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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
5.4
Amazon EMR delivers significant cost savings and efficiency, with some users achieving up to 20% savings and positive ROI.
Sentiment score
5.7
Amazon Redshift ROI varies; cloud transition boosts sales but data volume impacts cost-effectiveness compared to databases like Netezza.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.7
Amazon EMR support is generally proactive and responsive, though user experiences vary, especially during open-source integrations.
Sentiment score
6.7
Amazon Redshift's customer service is praised for efficiency and professionalism, though some desire easier phone access and consistent availability.
We get all call support, screen sharing support, and immediate support, so there are no problems.
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
7.4
Amazon EMR is scalable and versatile, though some face resource speed issues and performance differences between environments.
Sentiment score
7.3
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
7.7
Amazon EMR is stable and reliable, with high availability, but could improve slightly to address occasional concerns.
Sentiment score
7.3
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 requires improved user-friendliness, stability, monitoring, integration, and pricing adjustments to enhance performance, scalability, and compatibility.
Amazon Redshift users struggle with data management, pricing, performance, integration, UI support, and compatibility with various data types.
The cost factor differs significantly. When you run Spark application on EKS, you run at the pod level, so you can control the compute cost. But in Amazon EMR, when you have to run one application, you have to launch the entire EC2.
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 pricing is usage-based, perceived higher, but optimizable through instance management and auto-scaling for Big Data tasks.
Amazon Redshift offers competitive pricing with scalable costs, ideal for large enterprises, though not as economical for smaller companies.
Cost optimization can be achieved through instance usage, cluster sharing, and auto-scaling.
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 offers scalable, cost-effective data processing with easy integration, advanced features, and robust management on a cloud-based infrastructure.
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.
The compute demand has decreased and it has reduced the cost significantly.
Amazon Redshift's performance optimization and scalability are quite helpful, providing functionalities such as scaling up and down.
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.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EMR
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
13th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (3rd)
Amazon Redshift
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
8th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
72
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon EMR is 3.3%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon Redshift is 7.6%, up from 7.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon Redshift7.6%
Amazon EMR3.3%
Other89.1%
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.
StevenLai - PeerSpot reviewer
Has supported data analysis needs but still requires improvements in support responsiveness and setup clarity
I work in the real estate industry, and the best features I appreciate about Amazon Redshift include its efficiency in managing large datasets. Amazon Redshift's security features help meet our compliance needs, and I have experience with its pricing and licensing which I find reasonable. I utilize Redshift's workload management.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
12%
Educational Organization
12%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Transportation Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise28
 

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: September 2025.
869,785 professionals have used our research since 2012.