What's the difference between Amazon Aurora and Amazon Neptune?
Both are purpose-built, fully managed AWS databases, but they solve fundamentally different problems. Aurora handles structured relational data with SQL; Neptune handles highly connected data where relationships between entities are the primary query pattern.
Compare side-by-side
*Content generated by AI and reviewed for accuracy
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Comparisons
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Amazon Aurora
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Amazon Neptune
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Category
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Databases, Relational databases |
Databases, Graph databases |
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Description
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MySQL, PostgreSQL, and DSQL-compatible relational database designed for the cloud. Aurora PostgreSQL and Aurora MySQL are designed to deliver up to 6x the throughput of standard MySQL and PostgreSQL. Aurora DSQL provides serverless distributed SQL with active-active scaling to zero. |
Fast, reliable, fully managed graph database service designed for highly connected datasets, knowledge graphs, and GraphRAG applications. |
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Best for
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Key features
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Pricing model
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On-Demand or Serverless |
On-demand or provisioned capacity |
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Free Tier
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Yes — Aurora DSQL and Aurora PostgreSQL |
Yes |
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Expert take
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Aurora was designed for the cloud from the storage layer up. The result is MySQL/PostgreSQL/DSQL compatibility designed to deliver up to 6x the throughput, plus features like Global Database, serverless with scale to zero, vector database, and agent memory that don't exist in traditional engines. |
Neptune is purpose-built for workloads where relationships between entities are the primary query pattern. When you need to traverse connections — friend-of-friend, shortest path, pattern matching — a graph database outperforms relational joins by orders of magnitude at depth. |
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Customer story
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View product pages
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How Aurora and Neptune compare
Both Amazon Aurora and Amazon Neptune are fully managed with encryption at rest and in transit, IAM integration, automated backups, and Multi-AZ deployments. The features listed in the table above highlight where the services differ.
Choose Aurora when your data fits naturally into tables with defined schemas, you need SQL for complex queries (aggregations, subqueries, reporting), or your access patterns involve filtering and sorting structured records. Aurora handles relationships through foreign keys and joins.
Choose Neptune when relationships between entities are what you're primarily querying (not just storing). If your questions sound like "who is connected to whom," "what's the shortest path between X and Y," or "find all entities matching this pattern within 3 hops," Neptune will outperform relational joins by orders of magnitude.
Common pattern: Many architectures use both — Aurora for transactional data (orders, accounts, inventory) and Neptune for relationship-heavy queries (recommendations, fraud rings, network topology) that would require expensive recursive joins in SQL.
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