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Amazon Timestream vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 13, 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
6th
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
7.0
Number of Reviews
102
Ranking in other categories
Database as a Service (DBaaS) (4th), NoSQL Databases (2nd), Vector Databases (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Managed NoSQL Databases category, the mindshare of Amazon Timestream is 6.2%, down from 11.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 16.3%, down from 16.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed NoSQL Databases Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB16.3%
Amazon Timestream6.2%
Other77.5%
Managed NoSQL Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Sushil Pandey - PeerSpot reviewer
It is helpful to get telemetry data from the devices in real-time
It is an easily scalable solution. When it comes to the retention period, if someone wants to change, they have to define it at the start. Later on, if users want to change it again, like, or increase the retention policy, then they have to create the table again and do so, and if it is not done, then we face problems. It will increase the retention, but when you try to insert a record or an older record that is not included in the range of your retention period, then you can face some problems and, like, it will throw some errors. The tool is scalable, but it should be defined at the start as to how much retention you want. For scalability, I rate the tool a six or seven out of ten.
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

"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."
"You can quickly aggregate data from the last ten years with Amazon Timestream."
"Change notification works well, and the ability to process documents in a scalable way is important. This means we can efficiently thread out different operations and meet our organizational performance and scalability needs."
"We chose Azure Cosmos DB initially because of the type of data that we needed to store. We have a schema that is very nondeterministic and flexible. It is always changing based on whatever data we need to acquire from different devices, so we needed a document store with a flexible schema."
"It is non-SQL and helps to manage and manipulate data from the coding, rather than direct data and complex queries."
"I would rate Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB a ten out of ten."
"The best feature is the velocity to make a query."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is very fast."
"I would rate Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB a ten out of ten."
"We doubled our productivity with this small application."
 

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."
"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 certain features that we would like to see added and we are collaborating with the product teams on these areas."
"There are disadvantages when it comes to time series databases since you can't delete anything from Amazon Timestream data."
"Sometimes, the solution's access request takes time, which should be improved."
"Better documentation on how to integrate with other components would be helpful because I was struggling with this."
"The customer service is lacking. We have a premier support agreement, but support is hit and miss."
"The first one is the ability to assign role-based access control through the Azure portal for accounts to have contributor rights."
"One of the primary challenges with Cosmos DB as a non-relational data store is the careful data modeling required due to the lack of collection-level joins when using the SQL API."
"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."
"We had some performance issues with a data segregation query. We worked closely with Microsoft to solve the problem of performance where, for example, one query had a delay of almost two or three minutes for this one use case. Microsoft tried to improve the product, but in the end, the solution was to change to MongoDB. MongoDB had better performance."
"An improvement would be a more robust functionality around updating elements on a document, or some type of procedural updates that don't require pulling the entire document."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Amazon Timestream's pricing seems manageable to me."
"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."
"We pay over $10 million a year to Amazon."
"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 costs, but if you don't know, you could end up spending more than necessary."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is moderately priced, where it is neither expensive nor cheap."
"Cosmos DB is a managed offering, so its cost is understandably higher."
"The solution is very expensive."
"Its price is very good for the basic stuff. When you go to a more complicated use case, especially when you need replication and availability zones, it gets a little costly."
"Azure Cosmos DB's pricing is competitive, though there is a need for more personalized pricing models to accommodate small applications without incurring high charges. A suggestion is to implement dynamically adjustable pricing that accounts for various user needs."
"Pricing is one of the solution's main features because it is based on usage, scales automatically, and is not too costly."
"Its pricing structure is quite flexible."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Insurance Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Legal Firm
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise55
 

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?
The pricing for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is good, but there is a developer factor to consider. It could be economical or expensive depending on usage. Guidance about query consumption of Request U...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
In terms of improvement for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, while it eliminates the burden of managing database infrastructure, we realized it might not be possible to use various models simultaneously ...
 

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: September 2025.
868,759 professionals have used our research since 2012.