Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

AWS Lake Formation vs Amazon Redshift comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 22, 2025

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 Redshift
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
7th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
AWS Lake Formation
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
13th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon Redshift is 7.6%, up from 7.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Lake Formation is 5.8%, up from 5.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Ramesh Raghavan - PeerSpot reviewer
Centralized repository, offers various cataloging mechanisms for quick data retrieval but data governance capabilities could be better
There are a couple of areas for improvement with Lake Formation. One of the main challenges, especially when dealing with rich media content, like in MarTech (Marketing Technology) or ad agencies, is its versatility. Some clients feel that Lake Formation doesn’t meet their needs and they tend to prefer competitor products for those specific use cases. The second area for improvement is in data governance. Specifically, Lake Formation could enhance its capabilities in audit logs, real-time monitoring, and advanced data governance. This includes managing the entire data lineage—where the data originated, how it moves, and where it’s currently stored. The visibility of the data as it evolves is crucial, and that’s where more advanced governance capabilities would be beneficial.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Has a very user-friendly SQL editor and it's very easy to use the connectors."
"Redshift's Excel features are handy. Redshift spectrum allows you to directly query the data on an Excel sheet. Now, SQL Server also allows this, but Redshift has many more features."
"Redshift allows you to transform different data formats and consolidate them into one Redshift cluster. This means you can transform various siloed data sources like Excel files and CSV files into Redshift."
"The seamless connection and good scalability on the cloud are valuable features of Amazon Redshift."
"The initial setup is easy."
"The product is relatively easy to use because there is no indexing and no partitions."
"The valuable features are performance, data compression, and scalability."
"I would rate Amazon Redshift a ten on a scale of one to ten."
"We use AWS Lake Formation typically for the data warehouse."
"AWS Lake Formation works hand in hand with other products."
"The solution is quite good at handling analytics. It's done a good job at helping us centralize them."
"There is no doubt that this place exceeded my expectations with its incredible ambiance, attentive service, and mouthwatering menu."
"AWS Lake Formation lets you see all your data and tables on one screen."
"The most important advantage in using AWS Lake Formation is its ability to connect the data lake to the other technologies in AWS. This is what I advise my clients."
"I can easily move data from cold storage to regular storage."
"The solution has many features that are applicable to events such as audits."
 

Cons

"Should be made available across zones, like other Multi-AZ solutions."
"They should provide a better way to work with interim data in a structured way than to store it in parquet files locally."
"The customer support could be more responsive."
"If you require a highly scalable solution, I would not recommend Amazon Redshift."
"Running parallel queries results in poor performance and this needs to be improved."
"The speed of the solution and its portability needs improvement."
"Pricing needs improvement as the solution is expensive."
"It would be good to see Redshift as a serverless offering."
"You need to have data experience to use the product."
"AWS Lake Formation's pricing could be cheaper."
"It falls short when it comes to more granular access control, such as cell-level or row-level entitlements which is a significant drawback for organizations that require precise control over who can access specific rows of data."
"Lake Formation could enhance its capabilities in audit logs, real-time monitoring, and advanced data governance."
"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."
"In our experience what could be improved are not the support, performance or monitoring, but at a managerial level, the very expensive professional services of AWS. This could be an area of improvement for them. It's too expensive to acquire their support."
"If I could improve AWS Lake Formation, I would add more integrations with SageMaker."
"For the end-users, it's not as user-friendly as it could be."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is cheap considering what it provides; I rate it five out of five for affordability."
"The cost is comparable to Snowflake."
"The product is quite expensive."
"It's around $200 US dollars. There are some data transfer costs but it's minimal, around $20."
"If you want a fixed price, an to not worry about every query, but you need to manage your nodes personally, use Redshift."
"Pricing for Amazon Redshift is reasonable, though it could be somewhat higher than other solutions, such as Azure. Still, when you base your comparison on the services offered and the pricing, it's the most reasonable versus its competitors, such as RDS."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing a seven."
"This solution implements the pay-as-you-use model, so no license. Pricing could be cheaper."
"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.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Media Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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.
What do you like most about AWS Lake Formation?
It is seamlessly integrated within the AWS ecosystem, making it straightforward to manage access patterns for AWS-native services.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Lake Formation?
The pricing is expensive compared to OpenStack, but cheaper than other cloud environments. It's middle-of-the-road for regular storage yet very cost-effective when using Amazon Glacier for data.
What needs improvement with AWS Lake Formation?
If I could improve AWS Lake Formation, I would add more integrations with SageMaker. I would have built-in functions that provide statistics for the data when using the GUI, such as SageMaker Insig...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Liberty Mutual Insurance, 4Cite Marketing, BrandVerity, DNA Plc, Sirocco Systems, Gainsight, Blue 449
bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Lake Formation vs. Amazon Redshift and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.