No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

AWS Lake Formation vs Amazon EMR comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EMR
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
13th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (3rd)
AWS Lake Formation
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon EMR is 3.7%, up from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Lake Formation is 3.3%, down from 5.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
AWS Lake Formation3.3%
Amazon EMR3.7%
Other93.0%
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2043696 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Data pipelines have simplified complex transformations and provide faster insights for users
The features at Amazon EMR that I have found most valuable are fully customizable functions. I am using Amazon EMR for data transformation, where we load the data. The entire ETL process is encompassed within it. The first thing is the egress part, where we pull the data from various sources, which include our main core databases, the systems that include Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, and Postgres. We bring data from all these sources and use Amazon EMR specifically to combine all this data, clean the data, and combine it at a particular level. We bring everything to a particular level to make it more production-ready, and we simplify the data because every system has its own problems. We are using it to clean the data and transform the data in such a way that the end-user can get the insights faster.
Ciro Baldim Guerra - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Analytics Engineer at Itau Unibanco S.A.
Has improved data governance by enabling clear ownership and structured access across teams
In my company, Itaú, we don't utilize all AWS offerings due to rigorous security measures. We operate approximately six to eight months behind other available services. I'm uncertain if gaps exist because of this limitation, though the system functions effectively for us. AWS Lake Formation offers column-level access control for databases, but we haven't implemented this feature either because it hasn't been approved by our compliance, governance, or security areas. In our current setup, everyone from my business unit uses the same consumer account. When access is requested for a table, everyone using that business unit account receives access. This could present a security concern, though it benefits new team members who automatically receive all necessary access permissions. However, I struggle to identify specific improvements needed in AWS Lake Formation.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The stability of the product has been great overall."
"Amazon EMR has multiple connectors that can connect to various data sources."
"The solution helps us manage huge volumes of data."
"Overall a good cloud infrastructure and takes the burden of managing the distributed hardware and can easily scale up and scale down as per the requirement of the task at hand."
"Amazon EMR is a good solution that can be used to manage big data."
"Amazon EMR provides out-of-the-box functionality because we can deploy and get Spark functionality over Hadoop."
"It's helped to automate processes."
"Less expensive than in-house hosting, much more scalable when needed to process larger volumes of data."
"The most valuable features of AWS Lake Formation were the access model itself, as it allows implementation of filters, Blueprints, and row-level and column-level security to mask data that shouldn't be accessed by certain entities, enabling granular control without exposing PII data."
"The solution has many features that are applicable to events such as audits."
"AWS Lake Formation works hand in hand with other products."
"The features and capabilities of AWS Lake Formation that I have found most valuable are that it is really convenient to see all the different data assets that were configured and understand who has and what type of service has or does not have access to those services."
"We use AWS Lake Formation typically for the data warehouse."
"Every solution has its pros and cons, however, for our purposes, this solution works quite well for us."
"The integration of AWS Lake Formation with the IAM for authentication and authorization is very good; I didn't have any problems in the setup and thought it was simple."
"We have observed measurable benefits in terms of cost savings, time savings, resource savings, and efficiency improvements in our workflows."
 

Cons

"In Qubole, the interface was very good. I could see many details because in Amazon EMR console, very few details are available."
"There were times where they would release new versions and it seemed to end up breaking old versions, which is very strange."
"In general, I would rate the solution at a four out of ten."
"The cost of Amazon EMR is very high."
"The most complicated thing is configuring to the cluster and to ensure it's running correctly."
"Whenever we have scaling policies for load balancing and our load increases the input rate, we increase the resources. However, at that time Amazon AWS is not providing the scale of the required resources in a short time."
"The dashboard management could be better. Right now, it's lacking a bit."
"The web interface for managing all your cloud services is a bit patchy and needs improvement."
"The solution could make improvements around orchestration and doing some automation stuff on AWS front automation. It would be useful if we could use automation to build images and use hardened images which are CIS compliant."
"I would appreciate online support, which I don't have access to in my corporation at the bank, so that is important."
"I haven't seen any measurable benefits from using AWS Lake Formation, such as time saving, resource saving, or efficiency improvements."
"Despite following official documentation, configuration problems persisted, requiring weeks of support from multiple AWS engineers to resolve."
"The main challenge we faced with AWS Lake Formation was related to cross-account sharing. Granting access to other AWS accounts for tables or databases in a different AWS account was somewhat difficult."
"Athena can be a bit clunky when writing queries, indicating a potential enhancement point for easier user interaction with query tools such as DataGrip using provided driver JARs."
"Information about the pricing, cost, and setup cost of the AWS solutions would be beneficial."
"AWS Lake Formation might not be easy to learn initially, especially for technical staff, due to various underlying options."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Amazon EMR is not very expensive."
"Amazon EMR's price is reasonable."
"The cost of Amazon EMR is very high."
"I rate the tool's pricing a five out of ten. It can be expensive since it's a managed service, and if you are not careful, you can run into unexpected charges. You can make a mistake that costs you tens of thousands of dollars. That's happened to us twice, so I'm sensitive to it. We're still trying to work on that. Our smallest client probably spends a hundred thousand dollars yearly on licensing, while our largest is well over a million."
"There is no need to pay extra for third-party software."
"You don't need to pay for licensing on a yearly or monthly basis, you only pay for what you use, in terms of underlying instances."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"There is a small fee for the EMR system, but major cost components are the underlying infrastructure resources which we actually use."
"AWS Lake Formation is a bit expensive."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Data Warehouse solutions are best for your needs.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EMR?
I would rate the price for Amazon EMR, where one is high and ten is low, as a good one.
What needs improvement with Amazon EMR?
I feel some lack of functionality in Amazon EMR. I have thoughts on what would be great to see in the product, such as AI/ML features or additional options.
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon EMR?
I find it easy to integrate Amazon EMR with other AWS services like S3 or EC2 for data processing needs. I would rate this review as eight out of ten.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Lake Formation?
I don't understand much about the pricing of AWS Lake Formation, but I know how to search for the cost of Glue jobs, and I use the calculator in Amazon. I use a tool to preview the cost based on th...
What needs improvement with AWS Lake Formation?
Regarding areas of AWS Lake Formation that could be improved or enhanced, I prefer not to answer, mainly because I do not believe that I would be the most valuable person to ask, as I have not used...
What is your primary use case for AWS Lake Formation?
My usual use cases for AWS Lake Formation involved securing and governing the data resources that we configured in AWS, but we did not use the analytics or machine learning capabilities specificall...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic MapReduce
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Yelp
bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Lake Formation vs. Amazon EMR and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.