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Amazon EMR vs Amazon Redshift comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.3
Companies using Amazon EMR often experience significant ROI, with savings up to 20% and substantial returns over on-premise systems.
Sentiment score
6.2
Amazon Redshift ROI varies; cloud transition boosts sales but data volume impacts cost-effectiveness compared to databases like Netezza.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.6
Amazon EMR support is generally proactive and efficient, but experiences vary, especially during open-source product integration.
Sentiment score
6.9
Amazon Redshift's customer service is praised for efficiency and professionalism, though some desire easier phone access and consistent availability.
They help with billing, cost determination, IAM properties, security compliance, and deployment and migration activities.
Whenever we need support, if there is an issue accessing stored data due to regional data center problems, the Amazon team is very helpful and provides optimal solutions quickly.
It's costly when you enable support.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Amazon EMR effectively scales to enterprise needs, with auto-scaling and adaptability, despite occasional peak demand resource allocation delays.
Sentiment score
7.4
Redshift is popular for its easy scalability on AWS, although some users face challenges with large cluster configurations.
Scalability can be provisioned using the auto-scaling feature, EC2 instances, on-demand instances, and storage locations like block storage, S3, or file storage.
The scalability part needs improvement as the sizing requires trial and error.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon EMR is generally stable and reliable, despite occasional data-related stability issues, with robust failover and monitoring features.
Sentiment score
7.4
Amazon Redshift is stable with minor scaling challenges, appreciated AWS support, and noted visibility concerns versus Snowflake.
Regular updates, patch installations, monitoring, logging, alerting, and disaster recovery activities are crucial for maintaining stability.
Amazon Redshift is a stable product, and I would rate it nine or ten out of ten for stability.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon EMR struggles with a steep learning curve, complex configurations, unpredictable costs, and needs enhancements in stability and support.
Amazon Redshift users struggle with data management, pricing, performance, integration, UI support, and compatibility with various data types.
There is room for improvement with respect to retries, handling the volume of data on S3 buckets, cluster provisioning, scaling, termination, security, and integration between services like S3, Glue, Lake Formation, and DynamoDB.
Integration with AI could be a good improvement.
They should bring the entire ETL data management process into Amazon Redshift.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EMR's costs vary by resources used, with potential high monthly expenses, requiring careful management to prevent surprises.
Amazon Redshift offers competitive pricing with scalable costs, ideal for large enterprises, though not as economical for smaller companies.
Costs are involved based on cluster resources, data volumes, EC2 instances, instance sizes, Kubernetes, Docker services, storage, and data transfers.
The cost of technical support is high.
It's a pretty good price and reasonable for the product quality.
The pricing of Amazon Redshift is expensive.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EMR is scalable, easy to use, cost-effective, integrates well with Hadoop, and supports diverse analytics applications.
Amazon Redshift offers scalable, efficient, and secure data warehousing with fast processing, AWS integration, and flexible configurations for analytics.
Amazon EMR helps in scalability, real-time and batch processing of data, handling efficient data sources, and managing data lakes, data stores, and data marts on file systems and in S3 buckets.
Scalability is the best feature of Amazon Redshift. Amazon Redshift handles scalability automatically, so we do not need to scale up or down; it is all managed by Redshift.
Scalability is also a strong point; I can scale it however I want without any limitations.
Amazon Redshift's performance optimization and scalability are quite helpful, providing functionalities such as scaling up and down.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EMR
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
12th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (3rd)
Amazon Redshift
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon EMR is 3.4%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon Redshift is 7.5%, down from 8.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Prashant  Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamless data integration enhances reporting efficiency and an easy setup
Amazon EMR has multiple connectors that can connect to various data sources. The service charges are based on processing only, depending on the resources used, which can help save money. It is easy to integrate with other services for storage, allowing data to be shifted to cheaper storage based on usage.
Sriram-Natesan - PeerSpot reviewer
The ability to create a lot of views or materialized views is beneficial
Improvement in the immediate response and the process of getting into a call could be helpful. We have had to wait for at least twenty-four hours to get a call and then wait for a couple more hours for a solution. Improved connectivity to different BI tools and already published connectors for major tools in AWS could enhance the service.
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Data Warehouse solutions are best for your needs.
861,490 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Educational Organization
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
20%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon EMR?
Amazon EMR is a good solution that can be used to manage big data.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EMR?
Compared to others, Amazon seems efficient and is considered good for Big Data workloads. Costs are involved based on cluster resources, data volumes, EC2 ( /products/amazon-ec2-reviews ) instances...
What needs improvement with Amazon EMR?
There is room for improvement with respect to retries, handling the volume of data on S3 ( /products/amazon-s3-reviews ) buckets, cluster provisioning, scaling, termination, security, and integrati...
How does Amazon Redshift compare with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?
Amazon Redshift is very fast, has a very good response time, and is very user-friendly. The initial setup is very straightforward. This solution can merge and integrate well with many different dat...
What do you like most about Amazon Redshift?
The tool's most valuable feature is its parallel processing capability. It can handle massive amounts of data, even when pushing hundreds of terabytes, and its scaling capabilities are good.
 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic MapReduce
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Yelp
Liberty Mutual Insurance, 4Cite Marketing, BrandVerity, DNA Plc, Sirocco Systems, Gainsight, Blue 449
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EMR vs. Amazon Redshift and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
861,490 professionals have used our research since 2012.