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Amazon RDS vs Google Cloud Spanner comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 12, 2024

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 RDS
Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
54
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Google Cloud Spanner
Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)
8th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon RDS is 24.7%, down from 27.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Cloud Spanner is 4.5%, up from 3.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Database as a Service (DBaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Samuel Ebite - PeerSpot reviewer
Ensure high availability with robust encryption and seamless backups
Amazon RDS provides data encryption using services like KMS, crucial for securing high-sensitive data and meeting compliance requirements such as HIPAA or PCI DSS. The best practices we've employed with RDS help design a well-architected framework, encompassing security, encryption, scalability with multi-availability zone deployment, and operational excellence with automated backups. RDS features, such as reserved instances, storage auto-scaling, monitoring with technologies like CloudWatch, and proxies, contribute to cost optimization. The solution enhances security with IAM authentication and offers high availability to end users.
Ethan Lo - PeerSpot reviewer
A stable and scalable relational database that ensures a return on investment for its users
The most valuable feature of the solution is its scalability. Scalability comes with two options, among which Google Cloud Spanner can scale horizontally, compared to other relational databases that scale vertically. You can change Google Cloud Spanner's resource configuration, which is done through processing units. Suppose you set up Google Cloud Spanner initially with a hundred processing units, and then you run out of resources since your database used too much CPU. In the aforementioned scenario, you can scale up or down and face no downtime in the production phase. The solution's features are important when running a company twenty-four hours, seven days a week.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The dashboard and performance are the most valuable features of Amazon RDS."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten...Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"The most valuable features of Amazon RDS are its scalability, reliability, and intelligence."
"Amazon RDS gives us the ability to select as many tools, replicas, regions, and zones as we want."
"The product is very, very easy to use."
"The most valuable feature is that it is a fully managed database, where they handle most of the administrative tasks and leaves the users more time to concentrate on business."
"It is stable, scalable, and easy to deploy."
"The product's initial setup phase is totally easy."
"The application deployment in the cloud is the best feature of the infrastructure."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its scalability. Scalability comes with two options, among which Google Cloud Spanner can scale horizontally, compared to other relational databases that scale vertically."
"It is a very scalable solution."
"Google Cloud Spanner is stable."
"We can scale the solution if we need to."
 

Cons

"Amazon cannot guarantee the stability of some extensions, and there is a need for different extensions to meet PCI requirements."
"I also don't think it's very scalable."
"Amazon has a policy of automatically restarting the server every seven days."
"Some of the features will not be there. For example, some on-premises things we want to set up will not be supported there. There are some challenges that they are fixing."
"Currently, we are using Fargate. Instead of that, we are planning to use EC2 instances, but we are facing some problems, and we are unable to enable NAT gateway for Elastic Load Balancer. When we enable auto-scaling, the instance count increases, and we get IP addresses dynamically. We need to whitelist the IPs of these instances, but there is no option to whitelist those IPs in Amazon RDS. We need one static IP that we can assign to ELB so that we can whitelist this IP."
"I like using Amazon RDS because it offers quick operations for me. However, there are times when understanding how to use some of the services can be challenging, even with documentation. If I could add a feature, I'd improve navigation for related services."
"In the next release, it would be great to see RDS provide connection pooling out of the box."
"Amazon RDS should have a more user-friendly graphical user interface and include better database management options."
"The cost can be a bit high."
"I want to improve the deployment of cameras and surveillance infrastructure."
"The tool needs to improve horizontal scaling."
"The tool lacks to offer AI features."
"Google came up with something called Cloud Spanner Emulator, which fails to work like the real product if I want to develop some code and run a database locally on my machine."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Amazon RDS is an expensive solution."
"The solution is expensive."
"AWS is becoming pretty expensive because cheap or absolutely free services have become paid services. Amazon RDS is not an expensive product, but Amazon's ecosystem is becoming increasingly expensive."
"On a scale from one to ten, where ten is the most expensive, and one is the cheapest, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."
"The price of Amazon RDS is reasonable."
"The cost is manageable because you can see the expense associated with each instance and utilize tools for tagging and cost control."
"Amazon RDS could improve by reducing the price."
"The price could be better."
"The solution is expensive."
"Price-wise, I heard that Google Cloud Spanner is on the higher side."
"Google Cloud Spanner is an expensive solution."
"It is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
14%
University
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
12%
Retailer
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon RDS?
The product's installation phase is easy.
What needs improvement with Amazon RDS?
One key improvement would be adding support for multi-storage paradigms, including columnar support, as seen in TiDB. The serverless support with Aurora could also be enhanced. Additionally, having...
What is your primary use case for Google Cloud Spanner?
Google Cloud Spanner has all the features of a traditional relational database, including schemas, SQL queries, ACID transactions, and provides excellent integration and monitoring tools as well as...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Cloud Spanner?
Price-wise, I heard that Google Cloud Spanner is on the higher side. I am not sure if this is a rumor or if it's fake news, but I believe that having BigQuery and GCP together could be a little cos...
 

Also Known As

RDS
Google Spanner
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Edmodo
Streak, Optiva, Mixpanel
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud Spanner and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
852,098 professionals have used our research since 2012.