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Amazon Athena vs Elastic Search 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
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Elastic Search
Ranking in Search as a Service
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (9th), Vector Databases (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon Athena is 10.6%, down from 13.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 14.4%, up from 8.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

Manilal Kasera - PeerSpot reviewer
A great AWS application that is easy to set up and simple to expand
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. We'd like it better if, for example, when you have some data, you can easily query it and you can easily read it at a glance. We'd like it to just be almost like a drag-and-drop situation. In Amazon Cloud, you actually have first to upload the data into S3. For that, you have to create a bucket. Now you have to create a Glue service, which will get you the schema. Then that schema would create basically a database and a table. After that, you have to go to Athena to query the data. It's a three-step process in Amazon Cloud. In Palantir, you just have to drag and drop.
Anand_Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Captures data from all other sources and becomes a MOM aka monitoring of monitors
Scalability and ROI are the areas they have to improve. Their license terms are based on the number of cores. If you increase the number of cores, it becomes very difficult to manage at a large scale. For example, if I have a $3 million project, I won't sell it because if we're dealing with a 10 TB or 50 TB system, there are a lot of systems and applications to monitor, and I have to make an MOM (Mean of Max) for everything. This is because of the cost impact. Also, when you have horizontal scaling, it's like a multi-story building with only one elevator. You have to run around, and it's not efficient. Even the smallest task becomes difficult. That's the problem with horizontal scaling. They need to improve this because if they increase the cores and adjust the licensing accordingly, it would make more sense.

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."
"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."
"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."
"The flexibility and the support for diverse languages that it provides for searching the database are most valuable. We can use different languages to query the database."
"The most valuable feature is the out of the box Kibana."
"The products comes with REST APIs."
"The initial installation and setup were straightforward."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"The security portion of Elasticsearch is particularly beneficial, allowing me to view and analyze security alerts."
"The ability to aggregate log and machine data into a searchable index reduces time to identify and isolate issues for an application. Saves time in triage and incident response by eliminating manual steps to access and parse logs on separate systems, within large infrastructure footprints."
"The solution is valuable for log analytics."
 

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."
"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."
"The solution should include a better API for query services."
"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."
"You have to build out the metadata yourself because of the nature of the cloud."
"I don't see improvements at the moment. The current setup is working well for me, and I'm satisfied with it. Integrating with different platforms is also fine, and I'm not recommending any changes or enhancements right now."
"The solution has quite a steep learning curve. The usability and general user-friendliness could be improved. However, that is kind of typical with products that have a lot of flexibility, or a lot of capabilities. Sometimes having more choices makes things more complex. It makes it difficult to configure it, though. It's kind of a bitter pill that you have to swallow in the beginning and you really have to get through it."
"Improving machine learning capabilities would be beneficial."
"There should be more stability."
"We see the need for some improvements with Elasticsearch. We would like the Elasticsearch package to include training lessons for our staff."
"They should improve its documentation. Their official documentation is not very informative. They can also improve their technical support. They don't help you much with the customized stuff. They also need to add more visuals. Currently, they have line charts, bar charts, and things like that, and they can add more types of visuals. They should also improve the alerts. They are not very simple to use and are a bit complex. They could add more options to the alerting system."
"There is another solution I'm testing which has a 500 record limit when you do a search on Elastic Enterprise Search. That's the only area in which I'm not sure whether it's a limitation on our end in terms of knowledge or a technical limitation from Elastic Enterprise Search. There is another solution we are looking at that rides on Elastic Enterprise Search. And the limit is for any sort of records that you're doing or data analysis you're trying to do, you can only extract 500 records at a time. I know the open-source nature has a lot of limitations, Otherwise, Elastic Enterprise Search is a fantastic solution and I'd recommend it to anyone."
"There are challenges with performance management and scalability."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It doesn't cost much if you are already part of the AWS ecosystem."
"The solution operates on a serverless model so you only pay for data that you consume."
"The price could be better."
"The solution is free."
"The tool is not expensive. Its licensing costs are yearly."
"This is a free, open source software (FOSS) tool, which means no cost on the front-end. There are no free lunches in this world though. Technical skill to implement and support are costly on the back-end with ELK, whether you train/hire internally or go for premium services from Elastic."
"​The pricing and license model are clear: node-based model."
"Although the ELK Elasticsearch software is open-source, we buy the hardware."
"The tool is an open-source product."
"ELK has been considered as an alternative to Splunk to reduce licensing costs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Government
10%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Athena?
Athena has a really good UI and is very compatible with on-prem products.
What needs improvement with Amazon Athena?
You have to build out the metadata yourself because of the nature of the cloud.
What do you like most about ELK Elasticsearch?
Logsign provides us with the capability to execute multiple queries according to our requirements. The indexing is very high, making it effective for storing and retrieving logs. The real-time anal...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
I don't know about pricing. That is dealt with by the sales team and our account team. I was not involved with that.
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
I found an issue with Elasticsearch in terms of aggregation. They are good, yet the rules written for this are not really good. There is a maximum of 10,000 entries, so the limitation means that if...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
T-Mobile, Adobe, Booking.com, BMW, Telegraph Media Group, Cisco, Karbon, Deezer, NORBr, Labelbox, Fingerprint, Relativity, NHS Hospital, Met Office, Proximus, Go1, Mentat, Bluestone Analytics, Humanz, Hutch, Auchan, Sitecore, Linklaters, Socren, Infotrack, Pfizer, Engadget, Airbus, Grab, Vimeo, Ticketmaster, Asana, Twilio, Blizzard, Comcast, RWE and many others.
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Athena vs. Elastic Search and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.