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Amazon Neptune vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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 Neptune
Ranking in Managed NoSQL Databases
7th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
4.5
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB
Ranking in Managed NoSQL Databases
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
113
Ranking in other categories
Database as a Service (DBaaS) (3rd), NoSQL Databases (1st), Vector Databases (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Managed NoSQL Databases category, the mindshare of Amazon Neptune is 5.9%, down from 7.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 14.9%, down from 16.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed NoSQL Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB14.9%
Amazon Neptune5.9%
Other79.2%
Managed NoSQL Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Reviewer3028812 - PeerSpot reviewer
Back End Developer at Zeta
Multiple graph models and languages support lead to efficient use, yet community growth brings challenges
The onboarding part and documentation where we could ideally use Amazon Neptune is excellent. Amazon Neptune as a product by AWS is exceptional because it supports multiple graph models such as RDF and property graph. It also has support for multiple querying languages such as Gremlin, SparkQL, and OpenCypher. It is very comprehensive in supporting every requirement we had at Zetta. Amazon Neptune's best features include its multiple servers, each supporting different languages such as OpenCypher, SparkQL, and RDF. For the same RDF graph or property graph, we could use multiple languages to query on different servers. This is exceptional because we have one graph DB with two endpoints exposed where we could interact with different languages on the same graph. Additionally, Amazon has a Sagemaker Jupyter Notebook which interacts with the Amazon Neptune database itself, providing a clean UI for representing nodes since the Jupyter Notebook has predefined graph representation capabilities through queries.
Michael Hasenfang - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Platform Engineering - Infrastructure Systems and Automation at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Collecting compliance data has become more efficient while managing unstructured inputs for reporting
The features that I find most valuable within Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB are probably the cost, as the cost optimization is good. The storage and queryability are good for what we're doing; it's a lot of unstructured data, so having a platform to put that in and then be able to harvest that data out for the reporting we do is essential. In terms of cost saving, it was probably easily 30 to 40% cheaper than doing a standard SQL, which is what we saw just on piloting and getting in there. We were initially thinking 20 to 25%, but we were probably more at the 35 to 40%. We are using Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's hybrid search today. The value that it has added to my AI or search workloads is that I think it's optimized that process and made it easier. We have a lot of unstructured data coming from different dissimilar systems and different data sources, so correlating those things together and making sense of it has been very beneficial. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB has had pretty good performance with searching through large amounts of data; it's been fast, and we haven't seen a lot of performance degradation while building larger queries and bringing in a large set of data. The dynamic auto-scale or serverless model from Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB has helped reduce costs and operational effort; however, it's hard to quantify how that plays out since you're using a shared service. It shifts my focus away from building, managing, and upgrading to adding value.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Amazon Neptune as a product by AWS is exceptional because it supports multiple graph models such as RDF and property graph, and it also has support for multiple querying languages such as Gremlin, SparkQL, and OpenCypher, making it very comprehensive in supporting every requirement we had at Zetta."
"The stability of Amazon Neptune is very good."
"The initial setup is actually simple."
"Relational databases are never good at identifying patterns in graphs or other similar relationships, whereas Amazon Neptune is."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is fast, and its performance is good compared to normal SQL DB."
"The most valuable features of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB include the TTL, the ability to scale up and down as needed, and geo-replication, which comes out of the box."
"It works reasonably fast. You can retain the original format of the document as received by the third-party system."
"The high speed of Azure Cosmos DB compared to other competitors is remarkable."
"Cosmos DB's greatest strengths are its easy setup and affordability, especially for those who understand its usage."
"It has been very efficient so far. The team has been using it for quite a while. I am new to the team, but they always talk about how efficient it is."
"rate Azure support nine out of 10. They respond quickly and will help you manage costs. However, they mainly give you an overview of the issue, so they'll never have an in-depth idea of what you're doing. They aren't the owners of our product, so they don't know much about it, but they can ask you generally: What are you doing? Are you doing too many updates? How can we reduce the cost?"
"As a NoSQL database, it offers schema flexibility which simplifies design and reduces initial engineering overhead."
 

Cons

"We had a strict time constraint, and it took many sleepless nights to find information in the documentation."
"Amazon Neptune could improve by spreading more awareness for others to have an understanding of the solution because the technology is fairly new. The developer community and larger community do not understand it yet."
"Additionally, the need for downtime during scalability is a concern."
"In my scenario, the integration wasn't easy because ................in Java."
"One area that could be improved is indexing. Some of the developers struggle with the way the indexing works. We are exploring vector indexing, which we haven't examined fully yet. Indexing is an aspect we're looking to improve upon potentially."
"A minor improvement would be enabling batch operations through the UI. Currently, to delete all documents in a collection, we must use an API, which some of my team finds inconvenient for admin tasks."
"Performance issues do not occur frequently, but I occasionally face performance issues with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB."
"Currently, I have no suggestions for enhancement or new implementations in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB. However, the cost can sometimes be high, especially during cross-partition queries with large data amounts."
"The cost is a concern. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB did not decrease our total cost of ownership. From the standpoint of the old way of doing DBA operations, it did, but our cloud cost increased significantly."
"The query searching functionality has some complexities and could be more user-friendly. Improvements in this area would be very helpful."
"Because there is no local way of doing things, Azure Cosmos DB will always be considered expensive."
"The RUs still appear to be a black box for everyone. Even though they explain read and write RUs, it remains unclear for many users."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS are on par for pricing and Google has been raising its prices."
"It's expensive. I would rate it a seven out of ten for pricing."
"Our experience with the pricing and setup cost is that it aligns with what we expect based on the pricing we see. However, I would absolutely like it to be less if possible."
"It is expensive. The moment you have high availability options and they are mixed with the type of multitenant architecture you use, the pricing is on the higher end."
"For the cloud, we don't pay for the license, but for the on-prem versions, we do pay."
"We are not consuming so much yet since we are at the beginning of using this solution. I would rate the pricing of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB a six out of ten."
"Azure is a pay as you go subscription."
"If you are a small organization or startup building from scratch without the Microsoft Startup Founder Club support, it could be expensive."
"Its cost is transparent. Pricing depends on the transaction and data size, but overall, it is cheaper compared to hosting it on your corporate network due to other factors like power consumption."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
University
12%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Legal Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business35
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise59
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Neptune?
The cost aspects were managed by our SRE team who provisioned the instances. The pricing structure is similar to how EC2 instance pricing varies. I was informed that it was somewhat expensive, thou...
What needs improvement with Amazon Neptune?
The main issue was the limited community of Amazon Neptune users, which meant everything needed to be explored independently. Although this was adventurous, it required more time investment in the ...
What is your primary use case for Amazon Neptune?
We managed traffic at Zetta, and traffic would be moving between multiple services in our microservice architecture. Because of this setup, we were using Amazon Neptune to understand how many reque...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
I have knowledge about the pricing, setup cost, and licensing aspect of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
I would see improvements in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, particularly concerning integration with more tiers. They should integrate products like IBM Watson for analytics and offer more options for e...
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
I have worked with databases like Azure SQL Database, Cosmos DB, and PostgreSQL. We had a migration where our customer wanted solutions like Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, where they desired high avail...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Intuit, Pearson, Samsung, Ignition One, Lifeomic, Blackfynn, Paysense
TomTom, KPMG Australia, Bosch, ASOS, Mercedes Benz, NBA, Zero Friction, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Kinectify
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Neptune vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.