Amazon EMR vs Teradata comparison

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Amazon EMR

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 4, 2026

Teradata and Amazon EMR compete in the data warehousing and analytics category. Teradata appears to have the upper hand due to its unmatched performance and robust toolset for analytics, although Amazon EMR offers significant advantages in cloud scalability.

Features: Teradata showcases its prowess with massively parallel processing, fast query execution, and adaptability through row and columnar partitioning. It provides extensive analytics tools and customer-driven innovations in workload management. Amazon EMR excels in cloud scalability with managed services like Hive and Spark, and seamless cluster resizing, offering flexibility in operations.

Room for Improvement: Teradata could enhance its cloud integration and unstructured data processing; its pricing and transactional processing models can also be improved. There is a need for better platform support. Amazon EMR needs improvements in startup speed, cost efficiency, and its user interface. Additionally, its support for recent open-source technologies could be enhanced.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Teradata offers multiple deployment options across on-premises, hybrid, and public cloud environments, with well-regarded customer service, albeit occasionally slow. Amazon EMR provides straightforward cloud-focused deployments, with generally satisfactory but improvable customer and technical support, especially in response times.

Pricing and ROI: Teradata involves high initial setup costs but returns significant investment through enhanced performance, appealing to large enterprises. Amazon EMR uses a moderately priced pay-as-you-go model, which can lead to hidden expenses if not managed carefully, though it remains economical for certain cases.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon EMR vs. Teradata Report (Updated: December 2025).

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Amazon EMR vs. Teradata

December 2025

Helped 881,082 peers since 2012

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

6.9

Teradata significantly boosts speed, efficiency, and ROI, with studies showing a 427% average ROI over three years.

No quotes available

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At least fifteen to twenty percent of our time has been saved using Teradata, which has positively affected team productivity and business outcomes.

Shugoyal Shugoyal

Senior product analyst at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Independent research showed that Teradata VantageCloud users achieved an average ROI of 427% across three years with payback under a year, demonstrating the platform's ability to deliver a strong financial return.

Engineers at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

We have realized a return on investment, with a reduction of staff from 27 to eight, and our current return on investment is approximately 14%.

For more quotes and insights, download the Teradata report

Interim and Fractional CIO and CTO at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

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

7.1

Teradata's support is praised for professionalism and responsiveness, but feedback on speed is mixed; training resources enhance service.

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.

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees

The customer support for Teradata has been great.

Interim and Fractional CIO and CTO at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

They are responsive and knowledgeable, and the documentation is very helpful.

Engineers at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

Customer support is very good, rated eight out of ten under our essential agreement.

For more quotes and insights, download the Teradata report

Team Leader for Data Base Administrators at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

7.5

Teradata offers scalable cloud and on-premise solutions with strong adaptability, overcoming hardware limitations and cost challenges efficiently.

Scalability can be provisioned using the auto-scaling feature, EC2 instances, on-demand instances, and storage locations like block storage, S3, or file storage.

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs

Whenever we need more resources, we can add that in Teradata, and when not needed, we can scale it down as well.

Shugoyal Shugoyal

Senior product analyst at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

This flexibility allows organizations to scale according to their needs, balancing performance, cost, and compliance requirements.

For more quotes and insights, download the Teradata report

Engineers at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

This expansion can occur without incurring downtime or taking systems offline.

RajeshKumar25

Principal Consultant & Director at Quensulting

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

8.3

Teradata's robust architecture ensures exceptional stability and reliability, with minimal downtime and high user ratings despite some integration challenges.

Regular updates, patch installations, monitoring, logging, alerting, and disaster recovery activities are crucial for maintaining stability.

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs

Its massively parallel process architecture allows the platform to distribute workload efficiently, enabling organizations to run heavy analytic queries without compromising speed or stability.

Engineers at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

I find the stability to be almost a ten out of ten.

For more quotes and insights, download the Teradata report

Team Leader for Data Base Administrators at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

The workload management and software maturity provide a reliable system.

RajeshKumar25

Principal Consultant & Director at Quensulting

Room For Improvement

Amazon EMR users face challenges with customization, stability, onboarding, cost optimization, task speed, and demand enhanced integration and security.

Teradata requires improvements in transaction processing, scalability, UI, cost-effectiveness, analytics features, integration capabilities, and security measures.

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.

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees

I want to highlight two features for improvement: first, storing data in various formats without requiring a tabular structure, accommodating unstructured data; and second, adding AI ML features to better integrate Gen AI, LLM concepts, and user-friendly experiences such as text-to-SQL capabilities.

Ganesh Verma

Data Engineer at Tredence Inc.

Unlike SQL and Oracle, which have in-built replication capabilities, we don't have similar functionality with Teradata.

Team Leader for Data Base Administrators at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most challenging aspect is finding Teradata resources, so we are focusing on internal training and looking for more Teradata experts.

For more quotes and insights, download the Teradata report

Interim and Fractional CIO and CTO at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

Setup Cost

Amazon EMR pricing is variable, potentially costly, but users can manage expenses with strategic resource and instance management.

Teradata offers high-value analytics with flexible pricing, excelling in performance and ROI, ideal for large enterprises and data-intensive sectors.

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.

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Teradata is much more expensive than SQL, which is well-performed and cheaper.

Team Leader for Data Base Administrators at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Initially, it may seem expensive compared to similar cloud databases, however, it offers significant value in performance, stability, and overall output once in use.

RajeshKumar25

Principal Consultant & Director at Quensulting

Role-based access control (RBAC), strong audit and compliance features, high availability, fault tolerance, and encrypted data at rest and in-transit are key features.

For more quotes and insights, download the Teradata report

Engineers at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

Valuable Features

Amazon EMR offers scalable, cost-effective big data management with integration, flexibility, security, and seamless Hadoop and Spark processing.

Teradata excels in parallel processing, scalability, and performance, offering robust data management, security, and integration for efficient data warehousing.

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.

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Teradata's security helps our organization meet compliance requirements such as GDPR and IFRS, and it is particularly essential for revenue contracting or revenue recognition.

Interim and Fractional CIO and CTO at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

Its architecture allows information to be processed efficiently while maintaining stable performance, even in highly demanding environments.

For more quotes and insights, download the Teradata report

Engineers at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

It facilitates data integration, where we integrate and analyze data from various sources, making it a powerful and high-quality reliable solution for the company.

reviewer2783274

Senior Data Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EMR

Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse

13th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Hadoop (3rd)

Teradata

Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse

3rd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Customer Experience Management (6th), Backup and Recovery (15th), Data Integration (15th), Relational Databases Tools (6th), Data Warehouse (3rd), BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (8th), Marketing Management (5th), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon EMR is 3.4%, up from 3.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Teradata is 8.5%, down from 8.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Data Warehouse Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Teradata	8.5%
Amazon EMR	3.4%
Other	88.1%

Cloud Data Warehouse

Featured Reviews

Has simplified ETL workflows with on-demand processing but needs improved cost efficiency and visibility

Senior Chief Engineer (Enterprise System Presales/Postsales) at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

I have used AWS Glue with S3 for making tables and databases, but regarding Amazon EMR, I do not remember much as we are currently using it very minimally. This is my observation: In EKS, we have had to deploy by ourselves because EKS does not provide the Hadoop framework, Spark, Hive, and everything, but we have completed all the deployment ourselves. Whereas Amazon EMR provides all these things. 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. In Qubole, the interface was very good. I could see many details because in Amazon EMR console, very few details are available. In Qubole, at one link, you can get all the details of what is happening, how the processes are running, and the cost decreased by using Qubole. I found Qubole more user-friendly and cost-effective. From the security point of view, we had to open some access rights to Qubole, which might be a drawback in comparison to Amazon EMR which is native to AWS.

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Delivers consistent performance and enables advanced analytics across complex data environments

Engineers at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

Teradata stands out as a solid platform for managing and analyzing large volumes of data. Its architecture allows information to be processed efficiently while maintaining stable performance, even in highly demanding environments. One of its most notable strengths is the ability to run complex queries at high speed, which is essential for organizations that require timely and reliable analytics. Teradata offers a well-integrated ecosystem that supports working with different types of data and enables scalability as organizational needs grow. Its focus on advanced analytics, integration with modern business intelligence tools, and the ability to operate both on-premise and in the cloud make it a versatile solution for data warehousing and large-scale processing. Teradata's stability, technological maturity, and the availability of strong documentation and best practices are noteworthy. I consider Teradata to be a tool with great potential for any organization looking to enhance its analytical capabilities, optimize data processing, and move toward more data-driven decision-making. Teradata stands out as a solid platform for managing a large volume of data in different projects. Its architecture allows information to be processed efficiently while maintaining stable performance, even in high-demanding environments. A well-integrated AI ecosystem that supports working with different types of data and enables scalability as organizational needs grow across different kinds of enterprises or organizations. The focus on advanced analytics integration with modern business intelligence tools is particularly valuable. Teradata combines a powerful parallel process and optimizing SQL engine with a highly scalable architecture allowing businesses to execute complex queries and analytics in real-time. It supports multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments, giving organizations flexibility to choose the setup that best aligns with their strategy. One of the biggest strengths is the ability to unify disparate data sources and support high concurrency, enabling different teams, such as analytics, operations, BI, and data science, to access consistent, trusted data across the enterprise.

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Comparison Review

it_user232068

Senior Data Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Aug 5, 2015

Netezza vs. Teradata

Original published at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/should-i-choose-net Two leading Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) architectures for Data Warehousing (DW) are IBM PureData System for Analytics (formerly Netezza) and Teradata. I thought talking about the similarities and differences…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

22%

Educational Organization

13%

Computer Software Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

24%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	12

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	28
Midsize Enterprise	13
Large Enterprise	52

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.

Comparing Teradata and Oracle Database, which product do you think is better and why?

I have spoken to my colleagues about this comparison and in our collective opinion, the reason why some people may declare Teradata better than Oracle is the pricing. Both solutions are quite simi...

Which companies use Teradata and who is it most suitable for?

Before my organization implemented this solution, we researched which big brands were using Teradata, so we knew if it would be compatible with our field. According to the product's site, the comp...

Is Teradata a difficult solution to work with?

Teradata is not a difficult product to work with, especially since they offer you technical support at all levels if you just ask. There are some features that may cause difficulties - for example,...

Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop vs Amazon EMR

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Compared 6% of the time

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Oracle Exadata vs Teradata

Compared 7% of the time

Snowflake vs Teradata

Compared 6% of the time

Oracle Database vs Teradata

Compared 5% of the time

SQL Server vs Teradata

Compared 5% of the time

IBM Db2 Database vs Teradata

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

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Amazon EMR

January 2026

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January 2026

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic MapReduce

IntelliFlex, Aster Data Map Reduce, , QueryGrid, Customer Interaction Manager, Digital Marketing Center, Data Mover, Data Stream Architecture, Teradata Vantage Enterprise (DIY)

Overview

Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) is a web service that makes it easy to quickly and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. Amazon EMR simplifies big data processing, providing a managed Hadoop framework that makes it easy, fast, and cost-effective for you to distribute and process vast amounts of your data across dynamically scalable Amazon EC2 instances.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Teradata is a powerful tool for handling substantial data volumes with its parallel processing architecture, supporting both cloud and on-premise environments efficiently. It offers impressive capabilities for fast query processing, data integration, and real-time reporting, making it suitable for diverse industrial applications.

Known for its robust parallel processing capabilities, Teradata effectively manages large datasets and provides adaptable deployment across cloud and on-premise setups. It enhances performance and scalability with features like advanced query tuning, workload management, and strong security. Users appreciate its ease of use and automation features which support real-time data reporting. The optimizer and intelligent partitioning help improve query speed and efficiency, while multi-temperature data management optimizes data handling.

What are the key features of Teradata?

Parallel Processing Architecture: Enables efficient handling of substantial data volumes.
Cloud and On-Premise Deployment: Offers seamless adaptability across environments.
Query Tuning: Improves speed and performance of data retrieval processes.
Workload Management: Ensures optimal resource allocation for enhanced performance.
Robust Security: Provides high levels of data protection and system integrity.
Data Integration: Facilitates cohesive data management from multiple sources.
Automation for Real-time Reporting: Enhances timely data insights and decision-making.
Optimizer and Intelligent Partitioning: Further increase query speed and system efficiency.
Multi-Temperature Data Management: Optimizes the handling and retrieval of data.

What benefits and ROI do users look for?

Efficient Data Management: Facilitates smooth integration and processing of diverse data sets.
Scalability: Easy adjustment to increasing or decreasing data requirements.
Improved Performance: Fast query speeds and optimized resource use.
Comprehensive Security: Safeguards data integrity and accessibility.
Ease of Use: Simplifies data handling and operational processes.

In the finance, retail, and government sectors, Teradata is employed for data warehousing, business intelligence, and analytical processing. It handles vast datasets for activities like customer behavior modeling and enterprise data integration. Supporting efficient reporting and analytics, Teradata enhances data storage and processing, whether deployed on-premise or on cloud platforms.

Sample Customers

Yelp

Netflix