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Amazon Athena vs Glean Platform 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
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Glean Platform
Ranking in Search as a Service
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (2nd), AI Agent Builders (4th), AI Software Development (10th), AI Customer Support (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon Athena is 5.0%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Glean Platform is 4.7%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Glean Platform4.7%
Amazon Athena5.0%
Other90.3%
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

Ciro Baldim Guerra - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Analytics Engineer at Itau Unibanco S.A.
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.
Ananya Bl - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Analyst at Capgemini
Daily orchestration of complex ai workflows has boosted my research and automation capabilities
Orchestration primarily decides which agent handles which part of a task and manages errors, retries, and complete state while maintaining the workflow effectively. On the orchestration side, branching, looping, and human approvals support non-linear workflows in production environments with real-time access. Through refined and improved prompts, this helps in closing the loop with actual users. One unique feature that stood out is that every step in the workflow can pause or recover from failures. Instead of finishing the entire agent in one go, this approach is interesting because if there is a minor change in a previously completed step regarding the state, I can re-edit and restart from the beginning. This is truly impressive.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Athena is serverless, so we don’t have to provision or manage compute clusters, and we can simply point Athena at our data in S3 and run SQL queries immediately."
"The solution is very easy to use and integrations are very smooth."
"The best feature of Amazon Athena is that we can use Glue to build the schema from the data and then we can query the data directly on S3."
"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."
"Amazon Athena's ability to query structured and unstructured data has been beneficial."
"Amazon Athena has positively impacted my organization by providing a completely serverless infrastructure."
"Amazon Athena works for scalability; I query data using tagged data that uses user usage of applications that contain very big data, millions and billions of lines, and it works very well."
"It's easy to set up the product."
"Since I have joined, I have built around ninety agents with Glean Platform, and it has saved our organization around twenty-seven hours a week for each user, and it has also positively impacted our ARR."
"Glean Platform has increased productivity by at least one hundred hours per week for my organization."
"Glean Platform has positively impacted our organization, especially in terms of productivity for both us and our customers."
"Productivity has really skyrocketed."
"When I searched for internal information spread across different systems, Glean Platform did centralize and retrieve that data for me effectively, giving me eighty percent accuracy."
"The best features Glean Platform offers are mostly the view, which I think is very good, and what I find most helpful about the view is that the user interface is very good, making it very easy to chat with the chatbot and get all the material that I want in the way that I need it."
"I have used many solutions, but Glean Platform is the best, and I would truly appreciate it if everyone considers this platform."
"Glean Platform offers excellent user interface design and integration capabilities with other platforms."
 

Cons

"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."
"Transaction support is one of the biggest missing features."
"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."
"In terms of its integration capabilities, I would say it's not straightforward. It works, but it's a little bit tricky."
"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."
"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."
"Amazon Athena can be improved, especially when working with S3 tables, which is a caveat for us."
"I chose seven out of ten because if I could upload PDFs and have them analyzed, or have it integrate with my Gmail and help me go through my emails, that would be very useful, but I do not think it does that."
"In workflow agents, I would prefer that we do not use AI in every step and instead we have a toggle button or something which can configure whether AI should be used in this specific search field or not, or in this specific node or not, because currently it's using AI in all nodes which sometimes messes up the output."
"There are multiple ways in which Glean Platform can be improved."
"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Glean Platform reveals limited options, and I wish there was more customization available."
"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the licenses were expensive, and it was hard to convince the company to adopt based on that."
"Sometimes Glean Platform gets slowed down."
"I tried pulling in an architecture diagram of a workflow, and it pulled in some other image instead."
"Glean Platform can implement more models. The NLP creation could be a little faster, and while debugging is amazing, the routing also needs to provide higher quality outputs sometimes rather than extensive searching."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution operates on a serverless model so you only pay for data that you consume."
"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."
"Athena is very inexpensive for being a cloud tool."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise9
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon Athena?
Amazon Athena can be improved, especially when working with S3 tables, which is a caveat for us. It does not work very well with Amazon Athena, as we have to do multiple settings in terms of provid...
What is your primary use case for Amazon Athena?
My main use case for Amazon Athena is querying data that sits in S3 buckets. Currently, I am working for an aviation client for which we receive data on a daily basis. We take this data from a sour...
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon Athena?
Regarding Amazon Athena's AI capabilities, we do not utilize them. However, data governance is ensured, and security is adequate since we operate within the VPC. ACID compliance helps preserve GDPR...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Glean Platform?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Glean Platform reveals limited options, and I wish there was more customization available.
What needs improvement with Glean Platform?
In workflow agents, I would prefer that we do not use AI in every step and instead we have a toggle button or something which can configure whether AI should be used in this specific search field o...
What is your primary use case for Glean Platform?
I use Glean Platform as an enterprise search tool and I am a power user of agents, so I mostly use this on a day-to-day basis for random searches that I need to do about a company, a website, or if...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Glean Work AI Platform
 

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 Athena vs. Glean Platform and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.