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Amazon RDS vs Amazon Aurora

SEPT 2026 audit

A comparison of Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora built from values read directly from each provider's own documentation, with the source recorded against every figure.

Reviewed by Palash BagchiUpdated 29 criteria comparedSources last checked

The short answer

Choose Amazon RDS if…

Teams already inside AWS, where the database sitting in the same VPC as everything else is worth more than any single feature on this page. Six engines, up to 35 days of point-in-time recovery, and read replicas you create and delete yourself.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

Choose Amazon Aurora if…

Teams on AWS who want a Postgres or MySQL cluster that can throw off a copy-on-write clone of production in minutes, keep up to fifteen readers behind it, and pause to nothing between bursts in serverless mode.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

Consider something else if…

  • Amazon RDS: You want a database per pull request. RDS documents no branching, and replicas are manual — AWS states outright that it does not autoscale them.
  • Amazon Aurora: You want the upstream database rather than a compatible one, or a branch workflow rather than a clone. AWS documents cloning as a way to build a test environment, not as something you do per pull request.

Neither quite fits? Every other option, ranked by iScore: Amazon RDS alternatives · Amazon Aurora alternatives

20 sourced criteria separate them — see where, with sources, below.

Visit Amazon RDS documentationVisit Amazon Aurora documentation

No affiliate links, sponsored placements or paid rankings appear on this site. Ordering follows the sourced data and the stated criteria.

01.

At a glance.

CriterionAmazon RDSAmazon Aurora
Pricing
Free tierNo — Free usage is time-boxed (6 months on the Free plan, 12 months legacy), not an ongoing free plan.No — capped Free plan plus time-limited credits
Kind of free offerIntroductory free tierIntroductory free tier
When the free offer ends
6 months from account creation.
6 months after the account is opened, or when the credits run out — whichever comes first.
Entry paid plan$0.016 per DB instance-hour on-demand for db.t4g.micro, the smallest DB instance class — RDS for MySQL, Single-AZ, US East (N. Virginia). No plan fee or minimum: instance-hours, storage and backups are billed separately. Cheapest of the 216 on-demand rates in this feed; db.t3.micro is next at $0.017.No plan fee and no minimum commitment — Aurora charges for what you use. AWS's own worked example prices serverless compute at $0.12 per ACU-hour on Aurora Standard in US East (N. Virginia), and the smallest capacity you can set is 0.5 ACUs; storage and I/O are billed separately.
Pricing modelOn-Demand DB instance hours billed per second with a 10-minute minimum, plus provisioned storage, backup storage and data transfer; Reserved Instances discount 1- or 3-year commitments.Pay per use with no plan fee: instances plus storage plus I/O, or ACU-hours in serverless mode. AWS's own worked example prices serverless compute at $0.12 per ACU-hour on Aurora Standard and $0.156 on Aurora I/O-Optimized in US East (N. Virginia) — the difference being whether I/O is metered separately or folded into a higher compute and storage rate. Provisioned instances also offer Reserved Instance pricing, and usage may qualify for Database Savings Plans against a committed hourly spend.
Limits
Storage (entry plan)Minimum 20 GiB of General Purpose SSD storage per DB instance, selectable up to 64 TiB (RDS for MySQL, gp2 or gp3).No included allowance on the pay-as-you-go Paid plan: storage scales automatically up to 256 TiB and is metered per GB-month — $0.10 per GB-month for Aurora Standard in AWS's US East (N. Virginia) example. The AWS Free Tier Free plan caps a cluster at 1 GiB.
Memory (entry plan)1 GiB of memory and 2 vCPU on the db.t4g.micro DB instance class, the smallest burstable class listed in the RDS hardware specifications.No plan tiers: memory comes with the Aurora Capacity Unit, and AWS states 1 ACU has approximately 2 GiB of memory. The smallest capacity you can set is 0.5 ACUs; the AWS Free Tier Free plan caps a cluster at 4 ACUs and the Paid plan at 256.
Execution
Managed connection poolingSupportedSupported — through Amazon RDS Proxy, a separate feature of the service
Infrastructure
Regions
39 geographic regions and 124 Availability Zones across the AWS Cloud — AWS-wide footprint; the RDS User Guide lists RDS Regions individually and publishes no total.
34 AWS regions, the same list for the MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible editions. Counted from the two availability tables in Aurora's own docs, which publish the regions and no total.
Uptime SLA
99.95% for a Multi-AZ DB instance or cluster; 99.5% for a single DB instance, which is what you get without enabling Multi-AZ. Both are service-credit thresholds.
99.99% for a cluster deployed across two or more Availability Zones; 99.9% for a single-AZ cluster. Both are service-credit thresholds.
Data
EnginePostgreSQL, alongside MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server and Db2. Each engine is a separate RDS product with its own version list and its own feature support, so a capability documented for one is not a capability of RDS as a whole.MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible. Aurora is AWS's own engine rather than a hosted build of either, so compatibility is the claim being made — existing code, tools and applications are stated to work, which is not the same as being the upstream database.
Connection limitNot a fixed number: RDS for PostgreSQL sets max_connections by formula from the instance's memory — LEAST({DBInstanceClassMemory/9531392}, 5000) — so a bigger instance class gets more connections and the ceiling is 5,000 however large it is. The parameter can be set by hand anywhere from 6 to 262,143, which is a limit on what you may configure rather than what an instance will serve. Other engines use different divisors: MySQL is memory/12582880 with no cap.Derived from memory, not set per plan. On Aurora serverless the default follows the maximum ACU setting — 90 connections on MySQL and 189 on PostgreSQL at 1 ACU, 135/823 at 4 ACUs, 1,000/1,669 at 8 ACUs — and a minimum capacity of 0 or 0.5 ACUs caps PostgreSQL at 2,000.
When idleA DB instance can be stopped for at most 7 consecutive days, with no instance-hour charges while stopped but provisioned storage and backups still billed; RDS then starts it automatically.Pauses only in serverless mode with minimum capacity set to zero ACUs: the instance auto-pauses after an idle interval you choose — 300 seconds (five minutes) by default and at minimum, up to 86,400 seconds (one day) — and resumes automatically when a connection request arrives.
Point-in-time recoveryAny point inside the configured backup retention period, so up to 35 days. Transaction logs are uploaded to S3 every five minutes, which is what bounds how close to now the latest restorable time can be.Any point inside the backup retention period, so up to 35 days. Aurora's backups are continuous and incremental against the cluster volume rather than periodic snapshots plus log replay, which is why AWS states no performance impact while they are taken.
Read replicasSupported — 15 per primary, raisable on requestSupported — 15 per cluster, a quota AWS will not raise
Backup retentionBetween 0 and 35 days, set per DB instance; 0 disables automated backups entirely. The default depends on how the instance was created — one day via the API or CLI, seven days via the console — so there is no single default to quote. Multi-AZ DB clusters cannot be set below 1 day.1 to 35 days. Unlike an RDS DB instance it cannot be set to 0 — Aurora backs the cluster volume up continuously and there is no way to turn that off.
Rewind in place
Not supported — Point-in-time restore creates a new DB instance without modifying the source; no in-place rewind.
Limited — Aurora MySQL edition only
Compliance
SOC 2
Listed as SOC-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page.
Assessed by third-party auditors under multiple AWS compliance programs, SOC among them; the docs name SOC, not SOC 2. Reports download via AWS Artifact. AWS names the SOC program, not a SOC 2 type.
ISO 27001Covered under AWS's account-wide ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification — not scoped per-service the way SOC, HIPAA and PCI DSS are on AWS's own site.Covered under AWS's account-wide ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification — not scoped per-service the way SOC, HIPAA and PCI DSS are on AWS's own site.
HIPAAListed as a HIPAA-eligible service on AWS's own reference page. — SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Db2 and MariaDB engines only.Listed as a HIPAA-eligible service on AWS's own reference page.
GDPR / data residencyAWS customers can process personal data on all AWS services in compliance with GDPR, and choose the storage type and geographic region for their data.AWS customers can process personal data on all AWS services in compliance with GDPR, and choose the storage type and geographic region for their data.
PCI DSSListed as PCI DSS-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page.Assessed by third-party auditors under multiple AWS compliance programs, PCI among them; no level or version named. Reports download via AWS Artifact.
Encryption at restAES-256 encryption of the underlying storage, logs, automated backups, read replicas and snapshots for DB instances created as encrypted.On by default: all new database clusters created on or after February 18, 2026 are encrypted at rest with AES-256 under an AWS KMS key.
Customer-managed keysAn encrypted DB instance can use a customer managed AWS KMS key instead of the AWS managed key, with key policies and CloudTrail auditing in AWS KMS.Three KMS key types: an AWS owned key by default, an AWS managed key, or a customer managed key stored in your account that you own and fully control. AWS KMS charges apply for a customer managed key.
Role-based access controlAWS IAM identity-based policies, roles and managed policies control access to RDS resources; IAM database authentication is available for MariaDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL.IAM identity-based policies and roles govern who may act on Aurora resources, and IAM database authentication can be used to sign in to the DB cluster.
Private networking / VPCDB instances launch into an Amazon VPC with customer-chosen IP ranges, subnets and access control lists, at no additional cost.Clusters sit behind security groups with network access off by default; a non-public instance is reachable over Site-to-Site VPN or Direct Connect. DB clusters launch into a VPC at no additional cost.
Dedicated infrastructure
A DB instance can run in a VPC whose instance tenancy is set to dedicated, restricted to approved EC2 dedicated instance types; a dedicated host is not guaranteed.
With dedicated VPC tenancy an Aurora DB cluster runs on dedicated hardware; all Aurora PostgreSQL instance classes except burstable db.t3/db.t4g support it.

Only criteria both providers publish appear here; a tinted cell marks a real difference. Criteria only one of them documents are listed below, and an absence there means we found no source — not that the feature is missing. How we source this.

The small bar above a value is inetGeek's own lean toward that side — computed from the same facts shown, never a number the provider published. See the picker below "The short answer" to weigh only the criteria you care about.

02.

Where they differ.

When the free offer ends

Amazon RDS

6 months from account creation.

Amazon Aurora

6 months after the account is opened, or when the credits run out — whichever comes first.

Sources (2) →

Entry paid plan

Amazon RDS
$0.016 per DB instance-hour on-demand for db.t4g.micro, the smallest DB instance class — RDS for MySQL, Single-AZ, US East (N. Virginia). No plan fee or minimum: instance-hours, storage and backups are billed separately. Cheapest of the 216 on-demand rates in this feed; db.t3.micro is next at $0.017.
Amazon Aurora
No plan fee and no minimum commitment — Aurora charges for what you use. AWS's own worked example prices serverless compute at $0.12 per ACU-hour on Aurora Standard in US East (N. Virginia), and the smallest capacity you can set is 0.5 ACUs; storage and I/O are billed separately.
Sources (2) →

Pricing model

Amazon RDS
On-Demand DB instance hours billed per second with a 10-minute minimum, plus provisioned storage, backup storage and data transfer; Reserved Instances discount 1- or 3-year commitments.
Amazon Aurora
Pay per use with no plan fee: instances plus storage plus I/O, or ACU-hours in serverless mode. AWS's own worked example prices serverless compute at $0.12 per ACU-hour on Aurora Standard and $0.156 on Aurora I/O-Optimized in US East (N. Virginia) — the difference being whether I/O is metered separately or folded into a higher compute and storage rate. Provisioned instances also offer Reserved Instance pricing, and usage may qualify for Database Savings Plans against a committed hourly spend.
Sources (2) →
  • Amazon RDS for MySQL pricing ↗

    “Option to pay as you go with no upfront fees or minimum commitments with On-Demand or Reserved Instances at a discounted rate. Pay only for what you use. [...] On-Demand database (DB) Instances let you pay for compute capacity by the hour your DB instance runs. [...] Amazon RDS for MySQL supports per-second billing in which partial DB instance hours consumed are billed in one-second increments with a 10-minute minimum.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • Amazon Aurora pricing — Amazon Web Services ↗

    “Aurora charges for database instances and storage, along with any optional features you choose to enable. Aurora PostgreSQL and Aurora MySQL offer On-Demand and Reserved Instance pricing. [...] We want to calculate the compute costs of running this workload on Aurora serverless with the database cluster configured as Aurora Standard and Aurora I/O-Optimized in US East (N. Virginia). [...] 5 ACUs * $0.12 per ACU-hour * 30/60 hour $0.30 [...] 5 ACUs * $0.156 per ACU-hour * 30/60 hour $0.39”

    Read 2026-09-09 · official pricing · Report a correction

Storage (entry plan)

Amazon RDS
Minimum 20 GiB of General Purpose SSD storage per DB instance, selectable up to 64 TiB (RDS for MySQL, gp2 or gp3).
Amazon Aurora
No included allowance on the pay-as-you-go Paid plan: storage scales automatically up to 256 TiB and is metered per GB-month — $0.10 per GB-month for Aurora Standard in AWS's US East (N. Virginia) example. The AWS Free Tier Free plan caps a cluster at 1 GiB.
Sources (2) →
  • Amazon RDS for MySQL pricing ↗

    “Amazon RDS provides you the ability to select from 20 GiB to 64 TiB of associated General Purpose SSD storage capacity for your primary data set. [...] gp3 volumes have a baseline performance of 3,000 IOPS and 125 MB/s throughput.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • Amazon Aurora Pricing — Amazon Web Services ↗

    “Free plan gives you access to Aurora PostgreSQL serverless instances with up to 4 ACUs and 1 GiB of storage per cluster. You can upgrade to the Paid plan at any time to increase capacity up to 256 ACUs and automatically scale storage up to 256 TiB. [...] We want to calculate the storage and I/O cost of running this workload with Aurora Standard and Aurora I/O-Optimized storage in US East (N. Virginia). [...] 80 GB * $0.10 per GB-month (30 days)”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official pricing · Report a correction

Memory (entry plan)

Amazon RDS
1 GiB of memory and 2 vCPU on the db.t4g.micro DB instance class, the smallest burstable class listed in the RDS hardware specifications.
Amazon Aurora
No plan tiers: memory comes with the Aurora Capacity Unit, and AWS states 1 ACU has approximately 2 GiB of memory. The smallest capacity you can set is 0.5 ACUs; the AWS Free Tier Free plan caps a cluster at 4 ACUs and the Paid plan at 256.
Sources (2) →

Regions

Amazon RDS

39 geographic regions and 124 Availability Zones across the AWS Cloud

Amazon Aurora

34 AWS regions, the same list for the MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible editions. Counted from the two availability tables in Aurora's own docs, which publish the regions and no total.

Sources (2) →

Uptime SLA

Amazon RDS

99.95% for a Multi-AZ DB instance or cluster; 99.5% for a single DB instance, which is what you get without enabling Multi-AZ. Both are service-credit thresholds.

Amazon Aurora

99.99% for a cluster deployed across two or more Availability Zones; 99.9% for a single-AZ cluster. Both are service-credit thresholds.

Sources (2) →
  • Amazon RDS Service Level Agreement ↗

    “make each Multi-AZ DB Instance and each Multi-AZ DB Cluster available with a Monthly Uptime Percentage [...] Less than 99.95% but equal to or greater than 99.0% 10% [...] make each Single-DB Instance available with an Instance-Level Uptime Percentage [...] Less than 99.5% but equal to or greater than 99.0% 10%”

    Read 2026-09-14 · official site · Report a correction

  • Amazon Aurora Service Level Agreement ↗

    “make each Multi-AZ Cluster available with a Monthly Uptime Percentage as shown in the table below during any monthly billing cycle [...] Less than 99.99% but equal to or greater than 99.0% 10% [...] make each Single-AZ Cluster available with a Single-AZ Uptime Percentage [...] Less than 99.9% but equal to or greater than 99.0% 10%”

    Read 2026-09-14 · official site · Report a correction

Engine

Amazon RDS
PostgreSQL, alongside MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server and Db2. Each engine is a separate RDS product with its own version list and its own feature support, so a capability documented for one is not a capability of RDS as a whole.
Amazon Aurora
MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible. Aurora is AWS's own engine rather than a hosted build of either, so compatibility is the claim being made — existing code, tools and applications are stated to work, which is not the same as being the upstream database.
Sources (2) →

Connection limit

Amazon RDS
Not a fixed number: RDS for PostgreSQL sets max_connections by formula from the instance's memory — LEAST({DBInstanceClassMemory/9531392}, 5000) — so a bigger instance class gets more connections and the ceiling is 5,000 however large it is. The parameter can be set by hand anywhere from 6 to 262,143, which is a limit on what you may configure rather than what an instance will serve. Other engines use different divisors: MySQL is memory/12582880 with no cap.
Amazon Aurora
Derived from memory, not set per plan. On Aurora serverless the default follows the maximum ACU setting — 90 connections on MySQL and 189 on PostgreSQL at 1 ACU, 135/823 at 4 ACUs, 1,000/1,669 at 8 ACUs — and a minimum capacity of 0 or 0.5 ACUs caps PostgreSQL at 2,000.
Sources (2) →

When idle

Amazon RDS
A DB instance can be stopped for at most 7 consecutive days, with no instance-hour charges while stopped but provisioned storage and backups still billed; RDS then starts it automatically.
Amazon Aurora
Pauses only in serverless mode with minimum capacity set to zero ACUs: the instance auto-pauses after an idle interval you choose — 300 seconds (five minutes) by default and at minimum, up to 86,400 seconds (one day) — and resumes automatically when a connection request arrives.
Sources (2) →
  • Stopping an Amazon RDS DB instance temporarily - Amazon RDS User Guide ↗

    “You can stop your DB instance intermittently for temporary testing or for a daily development activity, for a maximum of 7 consecutive days. [...] While the instance is stopped, you're not charged for DB instance hours. [...] If you don't manually start your DB instance after it is stopped for seven consecutive days, RDS automatically starts your DB instance for you.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official docs · Report a correction

  • Scaling to Zero ACUs with automatic pause and resume for Aurora serverless — Amazon Aurora User Guide ↗

    “Aurora serverless DB instances can automatically pause after a period with no user connections, and automatically resume when a connection request arrives. [...] To enable the auto-pause behavior for all the Aurora serverless DB instances in an Aurora cluster, you set the minimum capacity value for the cluster to zero ACUs. [...] The minimum interval that you can set is 300 seconds (five minutes). That's the default if you don't specify an interval. The maximum interval that you can set is 86,400 seconds (one day).”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official docs · Report a correction

Point-in-time recovery

Amazon RDS
Any point inside the configured backup retention period, so up to 35 days. Transaction logs are uploaded to S3 every five minutes, which is what bounds how close to now the latest restorable time can be.
Amazon Aurora
Any point inside the backup retention period, so up to 35 days. Aurora's backups are continuous and incremental against the cluster volume rather than periodic snapshots plus log replay, which is why AWS states no performance impact while they are taken.
Sources (2) →

Backup retention

Amazon RDS
Between 0 and 35 days, set per DB instance; 0 disables automated backups entirely. The default depends on how the instance was created — one day via the API or CLI, seven days via the console — so there is no single default to quote. Multi-AZ DB clusters cannot be set below 1 day.
Amazon Aurora
1 to 35 days. Unlike an RDS DB instance it cannot be set to 0 — Aurora backs the cluster volume up continuously and there is no way to turn that off.
Sources (2) →
  • Backup retention period — Amazon Relational Database Service User Guide ↗

    “If you create a DB instance using the Amazon RDS API or the AWS CLI and if you don't set the backup retention period, the default backup retention period is one day. If you create a DB instance using the console, the default backup retention period is seven days. [...] You can set the backup retention period of a DB instance to between 0 and 35 days. Setting the backup retention period to 0 disables automated backups. For a Multi-AZ DB cluster, you can set the backup retention period to between 1 and 35 days.”

    Read 2026-09-09 · official docs · Report a correction

  • Backing up and restoring an Aurora DB cluster — Amazon Aurora User Guide ↗

    “Aurora backs up your cluster volume automatically and retains restore data for the length of the backup retention period. [...] You can specify a backup retention period from 1–35 days when you create or modify a DB cluster.”

    Read 2026-09-09 · official docs · Report a correction

Rewind in place

Amazon RDS
Not supported — Point-in-time restore creates a new DB instance without modifying the source; no in-place rewind.
Amazon Aurora
Limited — Aurora MySQL edition only
Sources (2) →

SOC 2

Amazon RDS
Listed as SOC-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page.
Amazon Aurora
Assessed by third-party auditors under multiple AWS compliance programs, SOC among them; the docs name SOC, not SOC 2. Reports download via AWS Artifact. AWS names the SOC program, not a SOC 2 type.
Sources (2) →

PCI DSS

Amazon RDS
Listed as PCI DSS-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page.
Amazon Aurora
Assessed by third-party auditors under multiple AWS compliance programs, PCI among them; no level or version named. Reports download via AWS Artifact.
Sources (2) →

Encryption at rest

Amazon RDS
AES-256 encryption of the underlying storage, logs, automated backups, read replicas and snapshots for DB instances created as encrypted.
Amazon Aurora
On by default: all new database clusters created on or after February 18, 2026 are encrypted at rest with AES-256 under an AWS KMS key.
Sources (2) →
  • Encrypting Amazon RDS resources - Amazon RDS User Guide ↗

    “Data that is encrypted at rest includes the underlying storage for DB instances, its logs, automated backups, read replicas, and snapshots. [...] Amazon RDS encrypted DB instances use the industry standard AES-256 encryption algorithm to encrypt your data on the server that hosts your Amazon RDS DB instances.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official docs · Report a correction

  • Encrypting Amazon Aurora resources — Amazon Aurora User Guide ↗

    “are encrypted at rest using industry standard AES-256 encryption. This encryption happens automatically in the background, securing your data without requiring any action from you. [...] Amazon Aurora uses an AWS Key Management Service key to encrypt these resources.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official docs · Report a correction

Customer-managed keys

Amazon RDS
An encrypted DB instance can use a customer managed AWS KMS key instead of the AWS managed key, with key policies and CloudTrail auditing in AWS KMS.
Amazon Aurora
Three KMS key types: an AWS owned key by default, an AWS managed key, or a customer managed key stored in your account that you own and fully control. AWS KMS charges apply for a customer managed key.
Sources (2) →

Role-based access control

Amazon RDS
AWS IAM identity-based policies, roles and managed policies control access to RDS resources; IAM database authentication is available for MariaDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Amazon Aurora
IAM identity-based policies and roles govern who may act on Aurora resources, and IAM database authentication can be used to sign in to the DB cluster.
Sources (2) →

Private networking / VPC

Amazon RDS
DB instances launch into an Amazon VPC with customer-chosen IP ranges, subnets and access control lists, at no additional cost.
Amazon Aurora
Clusters sit behind security groups with network access off by default; a non-public instance is reachable over Site-to-Site VPN or Direct Connect. DB clusters launch into a VPC at no additional cost.
Sources (2) →

Dedicated infrastructure

Amazon RDS
A DB instance can run in a VPC whose instance tenancy is set to dedicated, restricted to approved EC2 dedicated instance types; a dedicated host is not guaranteed.
Amazon Aurora
With dedicated VPC tenancy an Aurora DB cluster runs on dedicated hardware; all Aurora PostgreSQL instance classes except burstable db.t3/db.t4g support it.
Sources (2) →

When these numbers change, hear about it. Sources are re-checked monthly; a repricing goes out as a short note.

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03.

Documented by only one.

These criteria are published by one provider and not the other. An absence here means we have not found a source, not that the feature is missing — except where we say we read the other provider's own page on a given date and it does not state it. Those rows lean, and the provider can correct them with a link.

Scales to zeroAmazon Aurora: Supported — serverless capacity mode only
Database branchingAmazon Aurora: Limited — clones, not a branch workflow
04.

Questions this comparison answers.

Entry paid plan: Amazon RDS or Amazon Aurora?

Amazon RDS: $0.016 per DB instance-hour on-demand for db.t4g.micro, the smallest DB instance class — RDS for MySQL, Single-AZ, US East (N. Virginia). No plan fee or minimum: instance-hours, storage and backups are billed separately. Cheapest of the 216 on-demand rates in this feed; db.t3.micro is next at $0.017.

Amazon Aurora: No plan fee and no minimum commitment — Aurora charges for what you use. AWS's own worked example prices serverless compute at $0.12 per ACU-hour on Aurora Standard in US East (N. Virginia), and the smallest capacity you can set is 0.5 ACUs; storage and I/O are billed separately.

Storage (entry plan): Amazon RDS or Amazon Aurora?

Amazon RDS: Minimum 20 GiB of General Purpose SSD storage per DB instance, selectable up to 64 TiB (RDS for MySQL, gp2 or gp3).

Amazon Aurora: No included allowance on the pay-as-you-go Paid plan: storage scales automatically up to 256 TiB and is metered per GB-month — $0.10 per GB-month for Aurora Standard in AWS's US East (N. Virginia) example. The AWS Free Tier Free plan caps a cluster at 1 GiB.

Should I choose Amazon RDS or Amazon Aurora?

Pick Amazon RDS if Teams already inside AWS, where the database sitting in the same VPC as everything else is worth more than any single feature on this page. Six engines, up to 35 days of point-in-time recovery, and read replicas you create and delete yourself.

Pick Amazon Aurora if Teams on AWS who want a Postgres or MySQL cluster that can throw off a copy-on-write clone of production in minutes, keep up to fifteen readers behind it, and pause to nothing between bursts in serverless mode.

Provider pages

Amazon RDSAWS managed relational database service running PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server and Db2 on provisioned DB instances.Amazon AuroraAWS relational database engine compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL, built on a shared cluster volume with copy-on-write cloning and a serverless capacity mode.

Related comparisons

Aiven vs Amazon AuroraAiven vs Amazon RDSAmazon Aurora vs Crunchy BridgeAmazon Aurora vs Neo4jAmazon Aurora vs NeonAmazon Aurora vs NileAmazon Aurora vs PlanetScaleAmazon Aurora vs Prisma Postgres

Comments

Every page here is sourced and dated.