Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs Milvus comparison

Microsoft and The Milvus Project are both solutions in the Vector Databases category. Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.2, while The Milvus Project is ranked #8 with an average rating of 7.4. Microsoft holds a 4.0% mindshare in VD, compared to The Milvus Project’s 8.2% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of The Milvus Project users who would recommend it.

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Read 99 Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB reviews

1,911 Views
330 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Milvus

Read 5 Milvus reviews

2,716 Views
379 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Milvus

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB and Milvus compete in database solutions. Azure Cosmos DB appears to have the upper hand due to its robust global distribution and multi-data model support, while Milvus excels in managing high-dimensional vectors for AI applications.

Features: Azure Cosmos DB supports seamless multi-model data storage, automatic scaling, and global distribution, making it versatile for diverse workloads. Milvus specializes in high-performance vector data processing, crucial for AI-driven complex search scenarios and analytics, highlighting its focus on similarity search operations.

Room for Improvement: Azure Cosmos DB could enhance its handling of extremely large data sets and refine its cost management for high-demand applications. Its learning curve for new users unfamiliar with NoSQL could be reduced, and optimization for complex relational data operations could be improved. Milvus could benefit from expanding its user interface capabilities, improving documentation for beginners, and enhancing its integration with diverse programming ecosystems.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Azure Cosmos DB offers streamlined deployment with integration across Microsoft Azure, providing easy scalability and management supported by comprehensive global service. Milvus offers flexible deployment in containerized environments, catering to specific enterprise needs with available customer assistance.

Pricing and ROI: Azure Cosmos DB's pricing based on provisioned throughput appeals to large-scale, globally distributed operations, offering significant ROI in reliable data management. Milvus, being open-source, offers low initial setup costs and potential high ROI for high-dimensional data processing needed in AI applications.

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

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus

June 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

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Ranking in Vector Databases

1st

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Database as a Service (DBaaS) (6th), NoSQL Databases (5th), Managed NoSQL Databases (1st)

Milvus

Ranking in Vector Databases

8th

Average Rating

7.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Open Source Databases (10th)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 4.0%. The mindshare of Milvus is 8.2%, down from 8.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vector Databases

Featured Reviews

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.

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Sameer Bhangale

Leader, Data Science Practice at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Provides quick and easy containerization, but documentation is not very user-friendly

Milvus' documentation is not very user-friendly and doesn't help me get started quickly. Chroma DB provides super user-friendly documentation, enabling new users to get started quickly. Chroma DB's setup doesn't have many dependencies, whereas Milvus usually comes with some dependencies because of the way it needs to be deployed. Unlike Milvus, it's very easy to do POCs with Chroma DB.

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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 most valuable features for our organization with Azure Cosmos DB are multi-master capability for applications, automatic failover ensuring high availability, scalability, support for multiple data models, and low-latency access."

"The global synchronization feature of Azure Cosmos DB stands out as the most valuable for me."

"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is its real-time analytics capabilities, which allow for turnaround times in milliseconds. This is crucial for applications like fraud detection."

"Cosmos DB is a document database that stores data in JSON format for faster retrieval of unstructured data. I personally appreciate the speed, which is significantly better for unstructured data, especially since Cosmos DB had JSON as a data type early on."

"Azure Cosmos DB's resiliency is valuable. It is available in every Azure region, allowing quick information storage and retrieval. We can partition it to improve indexing, enabling us to retrieve information and recreate website content quickly."

"It is a scalable product."

"From a global distribution perspective, Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is good and easy to handle."

"It gives us a lot of flexibility. The scaling is instantaneous as well. You immediately have all the resources available."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pros

"I like the accuracy and usability."

"Milvus offers multiple methods for calculating similarities or distances between vectors, such as L2 norm and cosine similarity. These methods help in comparing different vectors based on specific use cases. For instance, in our use case, we find that the L2 distance works best, but you can experiment with different methods to find the most suitable one for your needs."

"The solution is well containerized, and since containerization is quick and easy for me, I can scale it up quickly."

"The best feature of Milvus was finding the closest chunk from a huge amount of data."

"Milvus has good accuracy and performance."

Cons

"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. These aspects need addressing."

"I had a challenging experience implementing the emulator with a Mac. I had to install the emulator in a Docker container because it is not natively compatible. A significant amount of time was spent researching how to enable HTTPS communication when connecting the container and the emulator."

"Currently, it doesn't support cross-container joins, forcing developers to retrieve data from each container separately and combine it using methods like LINQ queries."

"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."

"There are some disadvantages as it is costly compared to other NoSQL databases. It has a complex pricing model and has a strict partitioning strategy."

"We'd like to avoid full DR replication if possible, as this would result in significant cost savings."

"One of the most frustrating aspects of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB right now is that you can only store one vector per document."

"The cost is a concern. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB did not decrease our total cost of ownership. From the standpoint of the old way of doing DBA operations, it did, but our cloud cost increased significantly."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB cons

"Milvus could make it simpler. Simplifying the requirements and making it more accessible. It could be more user-friendly."

"Milvus has higher resource consumption, which introduces complexity in implementation."

"I've heard that when we store too much data in Milvus, it becomes slow and does not work properly."

"Milvus' documentation is not very user-friendly and doesn't help me get started quickly."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cosmos DB is expensive, and the RU-based pricing model is confusing. Although they have a serverless layer, there are deficiencies in what I can define and assign to a database. Estimating infrastructure needs is not straightforward, making it challenging to manage costs."

"The pricing for Cosmos DB has improved, particularly with the new pricing for Autoscale."

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

"Everything could always be cheaper. I like that Cosmos DB allows us to auto-scale instead of pre-provisioning a certain capacity. It automatically scales to the demand, so we only pay for what we consume."

"From a startup point of view, it appears to be expensive. If I were to create my startup, it would not have the pricing appeal compared to the competition, such as Supabase. All those other databases are well-advertised by communities. I know there is a free tier with Azure Cosmos DB. It is just not well advertised."

"With heavy use, like a large-scale IoT implementation, you could easily hit a quarter of a million dollars a month in Azure charges if Cosmos DB is a big part of it."

"Cosmos DB is a highly cost-optimized solution when used correctly."

"Microsoft provides fair pricing."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pricing and cost advice

"Milvus is an open-source solution."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Legal Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

20%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?

We are not consuming so much yet since we are at the beginning of using this solution. I would rate the pricing of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB a six out of ten.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?

We are at the beginning of production, and everything is working very well. The price can always be lower, but currently, it's not a problem.

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What do you like most about Milvus?

I like the accuracy and usability.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Milvus?

Milvus could be improved how it could automatically generate insights from the data it holds. Milvus maintains embedding information and knows the relationships between data points. It would be use...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Milvus?

Milvus is primarily used in RAG, which involves retrieving relevant documents or data to augment the generation of new content. Milvus helps convert text and other data into a vector space, and the...

See all answers

Comparisons

Chroma vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 13% of the time

Pinecone vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon DynamoDB vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 7% of the time

Neo4j Graph Database vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 5% of the time

Amazon Neptune vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Compared 5% of the time

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB Competitors

LanceDB vs Milvus

Compared 18% of the time

Elastic Search vs Milvus

Compared 14% of the time

OpenSearch vs Milvus

Compared 9% of the time

Faiss vs Milvus

Compared 8% of the time

Cassandra vs Milvus

Compared 1% of the time

More Milvus Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

June 2025

Download Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB product report

Buyer's Guide

Open Source Databases

June 2025

Download Milvus product report

Also Known As

Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB

No data available

Overview

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

Milvus is a powerful tool for efficiently storing and retrieving large-scale vectors or embeddings. It is widely used in applications such as similarity search, recommendation systems, image and video retrieval, and natural language processing.

With its fast and accurate search capabilities, scalability, and support for multiple programming languages, Milvus is suitable for a wide range of industries and use cases.

Users appreciate its efficient search capabilities, ability to handle large-scale data, support for various data types, and user-friendly interface.

Milvus enables easy retrieval of information from vast datasets, regardless of the data format, and is praised for its high performance and scalability. The intuitive and easy-to-use interface is also highlighted as a valuable aspect of the platform.

The Milvus Project

Sample Customers

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

1. Alibaba Group 2. Tencent 3. Baidu 4. JD.com 5. Meituan 6. Xiaomi 7. Didi Chuxing 8. ByteDance 9. Huawei 10. ZTE 11. Lenovo 12. Haier 13. China Mobile 14. China Telecom 15. China Unicom 16. Ping An Insurance 17. China Life Insurance 18. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China 19. Bank of China 20. Agricultural Bank of China 21. China Construction Bank 22. PetroChina 23. Sinopec 24. China National Offshore Oil Corporation 25. China Southern Airlines 26. Air China 27. China Eastern Airlines 28. China Railway Group 29. China Railway Construction Corporation 30. China Communications Construction Company 31. China Merchants Group 32. China Evergrande Group

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus

June 2025

Free Report: Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus

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