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Amazon EMR vs Dremio comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 15, 2026

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
4.8
Amazon EMR offers cost savings and ROI benefits, with some users experiencing up to 20% cost reduction and high returns.
Sentiment score
4.0
Dremio offers cost savings and efficiency by reducing infrastructure needs and simplifying data source integration on data lakes.
Dremio surely saves time, reduces costs, and all those things because we don't have to worry so much about the infrastructure to make the different tools communicate.
SR BI developer at BRQ Digital Solutions
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.9
Amazon EMR customer service varies, with generally responsive support despite reported delays and occasional gaps in integration assistance.
Sentiment score
6.1
Dremio's customer service is highly praised for responsiveness, with Gold plan users enjoying positive interactions despite some limitations.
They help with billing, cost determination, IAM properties, security compliance, and deployment and migration activities.
Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs
We get all call support, screen sharing support, and immediate support, so there are no problems.
Senior Chief Engineer (Enterprise System Presales/Postsales) at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
I would rate the technical support from Amazon as ten out of ten.
Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees
I would rate customer support a ten out of ten.
We contact the technical support at least weekly; currently, it's more or less daily because we face performance issues, crashes of queries sometimes, and we also need support for configuration of the query engines and so on.
Data Architect at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
We have had to reach out for customer support many times, and they respond, so they are pretty supportive about some long-term issues.
SR BI developer at BRQ Digital Solutions
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
Amazon EMR efficiently scales for businesses, offering customizable cluster options to manage diverse data sizes and enterprise demands.
Sentiment score
7.3
Dremio's scalability excels, with user-configurable auto-scaling on Kubernetes/Docker, meeting large-scale needs, but some features require licensing.
Scalability can be provisioned using the auto-scaling feature, EC2 instances, on-demand instances, and storage locations like block storage, S3, or file storage.
Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs
Dremio's scalability can handle growing data and user demands easily.
SR BI developer at BRQ Digital Solutions
Internally, if it's on Docker or Kubernetes, scalability will be built into the system.
Senior Software Architect at USEReady
Dremio's scalability depends on your hardware and your deployment.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Amazon EMR is praised for stability and reliability, with high ratings due to its configurability and robust features.
Sentiment score
7.2
Dremio users report stable performance overall, despite occasional memory leaks, scalability issues, and the need for frequent monitoring.
Regular updates, patch installations, monitoring, logging, alerting, and disaster recovery activities are crucial for maintaining stability.
Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs
I rate Dremio a nine in terms of stability.
SR BI developer at BRQ Digital Solutions
We refactored the query, and that worked, but it still doesn't make you confident to go to production with a product that might crash depending on the query you send it.
Data Architect at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon EMR users face challenges with customization, stability, onboarding, cost optimization, task speed, and demand enhanced integration and security.
Dremio users face issues with performance, connectors, learning curve, and desire better integration and schema flexibility.
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.
Senior Chief Engineer (Enterprise System Presales/Postsales) at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
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.
Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs
I have thoughts on what would be great to see in the product, such as AI/ML features or additional options.
Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Starburst comes with around 50 connectors now.
Senior Software Architect at USEReady
Before we wrap up, I want to add that Dremio is lacking a semantic layer in a manner that the user can just choose dimensions, metrics, and filters to query the data.
It should be easier to get Arctic or an open-source version of Arctic onto the software version so that development teams can experiment with it.
Data Consultant at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EMR pricing is variable, potentially costly, but users can manage expenses with strategic resource and instance management.
Dremio offers cost-effectiveness but licensing is costly, leading some users to prefer the community version for scalability.
Costs are involved based on cluster resources, data volumes, EC2 instances, instance sizes, Kubernetes, Docker services, storage, and data transfers.
Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs
I would rate the price for Amazon EMR, where one is high and ten is low, as a good one.
Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees
I chose eight out of ten because Dremio is expensive for the Enterprise version, particularly regarding licensing.
Data Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
I had a good experience with pricing, as the pricing seems okay to me and the client.
Dremio does have a core of the engine that is open-source, but all the important features for the enterprise version are under license.
Data Architect at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EMR offers scalable, cost-effective big data management with integration, flexibility, security, and seamless Hadoop and Spark processing.
Dremio excels in data virtualization, federated queries, and integration, enhancing data management and access with efficient tools.
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.
Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs
Amazon EMR provides out-of-the-box functionality because we can deploy and get Spark functionality over Hadoop.
Senior Chief Engineer (Enterprise System Presales/Postsales) at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The features at Amazon EMR that I have found most valuable are fully customizable functions.
Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Having everything under one system and an easier-to-work-with interface, along with having API integrations, adds significant value to working with Dremio.
Data Consultant at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees
Dremio has positively impacted my organization as nowadays we are connected to multiple databases from multiple environments, multiple APIs, and applications, and Dremio organizes everything in an amazing way for me.
Data Analyst at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees
Multiple data sources can be queried in one query, and it is not just a query engine.
Data Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
 

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)
Dremio
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
10th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Data Science Platforms (9th)
 

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 Dremio is 4.3%, down from 7.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Dremio4.3%
Amazon EMR3.7%
Other92.0%
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.
Corrr Moray - PeerSpot reviewer
SR BI developer at BRQ Digital Solutions
Has simplified complex data integration workflows and supported consistent reporting across multiple sources
We also have a close relationship with the team that does the Dremio maintenance for the database, like upgrading the versions and they know about some specific problems we had in the past, such as a memory leak. We had a memory leak on some versions, which sometimes stopped the service. Since we are using Dremio installed like a server, not a SaaS solution, many times we need to stop and restart the service to clear all the cache and all that, and this is the thing I should add. I see that many times the new versions of Dremio have not fixed old bugs, and in some new versions, old problems that were previously fixed come back again, so I think the upgrade part could use improvement. I remember using some features in the past, like pivot tables, which proved to be really difficult, but I know this is a fault also for other vendors. Pivoting, transposing, and unpivoting are often not so good. CTEs also many times prove to be not so good, so I think these two main items could be improved significantly if they standardize them.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

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 Enterprise6
Large Enterprise5
 

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 Dremio?
I chose eight out of ten because Dremio is expensive for the Enterprise version, particularly regarding licensing.
What needs improvement with Dremio?
I think Dremio can be improved to query faster than multiple sources and big data lakehouses. The community version could be updated for new data catalog connections. I think the documentation is s...
What is your primary use case for Dremio?
I have been using Dremio to select multiple data sources, retrieve multiple data sources, and create and maintain Iceberg tables for the data lakehouse. My main use case for Dremio is to actively c...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic MapReduce
Dremio AWS - BYOL
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Yelp
UBS, TransUnion, Quantium, Daimler, OVH
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EMR vs. Dremio and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.