Azure AI Search vs. Azure Cosmos DB

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Azure AI Search
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Azure AI Search (formerly Azure Cognitive Search) is enterprise search as a service, from Microsoft.
$0.10
Per Hour
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
Pricing
Azure AI SearchAzure Cosmos DB
Editions & Modules
Basic
$0.101
Per Hour
Standard S1
$0.336
Per Hour
Standard S2
$1.344
Per Hour
Standard S3
$2.688
Per Hour
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure AI SearchAzure Cosmos DB
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 AI SearchAzure Cosmos DB
Features
Azure AI SearchAzure Cosmos DB
NoSQL Databases
Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Product A and Product B
Azure AI Search
-
Ratings
Azure Cosmos DB
9.9
Ratings
11% above category average
Performance00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Availability00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Concurrency00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Security00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Scalability00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Data model flexibility00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Deployment model flexibility00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Azure AI SearchAzure Cosmos DB
Small Businesses
Yext
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Score 8.9 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
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Score 7.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Guru
Guru
Score 9.5 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Guru
Guru
Score 9.5 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
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Score 7.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Azure AI SearchAzure Cosmos DB
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
7.6
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.2
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Azure AI SearchAzure Cosmos DB
Likelihood to Recommend
If you have a medium amount of data (2GB - 2.4TB), high-security concerns, and search is a key requirement in your single-tenant application then Azure Search likely has you covered. If you have a small amount of data per tenant (EG, about 2GB), have low-security concerns, and a multi-tenant application where search is a key requirement, then Azure Search would likely be a good choice - though you would need to implement your own concept of sharding and managing across potentially multiple Azure Search instances. If you can reflect your would-be indexes in Azure Search by depositing the data in columns in a SQL table and just index it for full-text search - and that still fits your requirements - it's probably better to start with SQL Database then scale up to Azure Search when you need the advanced features like ranking or cognitive abilities.
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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.
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Pros
  • Incredibly robust back-end infrastructure.
  • Streamlined integration into Microsoft's Azure Cloud.
  • From a user standpoint, it lets the customer easily access their data and provide useful search tips.
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  • 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.
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Cons
  • Like virtually all Azure services, it has first-class treatment for .Net as the developer platform of choice, but largely ignores other options. While there is a first-party Python SDK, there are only community packages for other languages like Ruby and Node. Might be a game of roulette for those to be kept up-to-date. This might make it a non-starter for some teams that don't want to do the work to integrate with the REST API directly.
  • In my opinion, partitions inside of Azure Search don't count as data segregation for customers in a multi-tenant app, so any application where you have many customers with high-security concerns, Azure Search is probably a non-starter.
  • To elaborate on the multi-tenant issue: Azure Search's approach to pricing is pretty steep. While there is a free tier for small applications (50MB of content or less) the first paid tier is about 14x more expensive than the first SQL Database tier that supports full-text search. For many applications, it makes a lot more economic sense to just run some LIKE or CONTAINS queries on columns in a table rather than going with Azure Search.
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  • 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
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
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.
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Usability
No answers on this topic
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.
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Support Rating
No answers on this topic
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.
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Alternatives Considered
Azure Search is a competitor against Google's own AI autosuggest a feature. We went with Azure because our network security folks found it to be more robust from a security standpoint, which is incredibly important when you have proprietary manufacturing information. Additionally, we're a Microsoft shop so it plugged into our cloud hosting package and client facing OS.
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Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB is more affordable than many other solutions and works incredibly well if you're within the Azure ecosystem.
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Return on Investment
  • Service cannot be downgrade or upgrade after creation
  • Good tool provide maximum ROI
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  • Expensive but works if your infra is on Azure data center.
  • No latency and nearly no downtime.
  • Takes time for end users to adapt.
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ScreenShots