Amazon RDS vs Google Cloud SQL comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google are both solutions in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.4, while Google is ranked #6 with an average rating of 7.8. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 14.8% mindshare in DS, compared to Google’s 8.5% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Google users who would recommend it.

Amazon RDS

Read 58 Amazon RDS reviews

3,594 Views
3,486 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Google Cloud SQL

Read 23 Google Cloud SQL reviews

1,988 Views
1,968 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon RDS

Google Cloud SQL

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 2, 2025

Amazon RDS and Google Cloud SQL are competitive products in the database as a service category. Amazon RDS appears to have the upper hand with robust features and reliability, while Google Cloud SQL excels in cost efficiency and ease of management.

Features: Amazon RDS offers support for a wide range of databases, automated management, and high availability, enhancing microservices architecture integration. It also provides scalability and performance optimization across multiple engines. Google Cloud SQL ensures robust data safety with redundancy options and offers automated scaling, minimizing operational concerns. It focuses on flexible customization potential but covers fewer on-premises enterprise features than RDS.

Room for Improvement: Amazon RDS users encounter migration challenges and limited shell access, hindering deep database management. Some features could be enabled by default for user convenience. Google Cloud SQL requires enhancement in supporting high I/O operations and improving documentation clarity. Better integration and analytics capabilities would strengthen its competitive position.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both Amazon RDS and Google Cloud SQL offer flexible deployment, accommodating public and hybrid cloud environments. Google Cloud SQL is notable for its user-friendly interface, while Amazon RDS receives mixed feedback on customer support quality, necessitating improvement in response times and support quality. Both services provide substantial documentation, although RDS charges additional support fees unless on premium plans.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon RDS is regarded as expensive but valuable, with potential ROI from reduced DBA workloads. Careful resource provisioning aids in managing costs. Google Cloud SQL is typically more affordable, aligning with industry standards, though additional costs arise from backup and replication requirements. Its predictable pricing model often leads to quicker ROI, aided by reduced management resource expenses.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud SQL Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud SQL

December 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 RDS

Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)

2nd

Ranking in Relational Databases Tools

9th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Google Cloud SQL

Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)

6th

Ranking in Relational Databases Tools

19th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Database Management Systems (DBMS) (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon RDS is 14.8%, down from 25.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Cloud SQL is 8.5%, down from 16.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Database as a Service (DBaaS) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Amazon RDS	14.8%
Google Cloud SQL	8.5%
Other	76.7%

Database as a Service (DBaaS)

Featured Reviews

reviewer2592669

Director Software Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

Positive experiences with database services, with minor room for feature enhancements observed

I don't really see any disadvantages of Amazon RDS. With Oracle, I think AWS doesn't provide the RAC stability. If you have Oracle installed in your own data centers, you can set up various clusters and we can set up the RACs, but in Amazon RDS, we cannot have the RAC feature of Oracle. They could add that feature. Amazon RDS has limitations regarding RAC. If we talk about installing Oracle in RDS, we cannot have the RAC, but if you deploy Oracle on GCP, then there is probably the RAC feature available. I observed that around two or three years back, but I'm not sure whether they have added the RAC feature in AWS. Amazon RDS is expensive compared to GCP. GCP also has the same features, and although it is quite extensive and feature-rich, I see Amazon RDS as slightly expensive compared to other clouds.

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Victor Danso

Database Engineer at Springer Nature

Migration to cloud eases management but needs better support for high I/O operations

Google Cloud SQL needs to improve its support for high-end I/O operations. On-prem systems with high I/O capabilities perform better, as Google Cloud SQL takes more time to handle the same tasks. There is also difficulty in changing the time zone after the database is set up. Moreover, some features available in MSSQL on-prem are missing on Google Cloud SQL, affecting migration potential.

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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

"The tool is very easy to use and configure."

"The product is very, very easy to use."

"The solution has unique features like backup and recovery, and snapshots. It upgrades automatically. The solution offers easy analytics concerning performance metrics. Its reliability and scalability are very good. The tool's most valuable features are disaster recovery, high availability and scalability."

"The solution’s scalability, usability, and availability are valuable to us."

"Amazon RDS gives us the ability to select as many tools, replicas, regions, and zones as we want."

"The time to install or set up a database environment is very fast."

"The solution's customer service is excellent."

"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."

More Amazon RDS pros

"Its most valuable feature is that it's scalable. I can start off with a base of a lot of data and move as much as I want and it's the same as if asked to do a lot of infrastructure changes."

"It's SQL. SQL is so easy if you know something about databases. It's easy to learn."

"It supports different databases, like Postgres and MySQL."

"The most valuable features are that it's easy to use, simple, and user-friendly."

"Ease of management and the ability to oversee the statistics of your SQL."

"Google Cloud SQL provides complete customization options, along with a dashboarding tool and a comprehensive suite of tools that can be used to customize and build any application needed."

"The valuable feature of Google Cloud SQL is its high availability option. The product is stable."

"Google Cloud SQL is easy to start with and allows me to scale as needed, which is advantageous from a developer perspective."

More Google Cloud SQL pros

Cons

"The solution's connectivity and response logs could be improved."

"User interface needs improvement for using IPS and CloudWatch to scale and utilize read replicas, enabling performance insights to view query formats where the bottlenecks occur, identifying the fixes, slow queries, and missing indexes, improving the security and monitoring with alerts."

"The product should support new databases."

"I also don't think it's very scalable."

"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."

"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."

"The solution could improve the administration tools."

"The technical support from Amazon could improve. I would rate them a six out of ten as they do not fully meet my expectations."

More Amazon RDS cons

"I am yet to explore a lot of features that are present in this solution. However, it would be good if more documentation is available for this solution. This would help us in preparing for the certification exam and understand it better. Currently, we don't have much documentation. We do the labs for 20 or 25 minutes, but we can't capture and download anything."

"The monitoring part could be better."

"The most challenging part is dealing with legacy data from your old systems and migrating it into the new setup, but once you've completed the data migration, it becomes quite convenient to use."

"The most vulnerable problem with Google SQL is that while you can customize your access control list, it provides you with a public IP address."

"In the case of Google, they need to work on a more easy interface for users."

"I would like to see better availability of the product in different regions. It should also improve the security with encryption."

"It is hard to do logging with the solution."

"Google Cloud SQL needs to improve its support for high-end I/O operations."

More Google Cloud SQL cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Amazon RDS could improve by reducing the price."

"Amazon RDS is cheaper compared to other tools."

"The solution’s pricing could be cheaper."

"The platform pricing is on the higher side, but given its capabilities and ease of use, it remains competitive."

"It is less expensive than SQL Server. We pay based on the usage on a monthly basis."

"The cost is manageable because you can see the expense associated with each instance and utilize tools for tagging and cost control."

"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."

"The substantial initial credit and cost-effectiveness make Amazon an attractive option."

More Amazon RDS pricing and cost advice

"It's really cheap. It wouldn't be more than, I believe it's around 50 euro per month for running a cloud SQL."

"It is not expensive, especially considering the significant reduction in database management time."

"From a financial perspective, Google Cloud SQL is on the cheaper side."

"The pricing is very much an important factor as to why we use this solution."

"While the platform’s pricing may be higher, it aligns with industry standards, considering the quality of service and features provided."

"You need to pay extra costs for backup and replication."

"The solution is affordable."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

11%

Educational Organization

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	22
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	23

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	9

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon RDS?

The product's installation phase is easy.

See all answers

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

The pricing for Amazon RDS is reasonable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon RDS?

Currently, I cannot think of any major improvements. Perhaps more platforms in terms of database engine versions would be beneficial. Right now, Amazon RDS supports MySQL and PostgreSQL, but there ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Google Cloud SQL?

The implementation part of the product was easy.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Cloud SQL?

We have set up automated patch management for Google Cloud SQL, and it does on a daily basis what needs to be done, so it is pretty good overall for maintaining our database security.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Google Cloud SQL?

Sometimes the sharing with third parties or configuring that in Google Cloud SQL is not the most intuitive. From a user perspective, if Google Cloud SQL integrated AI directly into the query so tha...

See all answers

Comparisons

MongoDB Atlas vs Amazon RDS

Compared 20% of the time

Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs Amazon RDS

Compared 13% of the time

Oracle Database as a Service vs Amazon RDS

Compared 12% of the time

Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer vs Amazon RDS

Compared 5% of the time

Google Cloud Spanner vs Amazon RDS

Compared 5% of the time

More Amazon RDS Competitors

Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs Google Cloud SQL

Compared 30% of the time

MongoDB Atlas vs Google Cloud SQL

Compared 15% of the time

Oracle Database as a Service vs Google Cloud SQL

Compared 6% of the time

Google Cloud Spanner vs Google Cloud SQL

Compared 4% of the time

Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer vs Google Cloud SQL

Compared 4% of the time

More Google Cloud SQL Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS

January 2026

Download Amazon RDS product report

Buyer's Guide

Google Cloud SQL

January 2026

Download Google Cloud SQL product report

Also Known As

RDS

No data available

Overview

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient, resizeable capacity for an industry-standard relational database and manages common database administration tasks.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Google Cloud SQL is a fully-managed database service that makes it easy to set up, maintain, manage, and administer your relational PostgreSQL and MySQL databases in the cloud. Google Cloud SQL offers high performance, scalability, and convenience. Hosted on Google Cloud Platform, Cloud SQL provides a database infrastructure for applications running anywhere.

Google

Sample Customers

Edmodo

BeDataDriven, CodeFutures, Daffodil, GenieConnect, KiSSFLOW, LiveHive, SulAm_rica, Zync

Buyer's Guide

Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud SQL

December 2025

Free Report: Amazon RDS vs. Google Cloud SQL

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