MarkLogic vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB comparison

Progress Software and Microsoft are both solutions in the NoSQL Databases category. Progress Software is ranked #19, while Microsoft is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.3. Progress Software holds a 1.3% mindshare in ND, compared to Microsoft’s 3.3% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Progress Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

MarkLogic

Read 2 MarkLogic reviews

239 Views
148 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Read 91 Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB reviews

495 Views
185 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

MarkLogic

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

MarkLogic and Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB compete in multi-model data management. Users typically prefer MarkLogic for its enterprise-grade security and data capabilities, while Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is favored for its global distribution and API support, making it suitable for large-scale applications.

Features: MarkLogic comes with ACID compliance, advanced search, and robust security, making it ideal for critical applications. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB offers global distribution, horizontal scaling, and supports various APIs, fitting for dynamic workloads.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: MarkLogic provides a comprehensive deployment model with customization and strong support. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB offers cloud-native, globally distributed deployment, and benefits from Azure integration. MarkLogic is favored for flexibility, while Cosmos DB is praised for seamless Microsoft integration.

Pricing and ROI: MarkLogic's pricing reflects its features, offering high ROI in secure environments. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is competitive in pricing for global scalability, leading to high ROI in distributed databases. MarkLogic sees use in data-heavy environments, whereas Cosmos DB is cost-effective for scalable cloud deployments.

To learn more, read our detailed MarkLogic vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

MarkLogic vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

April 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 851,604 peers since 2012

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

MarkLogic

Ranking in NoSQL Databases

19th

Average Rating

9.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Ranking in NoSQL Databases

3rd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Database as a Service (DBaaS) (6th), Managed NoSQL Databases (1st), Vector Databases (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the NoSQL Databases category, the mindshare of MarkLogic is 1.3%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 3.3%. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

NoSQL Databases

Featured Reviews

Beverly R. Jamison

IT Solutions Architect / Computer Scientist at Practical Semantics

Frequent updates, helpful search capabilities, and high quality support

MarkLogic's greatest asset is its strong engineering foundation. It was specifically designed with search capabilities in mind, and the developers placed a great emphasis on ensuring the quality of the indexing and all subsequent layers that were added. The solution has been good at providing the updates that were what we were hoping for. They frequently update the solution.

Read full review

MichaelJohn

Director | Data & AI at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The rules can show us if there are missing items, like titles, and we can add them in to ensure everything is filled and makes sense and there are no missing details."

"MarkLogic's greatest asset is its strong engineering foundation. It was specifically designed with search capabilities in mind, and the developers placed a great emphasis on ensuring the quality of the indexing and all subsequent layers that were added."

"It is non-SQL and helps to manage and manipulate data from the coding, rather than direct data and complex queries."

"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB offers exceptional stability, boasting a reliability rating of 99.95 percent."

"The best feature of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is API access, which makes it very easy to interact with the database without needing to write queries."

"One of the nice features is the ability to auto-scale"

"The solution is extremely user-friendly and easy to navigate."

"We achieved a strong return on investment."

"The high speed of Azure Cosmos DB compared to other competitors is remarkable."

"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is very fast."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pros

Cons

"The spreadsheet capabilities could be improved."

"One of the most common requests is to improve the user interface of the database. While it is primarily a database, there are other databases available that offer more user-friendly interfaces. The UI is good for developers but not for regular users. More visuals would be beneficial."

"Overall, it is a good resource. I am not aware of the background, but it seems to currently support only JSON documents."

"Once you create a database, it calls the container, and then items show up. A better description and more guidance would help because the first time I created it, I didn't understand that a container is similar to a table in SQL."

"We would like to see advancements in AI with the ability to benchmark vector search capabilities, ensuring it answers questions accurately. During our initial implementation, we faced challenges with indexing and sorting, which are natively available in other offerings but required specific configurations in Cosmos."

"We should have more freedom to tweak it and make our own queries for non-traditional use-cases."

"The one thing that I have been working on with Microsoft with regard to this is the ability to easily split partitions and have it do high-performance cross-partition queries. That is the only place where either our data size or our throughput has grown beyond one partition, so being able to do cross-partition queries efficiently would be my number one request."

"It is easy to use, but optimization has been a mixed experience. It has been more of trying to figure out how to do so. We have not found much support there, so we have to come up with our own way of optimizing it in different ways. That is one area of improvement."

"The cost can sometimes be high, especially during cross-partition queries with large data amounts."

"In the long run, there should be an addition of more features, especially because this space is evolving quickly. It all boils down to how many more features you are adding, how many integrations you are supporting, and how many more APIs you have that are standard APIs."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"MarkLogic is a pricey option, but there are some advantages to its pricing structure. For medium-sized clients or departments within larger companies, it is possible to obtain a license for one or two nodes for less than a hundred thousand dollars. Additionally, if you only need to deploy a single node, you can do so for under fifty thousand dollars. This is in contrast to other high-quality software options that are only accessible to larger businesses, where the starting price can be upwards of two hundred thousand dollars."

"Its pricing is higher compared to solutions like Aerospike. However, it is justified because of the out-of-the-box features that are provided. The availability and resiliency that we have make it worth the price."

"Cosmos DB is cost-effective when starting but requires careful management."

"Cosmos DB is a PaaS, so there are no upfront costs for infrastructure. There are only subscriptions you pay for Azure and things like that. But it's a PaaS, so it's a subscription service. The license isn't perpetual, and the cost might seem expensive on its face, but you have to look at the upkeep for infrastructure and what you're saving."

"Pricing is mid- to high-end."

"The cost is the biggest limitation of this solution."

"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."

"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."

"Its pricing is not bad. It is good."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which NoSQL Databases solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

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

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

Comparisons

MongoDB vs MarkLogic

Compared 43% of the time

Neo4j Graph Database vs MarkLogic

Compared 24% of the time

More MarkLogic Competitors

Chroma vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 15% of the time

Pinecone vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon Neptune vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 6% of the time

Amazon DynamoDB vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 5% of the time

Neo4j Graph Database vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 5% of the time

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

NoSQL Databases

May 2025

Download MarkLogic product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

May 2025

Download Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB product report

Also Known As

No data available

Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB

Overview

MarkLogic is an operational and transactional Enterprise NoSQL database that is designed to integrate, store, manage and search SON and XML documents and semantic data (RDF Triples).

Progress Software

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database service providing scalability, user-friendliness, and seamless integration, suitable for managing large volumes of structured and unstructured data across diverse applications.

Azure Cosmos DB is renowned for its scalability, stability, and ease of integration, offering robust support for multiple data models and APIs. Its capacity for handling unstructured data efficiently and providing real-time analytics makes it ideal for applications requiring high performance and global distribution. With features like automatic failover and integration with Microsoft products, users benefit from cost optimization and secure data handling. Enhancement opportunities include simplifying queries, improving documentation, and expanding backup and analytics functionalities.

What are the most important features of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?

Scalability and Autoscaling: Efficiently handles growing data and user demands.
Multi-Model Support: Adapts to different data models seamlessly.
Global Distribution: Provides low-latency access across multiple regions.
Automatic Failover: Ensures high availability and reliability.
Integration with Microsoft Products: Offers seamless connectivity with Azure services.

What benefits should users look for in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB reviews?

Performance and Speed: Exceptionally fast processing for real-time data analytics.
Cost Optimization: Tools for managing expenses effectively.
Secure Data Handling: Implements strong data security measures.
Flexible Data Ingestion: Supports diverse data ingestion methods.

Azure Cosmos DB is frequently used in sectors like web, mobile, IoT, and analytics. It supports applications as a key-value store, processes real-time data, and enables global scalability with low-latency access. Its big data management capabilities and integration with Azure services enhance its utility across industries.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

ALM, American Psychological Association, American Society of Agronomy, Cond_ Nast, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Institute of Engineering and Technology, JWG Group, Lagardre Active, RSuite CMS, Wiley

TomTom, KPMG Australia, Bosch, ASOS, Mercedes Benz, NBA, Zero Friction, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Kinectify

Buyer's Guide

MarkLogic vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

April 2025

Free Report: MarkLogic vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Find out what your peers are saying about MarkLogic vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our MarkLogic vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB report.

See our list of best NoSQL Databases vendors.

We monitor all NoSQL Databases reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.