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Amazon Timestream vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

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 Timestream
Ranking in Managed NoSQL Databases
3rd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
5
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
7.2
Number of Reviews
91
Ranking in other categories
Database as a Service (DBaaS) (6th), NoSQL Databases (3rd), Vector Databases (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Managed NoSQL Databases category, the mindshare of Amazon Timestream is 9.2%, down from 9.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 15.4%, down from 18.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed NoSQL Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Sekhar Reddy B - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful for real-time analytics and monitoring application's health
We use the tool with AI for customer data analysis as part of our internal product. It's a medium effort for beginners to learn; it's not too easy but not too hard. Overall, I'd rate Amazon Timestream eight point five to nine out of ten based on my experience. Integrating it wasn't difficult, and we didn't face any challenges. My advice for new users is to choose the right dimension names for better query performance and structure their data correctly before indexing.
MichaelJohn - PeerSpot reviewer
Very efficient for application-facing scenarios
There are several areas for improvement. Firstly, having a local development emulator or simulator for Azure Cosmos DB would be beneficial. It would be very handy to have a Docker container that developers can use locally. Although, I know there is a free tier and so on and so forth, having a local environment would be nice. For example, SQL Server is very portable. You can even install it on your machine. That is the number one thing that is missing in Azure Cosmos DB. The second improvement area is the IDE of choice. That means how you interact with Azure Cosmos DB. For example, with SQL Server, you have SQL Server Management Studio. I know there is a little bit of support for Azure Cosmos DB in Azure Data Studio, but it is not heavily advertised or it does not feel like first-class citizen support. Developer experience or developer tooling is missing in terms of interacting with the database. Better developer tools or an IDE for interacting with Azure Cosmos DB would enhance the developer experience. Lastly, there is some mixed messaging about what Azure Cosmos DB is, given its multiple APIs. There are so many Azure Cosmos DB APIs available. There is NoSQL. There are MongoDB, Gremlin, and others. There is still some mixed messaging for others who are new to Azure Cosmos DB about what Azure Cosmos DB is. Is this like MongoDB, but then there is also MongoDB in Azure Cosmos DB? I know it well, and I know that the default one is just NoSQL, but others I have interacted with over the last ten years or so get confused.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"You can quickly aggregate data from the last ten years with Amazon Timestream."
"The best things about Amazon Timestream are it's maintenance-free, customizable, and has no lag issues. It's always real-time."
"Using Amazon Timestream has been seamless due to its integration within the AWS ecosystem and ease of use for the engineering team."
"If you drop a message, the solution's technical support will definitely reply."
"What I like best is that the tool is easy to collect and store data and is fast and scalable. The fully managed database is easy to understand."
"The features most valuable to us in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB are the auto scale and change feed. These features allow us to do some operations that are not possible with SQL Server."
"One valuable feature of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is partitioning. Its performance is very nice."
"The solution is extremely user-friendly and easy to navigate."
"I would recommend Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB to other users without hesitation."
"The searching capability is exceptional. It is very simple and incomparable to competitors."
"The speed is impressive, and integrating our power-up database with Kafka was an improvement."
"We love the ability to land data with Cosmos DB easily. Cosmos is native to Azure, so everything works seamlessly with it. You need good data to have good AI, and Cosmos makes it easy to land the data."
"From a global distribution perspective, Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is good and easy to handle."
 

Cons

"The solution could be improved by making it easier for new graduates like me to use. Better explanations of queries and how to use them with other AWS services would help."
"There are certain features that we would like to see added and we are collaborating with the product teams on these areas."
"The tool could be improved by increasing the batch size from one hundred records to five hundred or a thousand to speed up indexing."
"Arranging the database schema is a bit challenging."
"There are disadvantages when it comes to time series databases since you can't delete anything from Amazon Timestream data."
"Better documentation on how to integrate with other components would be helpful because I was struggling with this."
"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."
"Cosmos DB is expensive, and the RU-based pricing model is confusing."
"We encountered an issue with Cosmos DB's recently introduced hierarchical partition feature."
"There are no specific areas I believe need improvement as I am happy with what I am getting currently. However, I am open to new features in future versions, like possibly integrating AI features natively into Cosmos DB. Any improvement would be beneficial."
"The main area of improvement is the cost, as the expense is high. Also, when writing processes into Cosmos, sometimes the threshold is met, which can be a problem if developers have not written the code properly, limiting calls to five thousand."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's pricing model is complicated, which people don't understand."
"There is room for improvement in their customer support services."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Amazon Timestream's pricing seems manageable to me."
"We pay over $10 million a year to Amazon."
"We don't see high costs with Amazon Timestream, which may vary by company."
"For 1GB of data, the solution charges $ 0.01 in the US region."
"The Cosmos DB pricing model, initially quite complicated, became clear after consulting with Azure Advisor, allowing us to proceed with confidence."
"Its price is in the middle, neither too low nor too high."
"For the cloud, we don't pay for the license, but for the on-prem versions, we do pay."
"Pricing, at times, is not super clear because they use the request unit (RU) model. To manage not just Azure Cosmos DB but what you are receiving for the dollars paid is not easy. It is very abstract. They could do a better job of connecting Azure Cosmos DB with the value or some variation of that."
"Cosmos DB is cost-effective when starting but requires careful management."
"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."
"Its pricing is not bad. It is good."
"The pricing model of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is a bit complex."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
8%
Legal Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon Timestream?
We are working on a few open change requests with the engineering teams on AWS's side. There are certain features that we would like to see added and we are collaborating with the product teams on ...
What is your primary use case for Amazon Timestream?
We use Amazon Timestream as a data historian for IT data. It stores all individual measurements of our customers' IoT devices for a certain period of time, allowing them to perform time-series-base...
What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
The initial setup is simple and straightforward. You can set up a Cosmos DB in a day, even configuring things like availability zones around the world.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
It is cost-efficient as long as you understand the right setup to optimize usage. Knowing the data needs of the organization and adjusting the Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB usage accordingly helps save...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
What is missing in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is definitely cold storage. We know it's coming, but that's currently what is missing—the possibility to park older data in a cold tier. Aside from the ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
TomTom, KPMG Australia, Bosch, ASOS, Mercedes Benz, NBA, Zero Friction, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Kinectify
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Timestream vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.