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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
7th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Glean Platform
Ranking in Search as a Service
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (3rd), AI-Agent Builders (4th), AI Software Development (14th), AI Customer Support (71st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon Athena is 4.8%, down from 10.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Glean Platform is 4.2%, up from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Glean Platform4.2%
Amazon Athena4.8%
Other91.0%
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."
"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."
"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."
"Athena has a really good UI and is very compatible with on-prem products."
"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."
"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."
"Glean Platform has increased productivity by at least one hundred hours per week for my organization."
"Life became so easy when we started using Glean Platform."
"I have used many solutions, but Glean Platform is the best, and I would truly appreciate it if everyone considers this platform."
"Glean Platform has positively impacted our organization, especially in terms of productivity for both us and our customers."
"Glean Platform has positively impacted my organization by speeding up a lot of repetitive tasks and making it easier for people outside of support to understand what kind of issues impact the support groups."
"Productivity has really skyrocketed."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"Transaction support is one of the biggest missing features."
"You have to build out the metadata yourself because of the nature of the cloud."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution should include a better API for query services."
"I tried pulling in an architecture diagram of a workflow, and it pulled in some other image instead."
"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."
"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."
"Also, the latency that the platform offers is a little high right now; what I have noticed is that on a particular query, the user has to wait a long time in order to get responses."
"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."
"Sometimes Glean Platform gets slowed down."
"Currently, Glean Platform does not integrate with Teams, Microsoft-owned platforms."
"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Glean Platform reveals limited options, and I wish there was more customization available."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution operates on a serverless model so you only pay for data that you consume."
"Athena is very inexpensive for being a cloud tool."
"It doesn't cost much if you are already part of the AWS ecosystem."
"I am happy with what they are charging and how they charge it, especially because they charge you per query, and not per series."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon Athena?
I don't have any specific answer on how Amazon Athena can be improved. This integration is more on the Glue side rather than on Amazon Athena, I would guess. Nothing comes to my mind here. In terms...
What is your primary use case for Amazon Athena?
The typical use case for Amazon Athena is that we have data in a data lake, and if we need to query the data from the data lake, we use Amazon Athena before it gets to the data warehouse where we w...
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon Athena?
I have experience of integration of Amazon Athena with AWS Glue. I think the pricing of Amazon Athena is quite reasonable as we use it in pay-as-you-go mode. On a scale from one to ten, I rate Amaz...
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?
I would appreciate a change to the color scheme of Glean Platform as a needed improvement, even if it is something small or minor.
What is your primary use case for Glean Platform?
My main use case for Glean Platform is general use at an introductory level.
 

Comparisons

 

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: April 2026.
892,287 professionals have used our research since 2012.