Reviews

Rajitha Jatothu

Aws Devops Engineer at LTIMindtree

Achieve high performance with fault-tolerant and highly available database management

Aurora is a key pillar for us, offering performance and availability. It is faster than RDS and supports multi-region clusters and scalability. One feature we value is Aurora's ability to provide a reader endpoint, allowing applications to connect without tracking replicas. It supports auto-scaling and offers several options for monitoring and optimizing database performance. Aurora's fault tolerance and ability to handle multiple replicas contribute to its reliability and high performance.

Read full review

Duy AnhMai

Product Owner at Heineken

Good storage and reliable but needs a better dashboard

I use Oracle Database just for storage of the corporate database data and the finance data I use Oracle Database just for storage of the corporate database data and the finance data. However, I find the dashboard to be complicated and not user-friendly. The dashboard is not user-friendly, and I…

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"One of the most valuable features is storage scaling."

"Aurora's features that I find the most beneficial include its database backup strategy, performance options, and input-output operations."

"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."

"One of the standout features of Amazon Aurora is that we do not need to maintain disaster recovery or manage availability zones."

"Amazon Aurora stands out for its ease of use in a managed environment, inbuilt security, continuous backups, numerous read replicas, multi-region automated replication, and seamless integration with other AWS services."

"The most valuable feature is that the maintainability is offloaded to the service provider. I don't have to maintain a database or do any administrative tasks, which comes in handy."

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

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

More Amazon Aurora pros

"I like that it's a robust product. It has very good features. One good feature is Oracle REX because, in SQL Server, we don't have that. SQL Server has something similar, but it's not the same stuff."

"Oracle Database is easy to use."

"It's powerful and fast, and the backup system is wonderful."

"I like the design of the database because it works well. I also like the stability of the solution."

"Oracle Database is the most widely accepted database, and it has built-in technical and security capabilities. It supports the new object in the database. The performance and security are very good, and it is user-friendly. There are a lot of people trained to use this solution which makes it simple to find assistance."

"You can scale the solution without any issues."

"The solution is a reliable database."

"It is user-friendly. It didn't take me much time to learn it."

More Oracle Database pros

Cons

"One of the most valuable features is storage scaling."

"While Amazon Aurora meets your current scaling and storage needs, there is room for improvement in cryptography and scalability compared to other databases."

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

"Room for improvement might be in the UI, integrations, or data working capabilities for better user experience."

"It is a bit costly. The features are quite good, and I wouldn't say it requires any technical improvements. But from a cost perspective, some clients wouldn't go for Aurora because of that."

"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 performance insights on the database based on the queries. Currently, we use SolarWinds as the monitoring tool. I would like to leverage SolarWinds’ performance insights in AWS services. SolarWinds gives larger insights when we run performance issues."

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

More Amazon Aurora cons

"On the ERP side, they do not seem to be improving the on-premises version. They seem to want to push the cloud option on users."

"I am not very satisfied with the support at times. You don't always get the support at the time you want and need it."

"They should reduce its price and provide faster support."

"The pricing could be more cost-effective, as the high price is driving some customers to consider migrating to open-source alternatives."

"The product is very expensive."

"Probably about 80% of their online documentation is useless. When you go to the Oracle documentation, you have to plow through page after page of stuff to get to anything that looks anything like an example of what it is that you might actually do. There are lots of other people who have filled that gap, and there are also websites where you can easily find the answers to most of your questions."

"Technical support quality has dropped recently. They aren't as helpful or responsive as they used to be."

"The monitoring of processes that are executing could be better. I find it very difficult to find processes that had been in a suspended state in order to stop them."

More Oracle Database cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an expensive solution."

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

"It is quite expensive."

"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."

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

"It's expensive. I would say that it is more expensive than other competing products."

"The main issue where I feel that Oracle still has a problem is with the licensing. Licensing is still expensive and the reason why today most startups use other, cheaper databases. Those other databases are much less sophisticated than Oracle."

"It has an annual subscription. It is an Oracle solution, so it is a bit expensive, but that's fine."

"Its price is already low. Oracle has a competitive and cheaper price as compared to others. Oracle Cloud is cheaper than other clouds. The pricing is very competitive for Oracle Cloud to be in the market. Their pricing makes customers interested in using this product even though Oracle doesn't have a local data center at this moment."

"You buy it when you need it, and then you pay the maintenance. We bought the licenses over 10 years ago. We haven't changed our licenses. We are not buying new licenses, and we are not looking at other devices. So, it is difficult to say whether it is cheap or expensive. There is nothing to compare to."

"Its cost is astronomical. They charge by the size of the server rather than what you're actually using. It is just a terrible business model. It has got a ton of features that are great, but you have to pay for them, and we don't want to spend a lot of money. If you use any of their additional products, you have to pay for those. Almost everything extra is at an additional charge. We also use RAC, and there is an additional charge for that."

"Our customers sometimes complain about the price of the license, as it is very high for them."

"The price of Oracle Database is too expensive and especially for individual environments. The pricing model is not clear, if I want to run it on a virtual environment, I still need to license the whole physical box."

More Oracle Database pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Relational Databases Tools solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

27%

Computer Software Company

14%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

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.

See all answers

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

The pricing for Amazon Aurora is nearly the same as RDS, with Aurora offering additional functionalities. This makes the product cost-effective.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon Aurora?

There are tuning challenges. The same methods used for tuning in RDS might not work in Aurora, and some functionalities available in MySQL may not be compatible with Aurora. There's also a concern ...

See all answers

How do you run Oracle Database at your organization and why?

My company has been using Oracle Exadata Database Service for some years now, and we are happy with it. I will allow myself to answer your questions about why and what benefits it provides us with ...

See all answers

Do you know of any disadvantages of Oracle Database?

Undoubtedly, Oracle Database is a top product in its category. But it does have its disadvantages, and for me and my organization, that has been the limitations of the product. When it comes to Ora...

See all answers

What is the best use for Oracle Database?

Oracle Database is flexible and can be used for many things. My company's main use case for this product is for storing data. We benefit from its high level of security as well as from the fact tha...

See all answers

Comparisons

SQL Server vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 36% of the time

MariaDB vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 8% of the time

YugabyteDB vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 6% of the time

Citus Data vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 6% of the time

SAP HANA vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 6% of the time

More Amazon Aurora Competitors

SAP HANA vs Oracle Database

Compared 22% of the time

SQL Server vs Oracle Database

Compared 14% of the time

IBM Db2 Database vs Oracle Database

Compared 10% of the time

MariaDB vs Oracle Database

Compared 9% of the time

IBM Informix vs Oracle Database

Compared 5% of the time

More Oracle Database Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Aurora

March 2025

Download Amazon Aurora product report

Buyer's Guide

Oracle Database

March 2025

Download Oracle Database product report

Also Known As

No data available

Oracle 12c, RDBMS

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)

Oracle Database is a top-ranking multi-model database management system by Oracle Corporation. Through Oracle database services and products, clients receive cost-optimized and high-performing versions of Oracle Database, as well as in-memory, NoSQL, and MySQL databases. The solution is available by several service providers on premises, in the cloud, or as a hybrid installation. It can be run on vendor servers as well as on Oracle hardware, including Exadata on-premise, Oracle Cloud, or Cloud at Customer.

Users can select from various types of Oracle Database solutions, depending on what they aim to do with this product. Based on their specific needs, they can choose among options that include:

Autonomously managed Oracle databases: This type of database eliminates the complexity of operating and securing Oracle Database, while simultaneously ensuring high levels of performance, scalability, and availability for users.
Oracle Database on Exadata: Users who seek particularly fast platforms can select this type of running solution. Exadata is a computing platform that is optimized for running Oracle Databases and it serves as the fastest platform for Oracle Database.
Oracle Database on-premises deployment: The product allows for deployment on-premises for clients who have data residency and network latency concerns. This option also offers customers the benefit of updated Oracle Cloud technology, including Exadata and Autonomous Database.
Oracle Database in the cloud: Organizations can use a specific version of this tool in the cloud, benefiting from complete control over the versions they run and when these versions change.

Part of this product is a fully automated database service called Oracle Autonomous Database, which facilitates the development and deployment of application workloads for organizations. It is built on Oracle Database as well as on Oracle Exadata. This service supports various data types and simplifies application development and deployment from modeling and coding to extract, transform, load process (ETL), data analysis, and database optimization. The service achieves high results in:

Performance
Availability
Security for online transaction processing (OLTP)
Analytics
Batch
Internet of Things (IoT) workloads

Oracle Database Features

Oracle Database has various features which users can utilize in their work with the solution. Among these features are the following:

Backup and recovery: Oracle Database ensures the integrity of users' data in system failure situations. This feature utilizes a tool named Recovery Manager (RMAN), which allows administrators to perform cold, hot, and incremental database backups, as well as point-in-time recoveries.
Clustering: This feature enables high availability of systems in order to run without interruption of services on occasions when one or more servers in a cluster fail. Included is a tool called Oracle Real Application Clusters.
Data dictionary: Through this set of internal tables and views, Oracle Database can be administered more efficiently.
Logical data structure: Through its feature for logical data structure, Oracle Database stores data in a way that allows users to interact with the database without knowing where the physical storage of the data is located.
Memory catching: Through the memory caching architecture feature, users can scale up very large databases and still perform at a considerably high speed.
Partitioning: This feature allows users to divide large tables into different pieces and store the pieces across storage devices.

Oracle Database Benefits

Oracle Database offers its users various benefits. Some of these include:

The solution decreases costs for organizations and provides a high return on investment (ROI) through the multiple services and features it offers.
Oracle Database has high-security protection which includes encryption, key management, data masking, and activity monitoring, that secures organizations' data within the tool.
The tool offers users the ability to use a single database for all data types, simplifying the process for them.
Oracle Database can be deployed in multiple places, including data centers and public and private clouds, which allows great flexibility for users.
The product allows applications from different platforms to communicate with the database through its networking stack.
Oracle Database is ACID-compliant, which helps maintain data reliability and integrity.

Reviews from Real Users

Paul S., president at Advance Consulting Enterprise, likes Oracle Database because it gets the job done, doesn't fail, and suitable for massively scalable applications.

An Oracle DBA at a computer software company describes Oracle Database as reliable with good performance and very good stability.

Oracle

Sample Customers

Dow Jones, Arizona State University, Verizon, Capital One, United Nations, Nielsen, Autodesk, Fanduel

Agncia Nacional de guas, Anbima, Aria Systems, Asiana Airlines, Astelit LLC, Australian Finance Group, Banco Occidental de Descuento, Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited, BT, Caja de Seguros S.A., Casas GEO S.A.B. de C.V., Comic Relief UK, Corsair Components Inc., CSAM Health AS, CSOB Group, Datacraft Solutions, DenizBank A.S., Department of Treasury and Finance WA, Office of State Revenue, Deutsche B_rse AG, Deutsche Lufthansa AG, Deutsche Messe AG, Digicel Haiti, DPR COSEA, Essar Group, Essatto Software Pty Ltd, Farmšcia e Drogaria Nissei Ltda., Fomento Econ‹mico Mexicano S.A.B. de C.V. (FEMSA), FundaÊo Petrobras de Seguridade Social, Future Group, GFKL Financial Services AG, Grupo Posadas S.A.B. de C.V., Grupo Sinosserra, Guerra S.A. Implementos Rodovišrios, Hanatour International Service, Hays plc, Henan Mobile Co. Ltd, Hochschule Hof, Hong Kong and China Technology (Wuhan) Co. Ltd (Towngas Technology), Industries Corpa_al C.A., Infrastructure Development Finance Company Limited, Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatstica, Instituto Mexicano de la Propiedad Industrial, Kcell, LinkShare Corporation, MercadoLibre Inc., MetLife Inc., Nextgen Distribution, €BB-IKT GmbH, Octagon Research Solutions, Pacific Lutheran University, Paragon Data GmbH, Ping ltd., PJSC Trustbank, Prodaub _ Processamento de Dados de Uberl_ndia, Purdue University, Redknee Inc., Robi Axiata Limited, Shanghai Infoservice Technology Co. Ltd, Shanghai Sihua Technologies Co. Ltd, Sistema de Aguas de la Ciudad de M_xico, Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council, Suddenlink Communications, Suprajit Engineering Limited, Tallink Grupp, Terminales Ro de la Plata S.A., Therap Services LLC, Think Passenger Inc., Trafigura, Transmed S.A.L Lebanon, ValeShop, VelQuest Corporation, Vodafone Group plc, West Virginia Network, WIND Hellas Telecommunications S.A

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Aurora vs. Oracle Database

March 2025

Free Report: Amazon Aurora vs. Oracle Database

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Aurora vs. Oracle Database and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Amazon Aurora vs. Oracle Database report.

See our list of best Relational Databases Tools vendors.

We monitor all Relational Databases Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.