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Amazon Athena vs Glean Platform comparison

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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
11
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 (8th), AI Customer Support (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon Athena is 5.3%, down from 5.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Glean Platform is 4.8%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Glean Platform4.8%
Amazon Athena5.3%
Other89.9%
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

YM
Senior Software Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Serverless analytics has reduced daily data query costs and supports accurate financial reporting
The best features Amazon Athena offers are its straightforward framework to perform ad hoc analysis on the data that we have. We use it primarily as our main query engine, so we are not using anything such as Snowflake or similar solutions. We essentially ingest the data into S3 buckets, and then we use Amazon Athena for querying the data. It is our main query platform on AWS. All of our queries, for transformations, are Athena-based queries that are orchestrated via Step Functions. We only pay for the amount of data that we scan. Since we operate on a relatively lower amount of data on a daily basis, we incur a very low cost on our querying. The pay-per-query pricing of Amazon Athena impacts my daily operations significantly. For other query engines, we pay for the query execution time, but in Amazon Athena, you only pay for the amount of data that you have scanned. Our queries primarily filter out the data. Since we operate on a daily basis, we are only concerned with today's data. When querying the data, we automatically put the filter to have the data in today's timestamp only. This way, we incur very low costs compared to other query engines. Our query scans are about 10 to 20 MBs, and despite performing 100 to 150 queries per day, this keeps our costs very manageable. Amazon Athena has positively impacted my organization by providing a completely serverless infrastructure. We have Step Functions, Lambda, and S3 buckets where we store our data. Our main infrastructure is serverless. We wanted a query engine that is less demanding in terms of setup efforts and cost-efficient, so we decided to go with Amazon Athena. It fulfills all our use cases, plus the ACID compliance that it brings, because we use Iceberg on top of Amazon Athena. This ensures our queries and data are consistent, durable, and that the queries are isolated in terms of execution. Athena's ACID compliance, especially with Iceberg, impacts our data consistency and reliability. We apply Iceberg with Parquet, which helps us compress the data to a very good volume. With the applied compression algorithms, we preserve our data consistency during parallel transformations. ACID compliance helps us achieve this, ensuring we do not compromise on our data and that our GDPR for the data is preserved.
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

"Amazon Athena is very stable. I never had any issues with it. The dashboarding tool is okay."
"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 has positively impacted my organization by providing a completely serverless infrastructure."
"The solution is very easy to use and integrations are very smooth."
"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."
"After implementing Amazon Athena in our project, we have observed significant savings in cost structure and effort, and the end user is very happy and is conducting analytical work using Amazon Athena."
"Productivity has really skyrocketed."
"Glean Platform offers excellent user interface design and integration capabilities with other platforms."
"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 increased productivity by at least one hundred hours per week for my organization."
"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."
"The major impact that I have noticed is how business users are now being impacted and they are using the platform because they understand it easily."
"Glean Platform has positively impacted our organization, especially in terms of productivity for both us and our customers."
"Life became so easy when we started using Glean Platform."
 

Cons

"Amazon Athena can be improved, especially when working with S3 tables, which is a caveat for us."
"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 use Python to query in Amazon Athena, and it's very complex and difficult just to save Amazon Athena results as an Excel file."
"You have to build out the metadata yourself because of the nature of the cloud."
"While implementing Amazon Athena, I observed an issue where, even after writing an exclusion pattern on the AWS Glue side, whenever the end user queries, it skips the exclusion pattern, overriding it and directly fetching data from the S3 bucket."
"Transaction support is one of the biggest missing features."
"Currently, Glean Platform does not integrate with Teams, Microsoft-owned platforms."
"I tried pulling in an architecture diagram of a workflow, and it pulled in some other image instead."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise4
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
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Athena vs. Glean Platform and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,683 professionals have used our research since 2012.