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Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs Milvus comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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
6.9
Number of Reviews
109
Ranking in other categories
Database as a Service (DBaaS) (4th), NoSQL Databases (2nd), Managed NoSQL Databases (1st)
Milvus
Ranking in Vector Databases
13th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 5.8%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Milvus is 7.3%, down from 8.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB5.8%
Milvus7.3%
Other86.9%
Vector Databases
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2724105 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Director of Product Management at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Provides super sharp latency, excellent availability, and the ability to effectively manage costs across different tenants
For integrating Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB with other Azure products or other products, there are a couple of challenges with the current system. Right now, the vectors are stored as floating-point numbers within the NoSQL document, which makes them inefficiently large. This leads to increased storage space requirements, and searching through a vast number of documents in the vector database becomes quite costly in terms of RUs. While the integration works well, the expense associated with it is relatively high. I would really like to see a reduction in costs for their vector search, as it is currently on the expensive side. The areas for improvement in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB are vector pricing and vector indexing patterns, which are unintuitive and not well described. I would also like to see the parameters of Fleet Spaces made more powerful, as currently, it's somewhat lightweight. I believe they've made those changes intentionally to better understand the cost model. However, we would like to take a more aggressive approach in using it. One of the most frustrating aspects of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB right now is that you can only store one vector per document. Additionally, you must specify the configuration of that vector when you create an instance of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB. Once the database is set up, you can't change the vector configuration, which is incredibly limiting for experimentation. You want the ability to try different settings and see how they perform, as there are numerous use cases for storing more than one vector in a document. While interoperability within the vector database is acceptable—for example, I can search for vectors—I still desire a richer set of configuration options.
Sameer Bhangale - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Azure Cosmos DB offers numerous data connectors that provide a platform for seamless integration with various platforms and visualization tools such as Power BI. It allows connection via multiple data connectors to integrate data in any desired format."
"I would rate Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB a ten out of ten."
"Switching to the cloud significantly improved scalability, flexibility, and uptime."
"The most valuable features of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB were the general infrastructure, ease to use, and interface."
"Cosmos DB is effective at handling large queries."
"The benefits of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB were immediate for us."
"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."
"With Azure being our main cloud, the valuable features of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB include integration with other Azure products that we're using and governance inside Azure. For integration with other products inside the Azure cloud, it was a better choice."
"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."
"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."
"I like the accuracy and usability."
 

Cons

"I would give a low rating to Microsoft support, as whenever I talked to them, I never got a solution. I had to guide them."
"One area for improvement is the ease of writing SQL queries and stored procedures in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB. Writing an SQL query and a stored procedure on top of that is a little challenging."
"There are no particular factors that need improvement. There is a little bit of a learning curve with scaling workloads, but it works smoothly."
"To show this in real time, we need a live connection that automatically updates in response to new records being inserted. This automated updating feature is lacking in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB compared to Databricks."
"I would like the speed of transferring data to be improved."
"We encountered an issue with Cosmos DB's recently introduced hierarchical partition feature."
"Areas of improvement for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB include indexing. While it makes data retrieval easier, it also increases costs."
"From about half a billion rows, we're returning maybe 20,000 in two or three minutes. We don't know why, but we are working with Microsoft and a third party to figure that out."
"Milvus has higher resource consumption, which introduces complexity in implementation."
"Milvus' documentation is not very user-friendly and doesn't help me get started quickly."
"I've heard that when we store too much data in Milvus, it becomes slow and does not work properly."
"Milvus could make it simpler. Simplifying the requirements and making it more accessible. It could be more user-friendly."
 

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."
"I would rate Cosmos DB's cost at seven out of ten, with ten being the highest."
"It seems to have helped significantly. We were using a different database system previously, and one of the reasons for acquiring Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB was cost."
"Cosmos DB gave us three accounts for $400. We pay according to the usage."
"Cosmos DB is expensive compared to any virtual machine based on conventional RDBMS like MySQL or PostgreSQL."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's licensing costs are monthly."
"Its price is in the middle, neither too low nor too high."
"The pricing is perceived as being on the higher side. However, if you have large data operations, it might reduce costs due to performance efficiencies."
"Milvus is an open-source solution."
"Milvus is an open-source solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Legal Firm
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise58
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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's pricing model has aligned with my budget expectations because I can tune the RU as I need to, which helps a lot. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's dynamic auto-scale or server...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
I have not utilized Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB multi-model support for handling diverse data types. I'm not in the position to decide if clients will use Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB or any other datab...
What do you like most about Milvus?
I like the accuracy and usability.
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...
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...
 

Also Known As

Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB
No data available
 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.