# Amazon RDS Reviews 2026. Verified Reviews, Pros & Cons | Capterra > Is Amazon RDS the right Database solution for you? Explore 218 verified user reviews from people in industries like yours to make a confident choice. Source: https://www.capterra.com/p/192201/Amazon-RDS/reviews --- Amazon RDS 4.7 (218) [View alternatives](https://www.capterra.com/p/192201/Amazon-RDS/alternatives/) Provider data verified by our Software Research team, and reviews moderated by our Reviews Verification team. [Learn more](https://www.capterra.com/our-story/) * * * Last updated March 25th, 2026 # Reviews of Amazon RDS Ease of use 4.4 Customer Service 4.4 ## Pros and Cons in Reviews Comprehensive managed database options 87% positive reviews out of 91 Most reviewers indicate database management is simplified, supporting multiple engines and reducing manual setup and maintenance tasks. Manish T Software Engineer, 10,001+ employees. "One of the best thing about it is that no configuration & setup required in order to work with any database, it could be relational or non relational DB eg: MySQL, MongoDB, SQL or Oracle anything with just few clicks on aws console we can start working." High and unpredictable costs 60% negative reviews out of 48 Some reviewers feel pricing is expensive, especially compared to competitors, and unexpected charges can occur without careful monitoring. Automated backup and restore features 87% positive reviews out of 38 Most reviewers find backup and recovery reliable, with automated snapshots, easy restoration, and robust disaster recovery options. Rehan J Software Engineer, 201 - 500 employees. "It automatically backs up data and we can restore our data even if we lost it." Flexible cloud database scaling 91% positive reviews out of 34 Most reviewers describe scalability as seamless, enabling quick resource adjustments and supporting businesses from startups to large enterprises. ## Showing most helpful reviews Showing 1-25 of 218 Reviews Sort by: Most Helpful Rating Company Size Reviewer's Role Length of Use Frequency of Use Prateek G. Senior Software Engineer Computer Software Used the software for: 2+ years ### "One of the best managed services for Postgres" January 7, 2026 4.0 Overall the experience has been wonderful with RDS. Given that it's managed service it serves you really well with High Availability, Disaster recovery, Replication The Blue green deployment is also a really good feature for testing out schema related or major version changes. This was really helpful when moving away from Older versions of Postgres for larger DBs Reserved Instances is another option you can use to save some dollars if you know about your workloads Pros I've mainly used Amazon RDS for Postgres so can't speak for other database engines. For Postgres the most liked thing about RDS is how quickly they make the major versions available. You don't have to wait too long to try out latest Postgres updates when you are with RDS Cons Couple of drawbacks with RDS I've seen over the years - there is not a great way to enable encryption if you started of with an unencrypted database. You need to create a new database and migrate all your data - same applies for reducing storage of the database, you can increase the storage but cannot lower the storage - columnar extensions are not made available on RDS - Review Source RR Richard R. IT Support Analyst Real Estate Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Simple solution to rapidly implement new platforms" May 30, 2025 5.0 Overall, a simple way to start testing/piloting new applications with minimal support required. Ease of use, access, and speed to deploy. We also had issues migrating out of AWS due to a supplier changing platforms, we needed to migrate to MS Azure. Pros Ease of setup. Configuration and out-of-the-box setups allowed for the rapid testing and then replication and rollout across the business. Reduction in management tasks such as, automation of tasks, provisioning, patching, backups and Recovery. Failover with alerts to a reporting platform ensures issues are dealt with in a timely manner. Cons On the odd occasion, we have had trouble diagnosing a performance issue, and access/management control. In particular, Lack of OS and Database Root Access. While RDS supports popular database engines (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, MariaDB), the way AWS manages them introduces some proprietary elements. Switched from [Microsoft 365](https://www.capterra.com/p/227157/Microsoft-365/) More ease of use, better setupand suppliers recommended Review Source Aleksandr S. Principal software engineer Computer Software Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Will cost you all yourmoney." April 7, 2021 3.0 Easy to setup. Very expensive. Play great with other AWS services. The main issue is that metrics collected manually will never meet AWS metrics which are used to bill your stack. And of course AWS point of view will be much costly. Their Enterprise Support can not understand why metrics extracted from DB itself do not meet billing metrics and will endlessly redirect you to yet another expert. Pros Requires minimum knowledge or time to set up the database. Everything you need is basically there. Documentation is fantastic. It just works and takes all the burden of infrastructure management from you. A handful of engines, version, and extensions to them are supprted. Integrated seamless to AWS infrastructure. Cons Price. It will literally eat 7/8 of your infrastructure budget. Metrics lies. Performance insight simply does not work. Note, this is an opinion of somebody who paid for AWS Enterprise support (sigh, that's me) Backups are not backups per se, this is filesystem rsync. So it is easy to end up with broken DB. Support is very poor. Alternatives considered [Google Cloud](https://www.capterra.com/p/268690/Google-Cloud-Platform/) Reason for choosing Amazon RDS We already had few services deployed to AWS. This is the sole reason. Switched from [Google Cloud](https://www.capterra.com/p/268690/Google-Cloud-Platform/) RDS looked very promising. It still is except that you have no control over the bill. Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Lead Engineer Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 6-12 months ### "Overall Good Experience" February 20, 2025 5.0 Pros RDS giving lot of features with better performance. Cons Doing setup become little bit difficult. Switched from [MySQL](https://www.capterra.com/p/11482/MySQL/) They are not providing that much features so i switch. Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Intern Computer Software Used the software for: 6-12 months ### "Scalable & Reliable But Hard To Configure" March 7, 2025 4.0 It provides seamless database management but limited control over configurations. Pros It supports multiple database engines like PostgreSQL, Aurora, and MySQL Cons It is costly for high performance workloads and complex while setting up in multi AZ deployments. Switched from [MongoDB](https://www.capterra.com/p/127374/MongoDB/)[MySQL](https://www.capterra.com/p/11482/MySQL/) I made switch because Amazon RDS provides scalability, automation and easy backups. Review Source Ana A. Security Architecture Discipline leader Banking Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "High availability even for database beginners" July 18, 2022 4.0 I am using it as a MySQL server. With a managed database server, almost everything can be configured by just operating the configuration screen, so it is recommended that even members with little knowledge of MySQL can create a high availability database infrastructure, such as creating a Master-Slave configuration. It was possible to significantly reduce the man-hours required to install and configure the DB supports in EC2 and the upgrade procedure for maintenance, and dedicate the man-hours to other design and construction work. Including a BD license, it has freed us from license management. In addition, by not needing a physical space, we are freed from the whole flow of purchasing it. Pros It is a pay-per-use system where you are only charged for the number of transactions that occur. Still, there is also a subscription system called Reserved Instances (RI), so instances that generate transactions frequently use this system to reduce costs significantly. There are three types to choose from: one-year prepayment, one-year prepayment, monthly payment, and no prepayment, depending on the kind of discount. Pay-per-use is basically cheaper for cases where transactions do not occur frequently, depending on the situation, so you can optimize the charge by using different payment methods depending on the application. Cons I would like you to provide a concrete fault test solution. If you do not have a high level of knowledge about RDS, you cannot be relieved that you cannot perform useful failure tests assuming a failure occurs. Alternatives considered [Quickbase](https://www.capterra.com/p/157262/QuickBase/) Reason for choosing Amazon RDS It is necessary to stop updating the specifications, but it is easy and simple to update. Switched from [PostgreSQL](https://www.capterra.com/p/48791/PostgreSQL/) I migrated to RDS from a database server with MySQL installed on a LINUX server. When creating a master-slave configuration, it was necessary to configure MySQL for two servers, but with the switch to RDS, only a few clicks are needed. In addition, the Availability Zone automatically becomes redundant, which makes it easier to manage. Review Source David W. Head of Engineering Computer Software Used the software for: 2+ years ### "High quality, bulletproof managed database service" April 20, 2022 4.0 We use Amazon RDS to manage our key production/transactional databases for our customer-facing applications as well as our development environment, internal ERP, etc. We definitely gain value and efficiency from not having to deal with the management of yet another server - and its operating system, patches, uptime, etc. - it is a real boon to simply have a database-as-a-service that we spin up, connect to, and work with, letting AWS deal with all the management. Pros AWS RDS allows us to deploy databases easily and efficiently with great resilience, scalability, and security - but without having to deal with managing a server. RDS makes it easy to spin up a new database, have multi-availability zone replicas, back it up, and do many other things. It's also dead easy to upgrade software versions - simply let AWS look after it. Cons Being a managed database service there are restrictions; for instance, with SQL Server you don't have the sysadmin role and you can't set any trace flag you want. You can adjust a number of parameters in the RDS console but only those which AWS have explicitly added support for. There are other caveats and restrictions for other DBMS products too. Another thing I don't like is when you change your instance size it takes a long time - but at least there's no downtime. Also, tooling is restricted. A lot of great tools to dig into performance and query tracing won't work with the AWS caveats so you have to use the AWS RDS console and logs and it can be more tedious to really drill into application performance bottlenecks. Alternatives considered [Microsoft Azure](https://www.capterra.com/p/16365/Azure/) Reason for choosing Amazon RDS Ultimately, despite being a Microsoft environment historically, our developers felt AWS provided superior tooling and functionality. Switched from [Microsoft SQL Server](https://www.capterra.com/p/1417/SQL-Server/) We wanted to move from on-premises to the cloud. Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Director, Internet Strategy Publishing Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Amazon RDS - the backbone of your AWS stack" May 6, 2022 5.0 Waaaay back in the day, we owned and managed huge machines on which we ran our database software. It was Oracle for a while, then we moved to mySQL. But the machine and the software were our problem to handle. Most of the time (because these are not new technologies), there were no problems. But when there were problems, there were huge problems. Because like many websites/apps, data is at the core of what we do. No database, and everything goes poof. Since switching to RDS, this has become a thing of the past. We tell RDS what kind of beefy setup we want, and they do the rest. The mySQL patching. The upgrades. If we want to move to a bigger instance, that's pretty straightforward, too. Database hosting at pretty large scale, with just a few clicks. And no machines to worry about. You get decent (but not amazing) visibility into the instance at any time. But, basically, what you really get is peace of mind, not having to worry that your system's most critical layer will flake out on you. That's worth a lot. Also: AWS's Aurora is a very nice port of mySQL. We've had no issues there either. Pros Aurora is a great port of mySQL - very compatible and super fast Prices are always going one direction: down Scalable way huge with just a few clicks Automated backups, patching, upgrades You can still do a lot of customization using PL/MYSQL The instances just stay up and running - becomes one less thing to worry about You have options: both mySQL and Postgres Cons It's not amazingly easy to update the various variables that enable you to configure your mySQL instance. I wish it was a bit easier to get monitoring that would give you more granular insight into what's causing issues. You don't have quite as much flexibility and control over special packages you might install to do special stuff (calculating the Levenschtein distance between words, for example). Switched from [MySQL](https://www.capterra.com/p/11482/MySQL/) Price, speed, ease of maintenance. We were tired of managing our own servers. RDS made keeping a top-notch database up and running MUCH easier for us. Review Source MAN Muhammad Arsalan N. Principal DevOps Engineer Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "AWS RDS Review" June 10, 2019 4.0 My company need a simple and fast scalable solution for managing MySQL databases therefore we chose RDS. Prior to RDS we were managing DB clusters installed on VMs on Hyper Visors, and it was a cumbersome job. Though switching to RDS does make our life easy but RDS is not a cheap solution though. Pros Easily Scalable as per need. AWS manage you infrastructure completely. Fast Disaster recovery if planned the architecture correctly. Multi AZ deployment and Read replica supported. Supported various DB services like MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server and Postgres. Backup procedure is very easy. Cons Cost on higher side. Lack of control on your DB instance, though it's good but at times you need some tweaking todo. Switched from [MySQL](https://www.capterra.com/p/11482/MySQL/) It was convenient for us to host DB on RDS than to managing a cluster. Review Source Monica G. Cloud Engineer Telecommunications Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Reliable, reliable, I/O cost are pricey, Aurora write forwarding is neat" June 9, 2025 4.0 Overall, reliable RDS service. I wish the I/O costs were a little more affordable. I really like Aurora write forwarding feature. Pros I use mostly RDS MySQL, RDS Postgresql, and RDS Aurora services. The multiple writers for Aurora is helpful to latency for global traffic. The service is reliable. I've only had 1 issue in the past 6 years with RDS. Cons I wish the service was cheaper, especially Aurora. The I/O charges are killer. Other than that, it is a good relational database service. Review Source SB Swaibu B. AWS Solution Architecture Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Amazon RDS" February 10, 2025 5.0 Amazon RDS is a reliable and convenient managed database service. It is great for automation and scaling, but it lacks deep customization and fine-tuned control. Pros Amazon RDS simplifies database management with automated backups, scaling, and maintenance, reducing operational overhead. Cons Compared to self-managed databases, there is limited customization and control, especially for configurations and performance tuning. Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Associate Engineer Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "AWS RDS for everything." October 14, 2022 5.0 My Overall experience with AWS RDS is amazing I will continue to use it ever after if it stays and upgrade with new features. Pros Most loved feature is data security and durability as we can take snapshot of data at another region its very easy to backup and restore data .Its all in one service for database Cons I have use this service alot and there is hardly anything I least lied but one thing is while we need support from AWS we need credits for that. Review Source DU Diego U. CTO Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Flexible and reliable data base suite on the cloud" May 30, 2022 5.0 It's up to our expectations and in many ways surpasses what an on premise database can give you Pros Easy deployment Easy management and monitoring Affordable price Cons Lack of replication options It do not have a scheduler to keep a replica updated at a desired time Review Source SN Samuel N. IT manager Computer Software Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Scale it with Amazon Rds! " May 10, 2023 5.0 Pros InexpensiveEase to useData security is highly recommended Cons Affected by system crashes which May result in data loss Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Cloud Engineering Practice Manager Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Super simple managed database solution" April 23, 2018 5.0 Quick and repeatable deployments, wide range of DB flavors, fully managed and supported by AWS. Pros AWS provides a fully managed database solution covering a number of DB technologies, so most deployments can utilize this product. MySQL, Postgres, MSSQL, Oracle, MariaDB, are all there, as well as AWS's own Aurora high performance DB. Automated backups, with 5 minute point in time recovery is provided out of the box at no additional cost, as is software patching. If you require high availability spanning multiple data centers, it's there too. Cons If there is a downside to AWS RDS, it would be that it does not cover every use case. In the MSSQL world, you cannot use SSRS or SSIS on RDS, so would need to look at MSSQL on EC2 instead . Review Source VR Verified Reviewer DevOps Engineer Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Best "cloud" rDB implementation so far" March 6, 2019 4.0 I've been using AWS since 2015 and to be fair, it has only improved all this time. Being RDS one of the most commonly used services, I have plenty of experience with it (including the support team behind it) and I only have good things to say about it. Pros \- Fully managed database - Access to all the configuration options you would usually do when tweaking the configuration file(s) - Top notch support - High-availability is just a few mouse clicks away - Incredible easy to setup master/slave scenarios - Great backup (snapshot) service - Great performance with basic monitoring included - You get the database engine you already know without the hassle to have to set it up by yourself Cons \- Price? AWS is still expensive - Nothing else I can think of Review Source VS Vinicius S. Software Engineer Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 6-12 months ### "Review for Amazon RDS" November 30, 2022 4.0 Amazon RDS is very useful for anyone who wants to maintain a relational database in order to use resources on demand, since it is a cloud service. The system has a configuration and management interface that demands very little cognitive load for its use, providing several resources to access it. Pros Very easy to use, as the system provides resources to setup, operate and scale in a simplified way. Cons It doesn't support performance insight. As it is a cloud service, a cost-benefit analysis must be carried out to verify that it will not be too expensive to maintain the system. Reason for choosing Amazon RDS System maintenance cost. Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Developer Computer Software Used the software for: 2+ years ### "A good fit" January 21, 2020 5.0 All our commercial products run on Aws Rds severs and overall we are happy with it. Server configuration is a breeze, performance is steady, but cost is not the lowest, for sure. Pros \- the ease of setting up and getting ready with the first instance - the multitude of options when getting to advanced level - the performance of the Aurora engine Cons \- could not get the fastest performance being connected from remote vs connect from another Aws instance. A minimum 60ms overhead is added to every query, which disappears running the client on an ec2 Reason for choosing Amazon RDS Because Aws manages the server, the updates, security and access is more configurable. Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Senior Software Developer Printing Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Database service that allows you to scale easily and quickly" October 3, 2019 5.0 Very good. Started using it when we were a small startup and it allowed us to easily scale to a full grown portal. Pros A lot of server tiers available to choose from, good when you need to start out with a smaller instance. Like to option to quickly create snapshots or restore a backup. Multi-az is a nice freaute to have that can save your business when things go south. Cons Halted instances are booted back up after 7 days automatically, so you can't really have an instance that is stopped for a long time. Since it's not a self-hosted service, there are some low level features that are missing. Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Software engineer intern Information Technology and Services Used the software for: 2+ years ### "No need of building own infrastucture, use RDS and save time ,money. Rapid development" July 16, 2019 5.0 Pros AWS is the reason, amazon is giant today and RDS is one of the most used services on AWS. No need of maintaining own infrastructure, server, backup plans. Use RDS, they have everything ready for you, create RDS instances , as much as you required, scale if you need more resources, use RDS backup plans to backup all your data and retrieve whenever required. with 99.999% availability and highly secured features, your application development will be much better. Cons security features need to be taken care seriously Review Source Ashish K. Software Developer Computer Software Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Amazon Web Services are the Best!" August 10, 2019 5.0 Pros It caters to all types of requirements in terms of size, it can handle any amount of data The pricing is good and even a person starting out his website or server can use this to maintain 100% uptime of his database. You can control a lot of things from the Control Panel of AWS which include monitoring CPU usage, number of connections. It provides easy rebooting as well. Cons There was nothing that I did not like about this software. I am still using it and it solves my use case perfectly. Review Source Manny P. . Computer Software Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Easy way to put DB in the cloud" September 24, 2018 5.0 Amazon is changing the way we do things and how our database reaches others. It's only a matter of time before our entire infrastructure is on the cloud. Pros Amazon is getting good at putting DB in the cloud that before you know it, it will be as easy and syncing data to another computer. Amazon is in the right track and not for long other companies will follow and make their disaster recovery simple to do. Cons Amazon still has a long way to go to make every database work seamless, but they have the right idea and concepts and it will only be a matter of time. The pricing is something to get use to until it goes down and the demand get larger. Review Source Ramses Miguel P. English Language professor Education Management Used the software for: 2+ years ### "The cloud is here" November 12, 2021 5.0 In general, this software is really good and efficient, you could do many things and your information is safe. Pros I really like this software and I would sincerally recommend it. It is simple, practical and easy to use. Cons I think the only thing that I don't quite like is the cost. I think it is a little expensive. Review Source Luis Felipe A. Programmer Internet Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Great performance and fast support" December 3, 2019 5.0 We have been using RDS for about 6 years, we have just a few issues (with always a fast response/solution) Pros \- Great stability and performance - Great technical support - You almost don't need to mind at any configuration or database servers anymore Cons Maybe the costs, but it depends. For small databases the RDS may not be a good idea but for large ones, you'll probably spend less than maintaining you own infrastructure Review Source AG Andrew G. Software Engineer Insurance Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Prefer Mongo or DocumentDB but if I must use an RDBMS" September 6, 2022 4.0 Deployed SQLserver to RDS on AWS Pros Easy deployments and ability to run in AWS Cons Non RDBMS are the future. I always prefer DocumentDB or Mongo if possible Switched from [Microsoft SQL Server](https://www.capterra.com/p/1417/SQL-Server/) Cloud Review Source Similar Products Featured ## Related categories [Database](https://www.capterra.com/database-management-software/)[Database Monitoring](https://www.capterra.com/database-monitoring-software/)[Data Center Management](https://www.capterra.com/data-center-management-software/) ## Send me user reviews about this product ### Fill out the form and we'll send a list of the top-rated software based on real user reviews directly to your inbox.