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Amazon AWS CloudSearch vs Amazon Athena comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Athena
Ranking in Search as a Service
7th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Amazon AWS CloudSearch
Ranking in Search as a Service
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon Athena is 5.5%, down from 14.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon AWS CloudSearch is 7.0%, down from 10.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon AWS CloudSearch7.0%
Amazon Athena5.5%
Other87.5%
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

Ciro Baldim Guerra - PeerSpot reviewer
Have struggled with exporting complex data and have disabled code suggestions due to inefficiency
I think there is room for improvement in Amazon Athena, and the first thing I will put is the data output. I use Python to query in Amazon Athena, and it's very complex and difficult just to save Amazon Athena results as an Excel file. The only option is copying the data, but sometimes if it exceeds 100 lines, if you copy and paste in Excel, it's very bad. You can't copy above 100 lines. The other option is downloading a CSV file, but the CSV file is not UTF-8 Unicode. Here in Brazil, we speak Portuguese, and there are a lot of special characters in the words and even names, and everything gets garbled when you put it in a CSV. You have to decode, encode, and there are a lot of problems. It could easily save as an Excel file since there are a lot of engines to help with it, so an XLSX file extension could be this way. Another point I would mention is the word completion. When I'm coding and making statements and queries, Amazon Athena tries to help me write the code, and that's very problematic. Sometimes I'm using some tables that I use every day, and Amazon Athena doesn't get the tables I'm using and suggests very improbable data. I have access to more than 30 databases and hundreds of tables. So, I turn it off, I disable the word completion because when I'm coding, the word completion makes the coding slower. It's very difficult, and every time I have to press escape to skip the completion. It's very ineffective, so I disable it because in other applications it functions very well, such as VS Code.
AmrIssa - PeerSpot reviewer
A scalable and fully managed search service with diverse data type support and robust security
We use it as our hosting solution, serving as the backbone for our systems, which include Rubrik and SAP It is remarkably efficient and beneficial. A reboot should be enhanced. There are issues with the VBC collection. I have been working with it for four years. I would rate the stability ten…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The solution is very easy to use and integrations are very smooth."
"One of the most valuable features is the ability to partition your databases. I also like the federal query functionality, for cases when you have to query outside your S3 storage, or even completely outside of the AWS platform."
"Athena has a really good UI and is very compatible with on-prem products."
"It's easy to set up the product."
"Amazon Athena is very stable. I never had any issues with it. The dashboarding tool is okay."
"The best feature is its scalability in that Cloud is always on the fly."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"I've found the solution to be very scalable."
"CDN service reduces latency when accessing our web application."
"It will remain alive in the market. The solution will be stable in the market."
"AWS CloudSearch's best features are good performance under high CPU and memory use, and ease of deployment and scaling."
"The quality of the solution is good."
"It is remarkably efficient and beneficial."
 

Cons

"I think it would be better if the product were more mature. It's still a young product compared to Power BI or Qlik. I find that development is a bit difficult, but it might be because I'm used to other tools. The dashboarding capabilities could be better. The reporting and statement generation could be better. I couldn't technically initiate picture-perfect reporting, for example, to send out statements every month for banking customers."
"You have to build out the metadata yourself because of the nature of the cloud."
"One improvement I can suggest is that Athena needs to work better with third-parties. For example, the process of querying a Microsoft SQL warehouse could be improved."
"If you compare it with Palantir, if you have some data and you want to quickly have a look at it, then that feature is not available in Amazon Cloud."
"The solution should include a better API for query services."
"Maybe they are common in Egypt, but you should make a request on Amazon to create a function to monitor CPU performance, memory, and files. It is very difficult in AWS. I would tell them it should be simple, just drag and drop. I think they could develop this option so we can drag and drop to monitor performance of the processor and memory."
"The solution should improve the recovery aspects that it has on offer."
"A reboot should be enhanced."
"Regarding the period of propagation on CDN servers, sometimes we update photos or files and we don't see the update instantly. We need to wait for sometime."
"The price of the solution can be expensive."
"I would say that it needs to keep its cost competitive in the market, especially in comparison to other clouds."
"I do not have any suggestions for improvements at this time."
"AWS CloudSearch's documentation isn't very clear. Also, the on-premise version of the solution is less stable than the cloud version."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution operates on a serverless model so you only pay for data that you consume."
"It doesn't cost much if you are already part of the AWS ecosystem."
"Athena is very inexpensive for being a cloud tool."
"I am happy with what they are charging and how they charge it, especially because they charge you per query, and not per series."
"There was no license needed to use this solution."
"We chose AWS because of its cost and stability."
"I'm not sure how much we pay a year. It might be around $30,000 a year."
"Our license costs around $4,000 per month."
"In comparison to IBM and Microsoft, the pricing is more favorable."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one point is cheap, and ten points are expensive, I rate the pricing as medium or reasonable."
"Amazon AWS CloudSearch charging is based on how many resources you consume or and the solution is known to be a bit expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
22%
University
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon Athena?
I think there is room for improvement in Amazon Athena, and the first thing I will put is the data output. I use Python to query in Amazon Athena, and it's very complex and difficult just to save A...
What is your primary use case for Amazon Athena?
I have experience using Amazon Athena, and this service I have more experience with, actually. I use Amazon Athena for my daily activity; I was using it just now for getting data, and we use Amazon...
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon Athena?
It is okay by me to have my name, my job, and my company when you post the review. I rate Amazon Athena a 10 out of 10.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon AWS CloudSearch?
In comparison to IBM and Microsoft, the pricing is more favorable. I would rate it eight out of ten.
What needs improvement with Amazon AWS CloudSearch?
A reboot should be enhanced. There are issues with the VBC collection.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
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Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon AWS CloudSearch vs. Amazon Athena and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,759 professionals have used our research since 2012.