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Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB pros and cons

Vendor: Microsoft
4.1 out of 5
Badge Ranked 1
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Pros & Cons summary

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Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB offers exceptional scalability, supporting multiple regions and automatic scaling, which enhances performance and availability.
Its flexibility with a variety of data models and APIs, such as MongoDB compatibility, simplifies integration and data management.
The global distribution of data and geo-replication features ensure low-latency access and disaster recovery without impacting application performance.
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB provides powerful real-time analytics capabilities, making it suitable for use cases like fraud detection with turnaround times in milliseconds.
Its high speed and efficiency in handling large data sets and queries are unmatched, offering quick data retrieval and cost-effective scalability.

CONS

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB query capabilities have been described as complex, with room for improvement in SQL options and integrations such as with MongoDB and Databricks.
The pricing model for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is perceived as complicated and expensive, especially for larger-scale queries and data migrations.
Several users have indicated dissatisfaction with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's technical support, citing slow response times and insufficient assistance during critical incidents.
Issues with indexing have been noted, including the complexities of data retrieval and the impact on cost, prompting calls for better indexing at lower costs.
Many find the resource unit (RU) model in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB to be unclear, leading to challenges in optimizing consumption and managing costs efficiently.
 

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB Pros review quotes

reviewer2542083 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 9, 2024
Change feed is a pretty amazing feature. Once you make the changes, they are quickly read for you, and then you also have geo-replication. You can do a lot of things in your region, and the same regions can be replicated all over the world.
Karlo Zatylny - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 17, 2024
We chose Azure Cosmos DB initially because of the type of data that we needed to store. We have a schema that is very nondeterministic and flexible. It is always changing based on whatever data we need to acquire from different devices, so we needed a document store with a flexible schema.
MichaelJohn - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 25, 2024
The most valuable feature of Azure Cosmos DB is its scalability. That is the biggest reason I use Azure Cosmos DB.
Learn what your peers think about Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: June 2025.
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Joel Hulen - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 24, 2024
The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is its ability to handle concurrency and consistency.
Cornell Emile - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 30, 2024
Specifically, we are using the MongoDB API, so we leverage it in that way. I like the flexibility that it offers. My team does not have to spend time building out database tables. We can get going fairly quickly with being able to read and write data into a MongoDB collection that is hosted inside Azure Cosmos DB.
Yoni Nijs - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 26, 2024
It gives us a lot of flexibility. The scaling is instantaneous as well. You immediately have all the resources available.
reviewer2724105 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 18, 2025
The efficiency of search capabilities is significant, particularly when it comes to the flexibility of conducting in-depth, almost recursive searches that are both efficient and cost-effective.
Michael Calvin - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 9, 2024
The querying language and the SDKs they've provided over the years have been phenomenal, giving us a significant advantage.
AK
Apr 25, 2025
The best part of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is that with the default configuration and the Azure functional pipeline, if your go-to cloud provider is Microsoft Azure, the whole integration is seamless.
Aasif Bagdadi - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 16, 2024
The fact that scalability can be achieved by simply configuring availability zones is very attractive.
 

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB Cons review quotes

reviewer2542083 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 9, 2024
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.
Karlo Zatylny - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 17, 2024
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.
MichaelJohn - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 25, 2024
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.
Learn what your peers think about Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Joel Hulen - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 24, 2024
The first one is the ability to assign role-based access control through the Azure portal for accounts to have contributor rights.
Cornell Emile - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 30, 2024
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.
Yoni Nijs - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 26, 2024
There are multiple approaches to implementing multitenant architecture on Azure Cosmos DB, but there is still no single or best-recommended approach when you have a big variance in the size of your tenants. That is something that still needs to be worked on.
reviewer2724105 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 18, 2025
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.
Michael Calvin - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 9, 2024
Azure Cosmos DB could be better for business intelligence and analytical queries.
AK
Apr 25, 2025
The topic of RU consumption needs better documentation. Now that Microsoft has partnered with different LLM organizations, such as OpenAI, a bot could guide us through different metrics present in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB.
Aasif Bagdadi - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 16, 2024
An improvement could include increasing the document size or providing a method to manage larger sets efficiently. If they want to keep a 2 MB limit, they should provide a way to chain multiple documents in a systematic way so that developers do not have to figure out what to do when a document is larger than 2 MB.