--- title: "Amazon RDS Reviews 2026. Verified Reviews, Pros & Cons | Capterra" description: "Is Amazon RDS the right Data Entry solution for you? Explore 220 verified user reviews from people in industries like yours to make a confident choice." source_url: "https://www.capterra.com/p/192201/Amazon-RDS/reviews/" page_type: "reviews" language: "en" publication_date: "2026-09-28" --- Amazon RDS 4.7 (220) [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 September 28th, 2026 # Reviews of Amazon RDS Ease of use 4.4 Customer Service 4.4 ## Pros and Cons in Reviews Manish T Software EngineerInformation Technology and Services, 10,001+ employeesUsed the software for: Less than 6 months. “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.“ February 13, 2025 Prateek G Senior Software EngineerComputer Software, 501 - 1,000 employeesUsed the software for: More than 2 years. “there is not a great way to enable encryption if you started of with an unencrypted database.“ January 7, 2026 Monica G Cloud EngineerTelecommunications, 51 - 200 employeesUsed the software for: More than 2 years. “The multiple writers for Aurora is helpful to latency for global traffic.“ June 9, 2025 RR Richard R IT Support AnalystReal Estate, 11 - 50 employeesUsed the software for: 1-2 years. “On the odd occasion, we have had trouble diagnosing a performance issue, and access/management control.“ May 30, 2025 Muhammad Aamer K Full stack software developerReal Estate, Self-employedUsed the software for: Less than 6 months. “I like some of the things the most about amazon RDS no 1 obviously the pricing it is amazing you only get charged for your usage and then secondly the remote connection although it is not very easy but when you establish it like for example with your microsoft workbench then there is nothing better than Amazon RDS and then there is more good things for example this is very very secure and fast and reliable“ November 29, 2023 an alessandro n administratorMedical Practice, Self-employedUsed the software for: I used a free trial. “some problems occoured in our management software while using program“ April 18, 2024 Hasan D Software EngineerComputer Software, 51 - 200 employeesUsed the software for: More than 2 years. “With just a few clicks, you can easily add or remove database instances, adjust computing resources, and automatically scale your database as your application grow.“ March 12, 2023 RC RYAN C Strategic Account ManagerComputer Software, 51 - 200 employeesUsed the software for: Less than 6 months. “Dashboard was confusing as there was so many options.“ December 12, 2023 ## Showing most helpful reviews Showing 1-25 of 220 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 EO Esteban O. CTO Computer Software Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Great when you need a database engine with dynamic sizing." September 2, 2026 5.0 It's been great. We used to suffer by having to expand or decrease the size of the database a lot of times during the month. Autoscaling has been a blessing for us. Pros The autoscaling feature has been a huge benefit for us. At Eventtia we have strong peaks of traffic because our users host thousands of events. Being able to increase and decrease the size of the database on demand is just great. Cons Sometimes it can be a little bit expensive, specially if you run a lot of time with a lot of units. But if you are able to keep it at a base level, you will be fine. Switched from [Amazon EC2](https://www.capterra.com/p/219781/EC2/) We used to have the database on a huge machine and administer it ourselves. 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 Senior DevOps Engineer Education Management Used the software for: 2+ years ### "A must-have managed database service" August 24, 2026 4.0 Overall I couldn't imagine running a database on production without RDS, and it requires very little thought when running outside of the upgrade windows. Pros RDS is one of the quickest and easiest ways of getting a reliable database working with very little effort, and a lot of the maintenance handled for you. Cons I think that the proxy toolset is quite minimal and could do with a rules system. It can also be pricy when used for development environments. 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 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 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 VR Verified Reviewer Software Engineer Information Technology and Services Used the software for: Less than 6 months ### "Simple, Reliable, and Ready-to-Use Database Solution" February 13, 2025 4.0 Pros 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. Cons There are no major issue but pricing model comparison to on premise setup is costly & cluster updates sometimes delay the business operation & any production deployment. Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Co-Founder & CTO E-Learning Used the software for: 2+ years ### "RDS is just a necessity" August 10, 2023 4.0 Pros Provides all the basic features that we absolutely need, out of the box. Super helpful Cons Since it's an AWS service, it's just not very intuitive to get around with - just like any other AWS products. Reason for choosing Amazon RDS We had credits with AWS - so we just went ahead with the most used managed-RDBMS service. Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Sr. System/Network administrator Computer Software Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Setting up a "serversless" database environment inminutes" February 13, 2019 4.0 Since we start using RDS it saves us a lot of time. You can start with a small instance and very easily grow to a larger instance and a multi AZ (High available) setup. No need to worry about disk space anymore for backups or snapshots. Amazon doesn't run out of space. You can setup automated backup with a retention of 35 days max but if you need to keep backups longer you can create manual snapshots and keep them forever. Pros \- Very easy to setup - Creating database environments including HA in minutes - Creating a HA environment without having to know anything about database replication - Upgrading the DB engine with a click of a mouse - Very ease to create backups (and setup automated snapshots) - Easy to restore - Can be managed via the weg GUI but also via the very powerful AWS CLI - No need to manage an Operating system - Changing instanced types if you need more or less CPU/memory. - Dynamically change the storage - Performance is very good Cons \- On Aurora the disk spaces grows automatically when the database grows. But when deleting lots of data its not possible to shrink the file system. - No root access to server (which we never missed since using RDS) Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Senior Software Engineer Retail Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Amazon RDS - Keeping it simple & easy" January 18, 2019 4.0 Overall very satisfied. It worked for our use case. Pros Easy to setup and running. All cloudwatch metrics made available like other AWS services. Ability to take snapshots, scale up horizontally and vertically across environments and depending upon load. We were able to automate our build and deployments using terraform scripts. Automated Backups are stored in S3 so you can retrieve backups when needed. Pay as you go like traditional EC2 metered cost model. You can predict your montly/yearly estimates before hand. It just works! Supports a wide range of DB's - PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL, etc. Cons Security setup may take time as its controlled by security groups. So it takes time to troubleshoot if you are not able to connect from local or any other remote instance. Pricing may start to increase when you upgrade your instance types and add replication nodes etc. Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Software Engineer Computer Software Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Great Database option for the cloud if you want fine-grained instance management" May 14, 2020 4.0 Overall Amazon RDS has been a very good solution in our switch to the cloud. Other options have come out that may be better for most people, such as Amazon Aurora, but it's great for fine-grained control over instances. Pros Amazon RDS has worked really well for us for our cloud DB solution. It's pretty intuitive and easy to use, and you can choose exactly what instances sizes, storage sizes, etc. you want. Cons Amazon RDS has a strange method for determining how many IOPS you get (Input/Output Operations per Second): it's based mostly on your db storage size. So if you have a smaller database that is hit a lot, you can get throttled with the IOPS. But if you have a large database that isn't hit as often, you end up having a lot of unused IOPS. Review Source RJ Rehan J. Software Engineer Computer Software Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Well performing database" May 26, 2023 5.0 Pros RDS is a highly scalable database and it can scale up or down depending on the resource and workloads it has and it works smoothly even for high data volumes and increased traffic. It automatically backs up data and we can restore our data even if we lost it. This is a highly available db because it automatically stores data in another availability zone and if a failure happens, then the primary database will be replaced with that replica. Cons With our application requirement, we have to choose the supported db engine. That db engine running inside RDS has some limitations other than running it in our machine. So that is the drawback I see. Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Architekt rozwiza IT - Departament Rozwoju Infrastruktury Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Easiest database management there is" June 13, 2018 5.0 Peace of mind if it's about database administration, backup and availability. Pros It's fully managed database service with multiple database types available (Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server) - you can chose whatever you like or used to run. It's really easy to migrate from existing database of the same type. RDS is highly available and durable service if you chose to run in multi AZ (multiple availability zone/datacenter) scenario (master/slave replication). Amazon will do all the administration task like upgrades or failover for you. Max database storage size is 16 TB (in most cases) and you pay only for what you use. Cons It'a a little pricey and not all advance database configuration/administratio options are available if you compare it to on premise deployment. 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 Cofounder and CTO Computer Software Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Always up, 0 headache database option" October 3, 2019 5.0 It's been a great experience so far. It also helps us manage a lot of our compliance risk living in a fully compliant datacenter. Pros We use Aurora, which gives us a lot of flexibility in scale and size. Not having to manage clusters or database consistency across a number of different machines is amazing. Cons RDS, and aurora, generally lags behind the current state of postgres, which comes with the territory. Alternatives considered [Google Cloud](https://www.capterra.com/p/268690/Google-Cloud-Platform/) Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Senior Software Engineer Computer Software Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Amazon RDS - The Clear Winner" September 6, 2018 5.0 We use Amazon RDS for all of our database needs. We use it for our transactional (OLTP) and datawarehousing database needs. Pros Amazon RDS is Amazon's solution to hosted database services in the cloud. The console is easy to use and provides a ton of functionality with the click of a button. They have CLI and other API's that makes it easy to automate processes such as backup and recovery. Cons Microsoft products are supported but latest features are late to be added. Amazon likes to push their own products and slower adopt new features of SQL Server. Review Source Pawe W. Software Engineer Computer Software Used the software for: 6-12 months ### "RDS as a database for Web Applications" August 9, 2022 5.0 Pros It has met all our requirements regarding costs and storage. We observed no downtimes. Once set up, we did not have to manage it at all. Really enjoyed the backup functionality. Cons Deployment was quite hard as for most of AWS infrastructure, but once you get over initial struggles it becomes relatively easy Alternatives considered [Amazon DynamoDB](https://www.capterra.com/p/199662/DynamoDB/) Reason for choosing Amazon RDS Previous experience with AWS. Review Source AA Adebayo A. Software Engineer Health, Wellness and Fitness Used the software for: 2+ years ### "A feature-packed database management system" December 17, 2022 5.0 We had a good experience using the product both for SQL server and PostgreSql. Once we passed initial hurdle of setting it up, we were able to take advantage of all the product had to offer. Pros Amazon RDS provides all features of a modern RDMS and it takes it further by securing your RDS instance using IAM which improves access and security.The backup feature ensures that replicas of data are maintained in cases of data loss. Cons One drawback is that it can be quite tricky to fully set up. The docs are easy to follow but you have to dig deeper to set up some feature that one is used to. A good example is setting up your RDS instance to allow connections from public IP addresses. Reason for choosing Amazon RDS We choose Amazon RDS because we had free credits that allowed us to try it out Review Source VR Verified Reviewer Lead Backend Engineer Computer Software Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Fantastic Managed Databases" October 30, 2018 5.0 Using RDS has been great. Before we rolled our own MySQL servers and actually was bottlenecked by them in a big release. RDS opened the pipes and helped us support a lot of connections. It’s also 10x easier to manage. Pros RDS makes deploying a MySQL or Postgres cluster a breeze. Their Aurora fork of MySQL allows for even more performance boosts. Auto scaling is made easy. Back ups are made easy. RDS makes everything easy. Cons Pricing can be a bit steep if you need their r3 server series. Review Source Richard R. Software Developer Computer Software Used the software for: 2+ years ### "Brilliant database service with scalability" September 25, 2019 5.0 Very positive. We've never had any downtime and our database is reliable and performs well. Pros I like that I don't have to worry about my database as much - RDS takes care of all of the details. Security, scaling and uptime are all baked in to the service. Cons Like all AWS products, it has a learning curve to figure out. And you don't get unlimited control - if you want that you have to deploy your own database servers. Review Source Nitin G. Junior Dev Financial Services Used the software for: 1-2 years ### "Amazon RDS" June 12, 2021 5.0 We have created MySQL instance in RDS and have been using it for 2 years via My SQL, and it had been a smooth and amazing experience in terms of data backup and the service provided by RDS. Pros Amazon RDS allows creating DB instances in a very few clicks with full customization like engine type, size of class required, connectivity, availability, and durability. Also, all monitoring, eventing, and logs are very handy and displayed on the pictorial representation dashboard. Cons Honestly, Amazon RDS fulfills all the use cases for me and I haven't spotted any disadvantage in it. Review Source Similar Products Featured ## 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.