Azure Cosmos DB vs Gearman: What are the differences?

Developers describe Azure Cosmos DB as "A fully-managed, globally distributed NoSQL database service". Azure DocumentDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service built for fast and predictable performance, high availability, elastic scaling, global distribution, and ease of development. On the other hand, Gearman is detailed as "A generic application framework to farm out work to other machines or processes". Gearman allows you to do work in parallel, to load balance processing, and to call functions between languages. It can be used in a variety of applications, from high-availability web sites to the transport of database replication events.

Azure Cosmos DB and Gearman are primarily classified as "NoSQL Database as a Service" and "Message Queue" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Azure Cosmos DB are:

• Fully managed with 99.99% Availability SLA
• Elastically and highly scalable (both throughput and storage)
• Predictable low latency: <10ms @ P99 reads and <15ms @ P99 fully-indexed writes

On the other hand, Gearman provides the following key features:

• Open Source It’s free! (in both meanings of the word) Gearman has an active open source community that is easy to get involved with if you need help or want to contribute. Worried about licensing? Gearman is BSD
• Multi-language - There are interfaces for a number of languages, and this list is growing. You also have the option to write heterogeneous applications with clients submitting work in one language and workers performing that work in another
• Flexible - You are not tied to any specific design pattern. You can quickly put together distributed applications using any model you choose, one of those options being Map/Reduce

"Best-of-breed NoSQL features" is the top reason why over 13 developers like Azure Cosmos DB, while over 10 developers mention "Free" as the leading cause for choosing Gearman.

According to the StackShare community, Azure Cosmos DB has a broader approval, being mentioned in 24 company stacks & 24 developers stacks; compared to Gearman, which is listed in 19 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.