Google Cloud Spanner and Azure Cosmos DB are CAP (Consistency-Availability-Partition Tolerance) compliant databases that provide high availability, but at the cost of potentially slower write performance due to the need for leader election in case of network partitions. YugabyteDB, on the other hand, is an EL (Low Latency - High Consistency) database that allows lower latency operations by tuning consistency down, making it suitable for cloud-native applications with strict latency requirements. While Google Cloud Spanner and Azure Cosmos DB offer strong consistency guarantees, YugabyteDB offers tunable read consistency, including optional read-only replicas for remote regions, which can be beneficial in multi-region deployments.