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

AWS Lake Formation vs Apache Hadoop comparison

 

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
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
41
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (9th)
AWS Lake Formation
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (9th)
 

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

"It is a reliable product."
"Real-time streaming and integration using Spark streaming and the ecosystem of Spark technologies inside Hadoop."
"One valuable feature is that we can download data."
"The Distributed File System, which is the base of Hadoop, has been the most valuable feature with its ability to store video, pictures, JSON, XML, and plain text all in the same file system."
"Hadoop File System is compatible with almost all the query engines."
"Two valuable features are its scalability and parallel processing. There are jobs that cannot be done unless you have massively parallel processing."
"The scalability of Apache Hadoop is very good."
"The performance is pretty good."
"We have observed measurable benefits in terms of cost savings, time savings, resource savings, and efficiency improvements in our workflows."
"The main benefits that I have seen from using AWS Lake Formation are related to FinOps because you have control of your data and can track your costs since AWS Lake Formation is integrated into a unique platform, which is AWS Cloud Service."
"The solution has many features that are applicable to events such as audits."
"The solution is quite good at handling analytics."
"AWS Lake Formation lets you see all your data and tables on one screen."
"Every solution has its pros and cons, however, for our purposes, this solution works quite well for us."
"A favorite feature of AWS Lake Formation is that it provides us with visibility into who has access to a particular table or database in Glue."
"I can easily move data from cold storage to regular storage."
 

Cons

"The price could be better. I think we would use it more, but the company didn't want to pay for it."
"It requires a great deal of learning curve to understand."
"The solution needs a better tutorial. There are only documents available currently. There's a lot of YouTube videos available. However, in terms of learning, we didn't have great success trying to learn that way. There needs to be better self-paced learning."
"The integration with Apache Hadoop with lots of different techniques within your business can be a challenge."
"The integration with Apache Hadoop with lots of different techniques within your business can be a challenge."
"The product's availability of comprehensive training materials could be improved for faster onboarding and skill development among team members."
"In the next release, I would like to see Hive more responsive for smaller queries and to reduce the latency."
"We are using HDTM circuit boards, and I worry about the future of this product and compatibility with future releases."
"Lake Formation could enhance its capabilities in audit logs, real-time monitoring, and advanced data governance."
"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's pricing could be cheaper."
"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."
"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."
"For the end-users, it's not as user-friendly as it could be."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is open-source, but some associated licensing fees depend on the subscription level."
"The price of Apache Hadoop could be less expensive."
"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."
"This is a low cost and powerful solution."
"We just use the free version."
"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."
"Do take into consider that data storage and compute capacity scale differently and hence purchasing a "boxed" / 'all-in-one" solution (software and hardware) might not be the best idea."
"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.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
28%
University
6%
Comms Service Provider
5%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Apache Hadoop?
It's primarily open source. You can handle huge data volumes and create your own views, workflows, and tables. I can also use it for real-time data streaming.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Hadoop?
The product is open-source, but some associated licensing fees depend on the subscription level. While it might be free for students, organizations typically need to pay for their subscriptions. Th...
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 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 AWS Lake Formation vs. Apache Hadoop and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.