Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs PostgreSQL comparison

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

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96% willing to recommend

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

PostgreSQL and Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB are both key players in the database solutions market, each offering distinct benefits and challenges. PostgreSQL is noted for its cost-effectiveness and comprehensive features, while Cosmos DB excels in scalability and NoSQL support, albeit at a higher price.

Features: PostgreSQL boasts strong support for SQL standards, asynchronous commit, and ACID compliance. Its powerful indexing and wide programming language support enhance its performance, particularly in data-heavy tasks and intricate queries. On the other hand, Azure Cosmos DB is praised for its high scalability, multi-model database support, low-latency access, and integration with various APIs. It is valued for its data handling versatility and seamless Azure services integration.

Room for Improvement: PostgreSQL faces difficulties with large-scale operations, challenges in handling read-only and COUNT(*) queries, and a complex setup process. Improvements could be made in partitioning and replication. Azure Cosmos DB is hindered by its high cost and intricate pricing structure. Users also seek better analytics capabilities and support for complex queries and integrations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: PostgreSQL is frequently deployed in on-premises or hybrid cloud environments, offering flexibility but often requiring significant expertise due to limited centralized customer support. Community support is robust, with active forums and extensive online resources. Azure Cosmos DB, designed for public cloud deployment, offers more streamlined setup and management but at higher costs. While Microsoft provides extensive support, its proprietary nature may pose interoperability challenges compared to open-source options.

Pricing and ROI: PostgreSQL is a cost-efficient solution, offering no licensing fees and promoting high ROI via its open-source model. It provides businesses with a powerful database solution with minimal financial investment. Conversely, Azure Cosmos DB requires careful management of its consumption-based pricing model. Though it offers significant features, its high operational costs are justifiable in large-scale operations where its performance and scalability benefits outweigh the expense.

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

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. PostgreSQL

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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)

PostgreSQL

Ranking in Vector Databases

12th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

125

Ranking in other categories

Open Source Databases (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 4.0%. The mindshare of PostgreSQL is 5.2%, up from 3.5% 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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PavithrarajShetty

Software Architect at Tetherfi

Offers simplicity and is cheaply priced

I haven't gone through the scalability aspect since I was using MySQL Server. I haven't worked to a high level in PostgreSQL, but with MySQL Server, I have managed clustering and partitioning. I think I haven't put much focus on PostgreSQL, so I am not sure how it behaves or how it works.

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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 speed is impressive, and integrating our power-up database with Kafka was an improvement."

"For example, we have people spread across multiple locations; if they update data in Australia, we can access it in another location within a fraction of a second."

"We love the ability to land data with Cosmos DB easily. Cosmos is native to Azure, so everything works seamlessly with it. You need good data to have good AI, and Cosmos makes it easy to land the data."

"I truly recommend Cosmos DB because it is a serverless product."

"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."

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

"Switching to the cloud significantly improved scalability, flexibility, and uptime."

"I like the way you can create and delete records. You pass a JSON, and then it creates a record."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pros

"PostgreSQL has complete SQL dialects and is useful for writing sophisticated and complex queries. We have experience with Oracle database. My partner is experienced in DDA and he writes sophisticated SQL queries. The solution helps to get the job done in the best possible way. In today’s age, most developers do not have strong SQL knowledge or language command. They find it difficult to write even a SQL statement. These developers write cool queries which perform badly on the database end. As DBAs, we constantly urge the developers not to write bad queries, help them learn more, and write placebo commands."

"It's a standard reliable database management system."

"PostgreSQL is very powerful, easy to manage, and has many features."

"The community support and the open-source community for it are good."

"It is a pretty comprehensive database system. Its performance is good, and it does what it is supposed to do. It also integrates very well."

"The PostgreSQL database is similar to the SQL Server but has a slightly different technology that has similar resources as well. If the customer has the confidence using SQL Server, they will be fairly comfortable using this solution."

"The solution is scalable, it is very good."

"This is an open-source solution, operates at a high speed, and supports more than one SQL language."

Cons

"It doesn't support all databases."

"It would be beneficial if Cosmos supported batch and real-time use cases to make the system more seamless."

"In Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, I would suggest improvements in security."

"The API compatibility has room for improvement, particularly integration with MongoDB. You have to connect to a specific flavor of MongoDB. We'd also like a richer query capability in line with the latest Mongo features. That is one thing on our wish list. The current version is good enough for our use case, but it could be improved."

"A limitation in Azure Cosmos DB is the 2 MB document size. Developers need more systemic support in chaining multiple documents if more than 2 MB is required."

"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."

"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."

"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

"The performance of PostgreSQL could improve."

"It could be improved by using parallelization. You want basically, distributed computing."

"I find it difficult to get connectors on the tool. For example, .NET has only one free provider in PostgreSQL. I need to pay the provider if I need something more sophisticated features. Other languages like PHP and Java have good community support. We need community support for .NET."

"The interface climate could be better."

"The database and applications can become very slow."

"I'd like to see better memory management. I think that that's one of the few areas that Postgres does not handle as well as MySQL does or did."

"Integration with other platforms could be improved."

"It still needs to be more mature and have some backup feature. We are normally dealing with Oracle's data, and we have very strong online tools to back up the data and do other things. PostgreSQL still needs to do more in this area as well as in the high availability area. There are many external tools that you can use for PostgreSQL's high availability, but there is no embedded tool within PostgreSQL for high availability. It could have a feature similar to Oracle for working on a distributed system. It can have some scripts to improve the monitoring and some tools to do performance analysis. We have a workaround for most of such requirements except for the support for a distributed system, which is very difficult to have. This area should be included in the core of the database itself."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 pricing is perceived as being on the higher side. However, if you have large data operations, it might reduce costs due to performance efficiencies."

"This cost model is beneficial because it allows for cost control by limiting resource units (RUs), which is ideal. However, for our needs, we can't engage with their minimum pricing, which ranges from 100 to 1,000 RUs. At the bare minimum, we need to use 4,000 RUs for a customer. I would like to find a way to gain some advantages from the lowest tier, particularly the ability to scale down if necessary. It would be helpful to have more flexibility in cost management at the lower end."

"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."

"The pricing and licensing model was initially difficult to understand, but as soon as I learned what was going on and how it was priced, it was pretty easy."

"The RU's use case determines our license fees."

"Cosmos DB is expensive compared to any virtual machine based on conventional RDBMS like MySQL or PostgreSQL."

"The solution is very expensive."

More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pricing and cost advice

"It is an open-source platform."

"We use the open-source version of PostgreSQL and not the enterprise edition."

"Affordable solution."

"It is free. There is no license on it."

"Our company pays for it. There are free versions available, but for advanced features, you obviously have to pay."

"The solution requires a license."

"The tool is cheaply priced compared to other RDBMS providers in the market."

"We are using the free version of PostgreSQL."

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Legal Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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?

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.

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.

How does Firebird SQL compare with PostgreSQL?

PostgreSQL was designed in a way that provides you with not only a high degree of flexibility but also offers you a cheap and easy-to-use solution. It gives you the ability to redesign and audit yo...

What do you like most about PostgreSQL?

It's a transactional database, so we use Postgres for most of our reporting. That's where it's helping.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PostgreSQL?

The tool is free of cost. For now, it's not about making money. But once we perfect it, we can offer it to customers willing to pay for support and other services. Most of my deployments are free.

Chroma vs Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

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More Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB Competitors

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Compared 35% of the time

MySQL vs PostgreSQL

Compared 11% of the time

EDB Postgres Advanced Server vs PostgreSQL

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Chroma vs PostgreSQL

Compared 8% of the time

MariaDB vs PostgreSQL

Compared 8% of the time

Product Reports

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Download Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB product report

Download PostgreSQL product report

Also Known As

Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB

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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

PostgreSQL is a versatile and reliable database management system commonly used for web development, data analysis, and building scalable databases.

It offers advanced features like indexing, replication, and transaction management. Users appreciate its flexibility, performance, and ability to handle large amounts of data efficiently. Its robustness, scalability, and support for complex queries make it highly valuable.

Additionally, PostgreSQL's extensibility, flexibility, community support, and frequent updates contribute to its ongoing improvement and stability.

Sample Customers

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

1. Apple 2. Cisco 3. Fujitsu 4. Instagram 5. Netflix 6. Red Hat 7. Sony 8. Uber 9. Cisco Systems 10. Skype 11. LinkedIn 12. Etsy 13. Yelp 14. Reddit 15. Dropbox 16. Slack 17. Twitch 18. WhatsApp 19. Snapchat 20. Shazam 21. SoundCloud 22. The New York Times 23. Cisco WebEx 24. Atlassian 25. Cisco Meraki 26. Heroku 27. GitLab 28. Zalando 29. OpenTable 30. Trello 31. Square Enix 32. Bloomberg

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. PostgreSQL