Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

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
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Elastic Search
Ranking in Search as a Service
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
74
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (9th), Vector Databases (3rd)
 

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 Elastic Search is 19.3%, up from 10.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search19.3%
Amazon Athena5.5%
Other75.2%
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.
Louis McCoy - PeerSpot reviewer
Searches through billions of documents have become impressively fast and consistent
The seamless scalability is something I see as among the best features Elastic Search offers. The speed with which Elastic Search is able to search through all of the documents we place into it is quite remarkable, as we search through 65 billion documents in less than a second in most cases, on a constant consistent basis. I find configuring relevant searches within Elastic Search platform very straightforward. Elastic Search is easily scalable. The customer support for Elastic Search is quite good. I advise others looking into using Elastic Search to think about the future of your platform and where you intend it to be in five years, and based on that, which version of Elastic Search best suits the needs of your platform. Additionally, jump into the AI products first as you're in the planning phase so that as you're filling out your data, the AI products and machine learning products can enrich the data real-time early on in the process, which will save you a lot of time later. The overall performance of the platform, scalability of the platform and other additional features, especially when it comes to AI, really earn the nine.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Athena has a really good UI and is very compatible with on-prem products."
"Amazon Athena is very stable. I never had any issues with it. The dashboarding tool is okay."
"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."
"It's easy to set up the product."
"I value the feature that allows me to share the dashboards to different people with different levels of access."
"It's a stable solution and we have not had any issues."
"The special text processing features in this solution are very important for me."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Enterprise Search is the Discovery option for the visualization of logs on a GPU instead of on the server."
"Using real-time search functionality to support operational decisions has been helpful."
"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 analytics with Elastic benefits us due to the huge traffic volume in our organization, which reaches up to 60,000 requests per second. With logs of approximately 25 GB per day, manually analyzing traffic behavior, payloads, headers, user agents, and other details is impractical."
"The full text search capabilities in Elastic Search have proven to be extremely valuable for our operations."
"Helps us to store the data in key value pairs and, based on that, we can produce visualisations in Kibana."
 

Cons

"You have to build out the metadata yourself because of the nature of the cloud."
"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."
"The solution should include a better API for query services."
"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."
"Elastic Search needs to improve authentication. It also needs to work on the Kibana visualization dashboard."
"Elastic Enterprise Search could improve its SSL integration easier. We should not need to go to the back-end servers to do configuration, we should be able to do it on the GUI."
"The upgrade experience and inflexibility with fields keeps Elastic Search from being a perfect 10."
"We have an issue with the volume of data that we can handle."
"It needs email notification, similar to what Logentries has. Because of the notification issue, we moved to Logentries, as it provides a simple way to receive notification whenever a server encounters an error or unexpected conditions (which we have defined using RegEx​)."
"I have not been using the solution for many years to know exactly the improvements needed. However, they could simplify how the YML files have to be structured properly."
"Elasticsearch should have simpler commands for window filtering."
"There are potential improvements based on our client feedback, like unifying the licensing cost structure."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I am happy with what they are charging and how they charge it, especially because they charge you per query, and not per series."
"Athena is very inexpensive for being a cloud tool."
"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 cost varies based on factors like usage volume, network load, data storage size, and service utilization. If your usage isn't too extensive, the cost will be lower."
"An X-Pack license is more affordable than Splunk."
"This product is open-source and can be used free of charge."
"The solution is affordable."
"Elastic Search is open-source, but you need to pay for support, which is expensive."
"The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"The basic license is free, but it comes with a lot of features that aren't free. With a gold license, we get active directory integration. With a platinum license, we get alerting."
"The solution is free."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Search as a Service solutions are best for your needs.
868,759 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

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 Business32
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise36
 

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 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?
We used the open-source version of Elasticsearch, which was free.
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
Elastic Search could improve in areas such as search criteria and query processes, as search times were longer prior to implementing Elastic Search. Elastic Search has limitations for handling huge...
 

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: September 2025.
868,759 professionals have used our research since 2012.