Timescale Cloud vs. Amazon RDS:  How Does Timescale Stack Up?

    Struggling with ingest performance, sluggish queries, and spiraling storage costs on Amazon RDS? Rising compute requirements and storage constraints forcing you to constantly see disks and bills increase in size?

    If you’re looking for better performance and cost-efficiency at scale for your time-series and real-time analytics workloads while continuing to use PostgreSQL, try Timescale Cloud.

    “The capacity of Timescale Cloud to support both traditional schemas and time-series data in the same database allowed us to consolidate into one storage solution and saved us the operating costs of running AWS RDS instances.”

    Carlos Olmos, Software Engineer at

    Timescale Cloud

    44% higher ingestion, up to 350x faster queries, and a 95% smaller data footprint with PostgreSQL on Timescale Cloud

    For a 160 GB dataset with almost 1 billion rows stored on a 1 TB volume, Timescale outperforms Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL (even when paired with the pg_partman extension to provide partition management) in ingest speed, query speed, and compression.

    The show the difference.

    Purpose-built for time-series & real-time analytics

    • Hypercore extends PostgreSQL with row/columnar storage for fast, scalable analytics
    • PostgreSQL reliability and ecosystem with time-series optimizations
    Purpose-built for time-series & real-time analytics

    No more ingest bottlenecks

    Performance that scales with your data

    • Automated partitioning and indexing specifically designed for time-series queries
    • Built-in continuous aggregations reduce query latency from seconds to milliseconds
    Performance that scales with your data

    No more query slowdowns

    Storage efficiency by design

    • Row-columnar compression reduces storage requirements by over 90%
    • Only pay for the data you store, not provisioned capacity
    • Tiered storage stores data in different tiers based on how often you access it, enabling low-cost scalability
    • Automated data lifecycle management with configurable retention policies
    Storage efficiency by design

    No more spiraling storage costs

    AI capabilities right in your application database

    • Time-series, relational, and vector data in one place
    • Build more apps with a simpler stack and unlock large-scale, high-performance AI use cases
    • PostgreSQL extended for AI through open source extensions
    • Optimized hybrid time-based vector search (queries combining vector search with rich SQL filtering)
    AI capabilities right in your application database

    Top-notch cloud support you can rely on

    • Cloud Basic Support (always included at no extra cost)
    • Cloud Production Support (annual subscription)
    • Distinct packages for your distinct support needs
    Top-notch cloud support you can rely on

    Timescale is PostgreSQL made powerful to meet the demands of modern applications.

    Applications use many data types—time series, AI, and transactions.

    Timescale accommodates them all in a single application database.

    PostgreSQL-Based Cloud Database Comparison: 

    Timescale Cloud vs. Amazon RDS

    Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL

    Database Engine

    PostgreSQL extended for demanding workloads like real-time analytics over time-series and event data and AI

    PostgreSQL

    Query Language

    SQL

    SQL

    Data Model

    Relational extended for time-series and vector formats

    Relational

    Geo-spatial Support

    Yes (via PostGIS)

    Yes (via PostGIS)

    Integrations

    Full PostgreSQL ecosystem support, plus TimescaleDB

    Full PostgreSQL ecosystem support (but no TimescaleDB 🐅)

    AI-Specific Capability

    Open-source extensions pgvector, pgvectorscale, pgai (with added Timescale-Cloud-specific AI functionalities)

    Support for open source extensions pgvector, pgvectorscale, pga

    Time-Series Optimization

    Hypertables (automated dynamic data partitioning), Hypercore (hybrid row-column store and compression engine), Continuous Aggregates (incrementally updated materialized views for aggregates which reduce query-time to milliseconds)

    PostgreSQL partitioning only

    Retention Policies

    Yes, built-in and completely customizable. Retention policies can be combined with continuous aggregates to automatically downsample data according to a schedule

    No (need to code and schedule your own)

    Data Storage Format

    Hypercore allows row-based storage for recent data, automatically converted to column based for older data unlocking real-time analytics workloads.

    Row-based only

    Data Compression

    Yes, column-based data is compressed in batches often achieving compression rates above 90%

    Only PostgreSQL built-in compression. Large values are compressed before storing.

    Data Ingestion Rate

    High

    Medium

    High-Cardinality Support

    Yes

    Yes

    Downsampling and Gap-Filling

    Yes (critical for high-frequency, data-intensive workloads native in SQL)

    Manual implementation required

    Built-in Visualization

    Yes (Timescale Console - Data Mode)

    No (requires third-party tools)

    Multi-Cloud Availability

    AWS, Managed Service for TimescaleDB (MST) on GCP and Azure

    AWS only

    Tiered Storage

    Multi-tiered storage architecture which can transparently migrate data to cheaper object storage

    Single tier with no cheaper object storage available

    Backup & Restore

    Fully managed, no cost

    Fully managed, pay for data stored in backups

    Security & Compliance

    SOC2 Type II and GDPR compliance, data encryption at rest and in transit, SSL support, VPC peering for your Amazon VPC, secure backups, multi-factor authentication, automated patching

    AWS security features, encryption at rest/in transit, VPC isolation, IAM integration, SSL support, automated patching, compliance certifications (SOC, ISO, PCI-DSS, etc.)

    Pricing Model

    Resource-based compute coupled with usage-based storage (pay for what you use with automatic volume management). No extra charges for backups or ingress/egress.

    Resource-based compute and storage (pay for the amount you deploy, manual volume management, no storage shrinking available). Pay for egress.

    Support

    24/7 Support from Postgres database professionals

    Platform support with an AWS Support plan

    Looking to explore or switch to Timescale for your use case?

    Don’t wait until you hit that performance wall—hundreds of thousands of developers across industries including IoT, crypto, finance, developer tools, SaaS, and more already use Timescale Cloud in production for mission-critical applications.

    Since Timescale is still PostgreSQL and already runs on AWS, the transition from Amazon RDS is swift. So whether you’re looking to scale performance, save on storage cost, or both, Timescale can help.

    To take it for a spin and see for yourself,