Azure Cosmos DB vs. Azure SQL Managed Instance

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Azure Cosmos DB
Score 6.8 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft's Big Data analysis platform. It is a NoSQL database service and is a replacement for the earlier DocumentDB NoSQL database.N/A
Azure SQL Managed Instance
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Azure SQL Managed Instance is a scalable cloud database service that combines SQL Server database engine compatibility with a fully managed and evergreen platform as a service.N/A
Pricing
Azure Cosmos DBAzure SQL Managed Instance
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure Cosmos DBAzure SQL Managed Instance
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Azure Cosmos DBAzure SQL Managed Instance
Considered Both Products
Azure Cosmos DB
Chose Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB is more affordable than many other solutions and works incredibly well if you're within the Azure ecosystem.
Chose Azure Cosmos DB
Because we often use Microsoft products for large corporate projects and other customer projects, and compatibility and integration are important to us, we used this platform, which in addition to very high security, has a very good response speed, also, building modern …
Chose Azure Cosmos DB
We evaluated Mongo DB and Amazon Redshift. In the end, we decided to have both Redshift and Cosmos but for different app stacks. For apps hosted on Azure, Cosmos plays a very important role. Also from a support standpoint, Microsoft offers very good service and an equally good …
Chose Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Cosmos DB has the benefit of having multi-master key tenancy compared to Redis and Mongo. Reads are just as fast, if not faster than Mongo. However, the distribution of writes (i.e. ACID transactions) isn't as high as Google Cloud Spanner or CouchDB. Azure Cosmos DB …
Chose Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed NoSQL database & globally distributed NoSQL database service. Its very fast and predictable performance, high availability, elastic scaling, global distribution, and ease of development DB platform compare to MongoDB.
Chose Azure Cosmos DB
Our development and administration teams are just more familiar with the Microsoft Stack, and there was very little additional knowledge required to put this into production.
Chose Azure Cosmos DB
Cosmos DB is unique in the industry as a true multi-model, cloud-native database engine that comes with solutions for geo-redundancy, multi-master writes, (globally!) low latency, and cost-effective hosting built in. I've yet to see anything else that even comes close to the …
Azure SQL Managed Instance
Chose Azure SQL Managed Instance
Azure to our enviironment where we have everything integrated stacks up far better than MySQL where we would have to reinvent and use everything to fit a MySQL environment including the data and the commands within that data. Furthermore, doesn't work really well on SQL …
Features
Azure Cosmos DBAzure SQL Managed Instance
NoSQL Databases
Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Product A and Product B
Azure Cosmos DB
9.9
Ratings
11% above category average
Azure SQL Managed Instance
-
Ratings
Performance10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Availability10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Concurrency10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Security10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Scalability10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Data model flexibility9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Deployment model flexibility10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Azure Cosmos DB
-
Ratings
Azure SQL Managed Instance
8.4
Ratings
5% above category average
Ease of building user interfaces00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Scalability00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Platform management overhead00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Workflow engine capability00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Platform access control00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Services-enabled integration00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Development environment creation00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Development environment replication00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Issue recovery00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Azure Cosmos DBAzure SQL Managed Instance
Small Businesses
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Azure Cosmos DBAzure SQL Managed Instance
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(0 ratings)
6.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.6
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.8
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Azure Cosmos DBAzure SQL Managed Instance
Likelihood to Recommend
NoSQL platforms are very useful when it comes to security, speed, accuracy, high accessibility with high read and write power. Everything is managed under the cloud and we have the various capabilities of Azure and support for Microsoft products with us. Flexibility in price and variety of features, as well as real-time results, are some of the popular [features] of this platform.
Read full review
Runs the supply chain workload well. Able to provide proper alerts when the cpu is not enough to run the workload. Is able to run the update stats automatically as the data changes. Scales very well for most oltp apps. Has good dashboards to show what is going on the database.
Read full review
Pros
  • Turn-key geo-redundancy with multi-master writes is unprecedented and unparalleled in the industry!
  • Guaranteed low latency makes Cosmos DB an excellent fit for most of our performance-intensive situations.
  • The tunable consistency model simplifies so many challenges in distributed systems engineering that otherwise require advanced knowledge of computer science topics. I continue to be impressed at how Cosmos DB has abstracted away so much complexity.
Read full review
  • executes the queries efficiently
  • has tools/dashboards to show where the query problems lie
  • alerting for problems
Read full review
Cons
  • When searching by default, it is case sensitive, which must be changed by default
  • In many ways, the price should be more flexible according to the requested facilities, because the price is very expensive for startup companies.
  • It is not fully compatible with most common Streaming Analytics tools applications and developers should be worked on it
Read full review
  • hard to use without Microsoft knowledge
  • Intimidating CLI
  • Commands are not intuitive
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
It's efficient, easy to scale, and works. We do have to do a bit of administration, but less now than when we started with this a couple of years ago. Microsoft continues to improve its self-management capability.
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Usability
Like I said, Cosmos is the way to go. From all of the services that Azure has, Cosmos is very robust in terms of usability. It's ever-evolving and integrates with other applications seamlessly. The interface is pretty easy to understand. I implemented various solutions for my company and Cosmos was one of them.
Read full review
it runs the workload very well without causing any issues to the business. there are many applications running on Azure SQL Managed Instances in my organization. Most users are happy with its performance. Is able to provide good dashboard for the visibility of the workload. Can add cpu without a downtime to deal with high workload.
Read full review
Support Rating
The support team is very responsive and we are generally satisfied with Microsoft support, in my opinion support team of a product and service is just as valuable as its quality and performance. Telephone answering, 24-hour hotline, email support and ticketing are excellent.
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB is more affordable than many other solutions and works incredibly well if you're within the Azure ecosystem.
Read full review
Azure to our enviironment where we have everything integrated stacks up far better than MySQL where we would have to reinvent and use everything to fit a MySQL environment including the data and the commands within that data. Furthermore, doesn't work really well on SQL Management Studio which makes it completely useless for what we are trying to do.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • Expensive but works if your infra is on Azure data center.
  • No latency and nearly no downtime.
  • Takes time for end users to adapt.
Read full review
  • Decision Driven decisions have been quicker
  • Negatively cumbersome at start when training
  • Positive use of PaaS services instead of devoting VMs
Read full review
ScreenShots