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

AWS Lake Formation vs Apache Hadoop comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Apache Hadoop
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (13th)
AWS Lake Formation
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (4th)
 

Featured Reviews

NR
Financial Advisor at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Reliable performance maintained but requires ongoing management and support
Hadoop was used for years, but there were problems since the people who originally set it up left the firm. The group that owned it later didn't have the technical resources to properly maintain it. Although there was nothing wrong with Hadoop itself, issues arose without proper management and upgrades.
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 ability to add multiple nodes without any restriction is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"Initially, with RDBMS alone, we had a lot of work and few servers running on-premise and on cloud for the PoC and incubation. With the use of Hadoop and ecosystem components and tools, and managing it in Amazon EC2, we have created a Big Data "lab" which helps us to centralize all our work and solutions into a single repository. This has cut down the time in terms of maintenance, development and, especially, data processing challenges."
"What comes with the standard setup is what we mostly use, but Ambari is the most important."
"Hadoop is extensible — it's elastic."
"The most valuable feature is the database."
"It's open-source, so it's very cost-effective."
"Hadoop File System is compatible with almost all the query engines."
"Apache Hadoop is crucial in projects that save and retrieve data daily. Its valuable features are scalability and stability. It is easy to integrate with the existing infrastructure."
"There is no doubt that this place exceeded my expectations with its incredible ambiance, attentive service, and mouthwatering menu."
"AWS Lake Formation has several valuable features that enhance data management, and one particularly beneficial aspect is how it facilitates better collaboration within data teams."
"I can easily move data from cold storage to regular storage."
"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."
"AWS Lake Formation significantly improves the structure of the data mesh, making it superior to previous structures we used."
"AWS Lake Formation works hand in hand with other products."
"We use this to reduce latency from minutes to seconds, as we aim for real-time visibility into patient healthcare monitoring."
 

Cons

"Hadoop's security could be better."
"We have plans to increase usage and this is where we've realized that when we have all these clusters and we're running queries and analyzing, we are facing some latency issues."
"It needs better user interface (UI) functionalities."
"Oracle BI is difficult to integrate."
"The problem with Apache Hadoop arose when the guys that originally set it up left the firm, and the group that later owned it didn't have enough technical resources to properly maintain it."
"We're finding vulnerabilities in running it 24/7. We're experiencing some downtime that affects the data."
"The load optimization capabilities of the product are an area of concern where improvements are required."
"It requires a great deal of learning curve to understand. The overall Hadoop ecosystem has a large number of sub-products. There is ZooKeeper, and there are a whole lot of other things that are connected. In many cases, their functionalities are overlapping, and for a newcomer or our clients, it is very difficult to decide which of them to buy and which of them they don't really need. They require a consulting organization for it, which is good for organizations such as ours because that's what we do, but it is not easy for the end customers to gain so much knowledge and optimally use it."
"You need to have data experience to use the product."
"There are areas that could be improved in AWS Lake Formation, and functionality that could be included in future releases."
"Information about the pricing, cost, and setup cost of the AWS solutions would be beneficial."
"For the end-users, it's not as user-friendly as it could be."
"AWS Lake Formation's pricing could be cheaper."
"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."
"AWS Lake Formation might not be easy to learn initially, especially for technical staff, due to various underlying options."
"Lake Formation could enhance its capabilities in audit logs, real-time monitoring, and advanced data governance."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We don't directly pay for it. Our clients pay for it, and they usually don't complain about the price. So, it is probably acceptable."
"The price could be better. Hortonworks no longer exists, and Cloudera killed the free version of Hadoop."
"The price of Apache Hadoop could be less expensive."
"For any big enterprise the costs can be handled, and it is suitable for big enterprises because the scale of data is large. For medium and small enterprises, the tool is on the high-price side."
"​There are no licensing costs involved, hence money is saved on the software infrastructure​."
"If my company can use the cloud version of Apache Hadoop, particularly the cloud storage feature, it would be easier and would cost less because an on-premises deployment has a higher cost during storage, for example, though I don't know exactly how much Apache Hadoop costs."
"The product is open-source, but some associated licensing fees depend on the subscription level."
"We just use the free version."
"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
25%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Construction Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
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 Business14
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise22
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Apache Hadoop?
The problem with Apache Hadoop arose when the guys that originally set it up left the firm, and the group that later owned it didn't have enough technical resources to properly maintain it. This wa...
What is your primary use case for Apache Hadoop?
My use cases for Apache Hadoop include the setups I completed, connecting to the database, and analyzing the incidences, making it a good tool for Hadoop. Apache Hadoop helps us analyze all of the ...
What advice do you have for others considering Apache Hadoop?
When I've dealt with open-source technologies, it's crucial that there's a mechanism for issue escalation. Structured support is invaluable, which is why I appreciate having technical account manag...
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...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Amazon, Adobe, eBay, Facebook, Google, Hulu, IBM, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Spotify, AOL, Twitter, University of Maryland, Yahoo!, Cornell University Web Lab
bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Google, Databricks and others in Cloud Data Warehouse. Updated: October 2026.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.