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Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs Milvus 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

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB
Ranking in Vector Databases
3rd
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), Managed NoSQL Databases (1st)
Milvus
Ranking in Vector Databases
6th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 3.0%. The mindshare of Milvus is 8.6%, up from 8.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Sameer Bhangale - PeerSpot reviewer
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

"Cosmos DB has helped our organization handle large amounts of data."
"I would recommend Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB to other users without hesitation."
"What I appreciate most are the latency and the access, which are guaranteed by the tool, which is really impressive."
"It is one of the simpler databases to work with in terms of code management, tracking, and debugging due to its straightforward data storage and retrieval mechanisms."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB has helped to improve efficiency, providing good response times and allowing the storage of AI process results, which is crucial for feedback loops."
"It is integral to our business because it helps manage schema and metadata for all our documents and customers. The AI insights we glean based on Azure OpenAI also end up in Cosmos DB. We need a NoSQL store because the schema is dynamic and flexible, so Cosmos DB is a great fit. It has four nines or possibly five nines availability, excellent geo-distribution, and auto-scaling."
"Cosmos DB is effective at handling large queries."
"The connectors, such as the MongoDB connector and the integration with SQL, are incredibly valuable."
"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."
"The best feature of Milvus was finding the closest chunk from a huge amount of data."
"The solution is well containerized, and since containerization is quick and easy for me, I can scale it up quickly."
 

Cons

"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 auto-scaling feature adjusts hourly. We have many processes that write stuff in batches, so we must ensure that the load is spread evenly throughout the hour. It would be much easier if it were done by the minute. I'm looking forward to the vector database search that they are adding. It's a pretty cool new feature."
"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."
"There's a little bit of a learning curve because I was new to Azure. But once you learn the tool, it's pretty straightforward."
"Currently, I have no suggestions for enhancement or new implementations in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB. However, the cost can sometimes be high, especially during cross-partition queries with large data amounts."
"The query searching functionality has some complexities and could be more user-friendly."
"Azure Cosmos DB could be better for business intelligence and analytical queries."
"The size of the continuation token in Azure Cosmos DB should be static rather than increasing with more data, as it can lead to application crashes. They should use a static key size."
"Milvus' documentation is not very user-friendly and doesn't help me get started quickly."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's licensing costs are monthly."
"Cosmos DB is a managed offering, so its cost is understandably higher."
"The tool is not expensive."
"You need to understand exactly the details of how the pricing works technically to stay within reasonable pricing."
"When we've budgeted for our resources, it's one of the more expensive ones, but it's still not very expensive per month."
"The price of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB could be a bit lower."
"Cosmos DB is cost-effective when starting but requires careful management."
"Azure is a pay as you go subscription."
"Milvus is an open-source solution."
"Milvus is an open-source solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Legal Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
8%
 

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.
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 ...
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...
 

Comparisons

 

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: April 2025.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.