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AWS Lake Formation vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft are both solutions in the Cloud Data Warehouse category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #13 with an average rating of 7.3, while Microsoft is ranked #5 with an average rating of 7.9. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 5.8% mindshare in CDW, compared to Microsoft’s 6.2% mindshare. Additionally, 71% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.
AWS Lake Formation
Read 8 AWS Lake Formation reviews
  • 1,795 Views
  • 1,035 Comparison Views
71% willing to recommend
Microsoft Azure Synapse Ana...
Read 93 Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics reviews
  • 4,217 Views
  • 1,232 Comparison Views
94% willing to recommend
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics and AWS Lake Formation are competing in the data integration and analytics platform category. Azure Synapse Analytics seems to have an edge in terms of support and pricing, while AWS Lake Formation offers greater value through its comprehensive feature set.

Features: Azure Synapse Analytics provides integrated analytics services, seamless scalability, and a user-friendly interface for Microsoft product integration. These features make it particularly suitable for businesses utilizing other Azure services. AWS Lake Formation stands out with its robust data cataloging, advanced security capabilities, and strong interoperability within the AWS ecosystem. These strengths facilitate superior data governance and management.

Room for Improvement: Azure Synapse Analytics may lack some advanced data security features compared to AWS, potentially requiring enhancements in data cataloging for non-Microsoft environments. It might benefit from improved interoperability with non-Microsoft platforms. AWS Lake Formation could improve ease of deployment and user experience for those unfamiliar with AWS. Additionally, streamlining integration processes for non-native AWS services could increase its appeal outside the AWS environment.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Azure Synapse Analytics offers a streamlined deployment process, particularly within the Azure ecosystem, bolstered by reliable customer support. AWS Lake Formation, while posing a more comprehensive setup due to its wide-ranging data management capabilities, provides strong backing with customer support tailored to meet enterprise-level requirements. This distinction underscores ease of use in environments where each solution excels, with Azure Synapse integrating more smoothly within Microsoft-based infrastructures.

Pricing and ROI: Azure Synapse Analytics presents competitive pricing, especially for Microsoft-centric organizations, offering efficient ROI through streamlined data processing workflows. AWS Lake Formation may require a higher initial financial commitment but promises significant ROI owing to its extensive security and robust data management features. Deciding between the two requires organizations to weigh cost against long-term value, considering their strategic priorities around data governance and security.

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To learn more, read our detailed AWS Lake Formation vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Report (Updated: June 2025).
Buyer's Guide
AWS Lake Formation vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics
June 2025
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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

AWS Lake Formation
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
13th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Azure Synapse Ana...
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
93
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of AWS Lake Formation is 5.8%, up from 5.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is 6.2%, down from 8.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Read full review
Renee Hoon - PeerSpot reviewer
Scalable performance tuning and optimization for finance and supply chain jobs
We run our finance and supply chain jobs using SQL BW, and we visualize our data loads on Power BI. We are using SQL Data Warehouse for data warehousing In terms of cost savings, we don't need specialization in skills as advanced as Teradata. We used to pay extensive licensing fees for Teradata,…
Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution has many features that are applicable to events such as audits."
"AWS Lake Formation lets you see all your data and tables on one screen."
"AWS Lake Formation works hand in hand with other products."
"We use AWS Lake Formation typically for the data warehouse."
"The solution is quite good at handling analytics. It's done a good job at helping us centralize them."
"I can easily move data from cold storage to regular storage."
"It is seamlessly integrated within the AWS ecosystem, making it straightforward to manage access patterns for AWS-native services."
"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."
"The best thing about it is that it has integration at multiple places. It can talk to more than 90 types of data sources, which is one good thing about it."
"I have not used the technical support from Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, but I worked with the developers at Microsoft who were top-notch."
"The initial setup was really easy and straightforward."
"Azure elasticity allows us to scale as much as we want, and it is pay-as-you-go, so we can scale up as we need to."
"The most valuable feature is the scalability."
"The speed is great and the architecture is excellent."
"I think the most valuable component is that pipelines are built into it and then the feature that you can mirror a cosmos BB for analytics."
"It is a highly stable solution and it's easy to use."
More Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics pros
 

Cons

"Lake Formation could enhance its capabilities in audit logs, real-time monitoring, and advanced data governance."
"You need to have data experience to use the product."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"If I could improve AWS Lake Formation, I would add more integrations with SageMaker."
"AWS Lake Formation's pricing could be cheaper."
"Synapse Analytics' performance slows down if you don't get your distribution right because it gets queued and goes into a single node."
"The platform is not flexible, and the graphical user interface needs to be improved because the interface makes it hard for the end user to use it."
"I am very sure that there are areas in need of improvement, but I can't recall what they are off the top of my head."
"The initial setup has a bit of a learning curve."
"It needs strong support for social media, internet data, and native support for NoSQL."
"This solution needs to have query caching so that if the same query is run and the results are available, it will return the data from the cache without having to re-run the query."
"Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics could improve in usability. I have found the same issue with all Microsoft solutions."
"We'd, of course, always like to pay less for the service if we can."
More Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics cons
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"AWS Lake Formation is a bit expensive."
"I think Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is priced well, and I would rate the price at eight out of ten."
"Because it's cloud the cost is a different convention and the licensing costs are not the same."
"Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics can be costly, however, a cost-effective approach would be to purchase it in advance through reservation for either one or three years. This will significantly reduce the overall expenses incurred."
"The price of this solution could be improved."
"We only have to pay for what we use in the solution. It's easy for the customers. It's not more than some companies, not more than 300 to 400 users. They do not need to buy other license products, such as SAP B1, or analytics tools in the market, such as Tableau."
"We chose the serverless option for the database which has saved us a lot of money. Our costs are approximately £600 per month."
"The costs are billed such that we pay for what we use, which is a good thing."
"I would rate the ROI a nine out of ten, where one is zero value and ten is 100% value."
More Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics pricing and cost advice
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
5%
Educational Organization
30%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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.
See all answers
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.
See all answers
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...
See all answers
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...
See all answers
What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?
The product is easy to use, and anybody can easily migrate to advanced DB.
See all answers
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?
I think the price of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is very expensive, but that's not only for Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics—it's for the cloud in general. The cloud is not cost-effective. I...
See all answers
 

Comparisons

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Compared 31% of the time
Azure Data Factory vs AWS Lake Formation Logo
Azure Data Factory vs AWS Lake Formation
Compared 21% of the time
Amazon Redshift vs AWS Lake Formation Logo
Amazon Redshift vs AWS Lake Formation
Compared 20% of the time
BigQuery vs AWS Lake Formation Logo
BigQuery vs AWS Lake Formation
Compared 8% of the time
Databricks vs AWS Lake Formation Logo
Databricks vs AWS Lake Formation
Compared 6% of the time
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Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Logo
Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics
Compared 17% of the time
Snowflake vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Logo
Snowflake vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics
Compared 14% of the time
SAP BW4HANA vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Logo
SAP BW4HANA vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics
Compared 10% of the time
Amazon Redshift vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Logo
Amazon Redshift vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics
Compared 8% of the time
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Logo
Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics
Compared 4% of the time
More Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Competitors
 

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide
AWS Lake Formation
June 2025
AWS Lake Formation reportDownload AWS Lake Formation product report
Buyer's Guide
Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics
June 2025
Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics reportDownload Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics product report
 

Also Known As

No data available
Azure Synapse Analytics, Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Microsoft Azure SQL DW, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, MS Azure Synapse Analytics
 

Overview

AWS Lake Formation is a service that makes it easy to set up a secure data lake in days. A data lake is a centralized, curated, and secured repository that stores all your data, both in its original form and prepared for analysis.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is an end-to-end analytics solution that successfully combines analytical services to merge big data analytics and enterprise data warehouses into a single unified platform. The solution can run intelligent distributed queries among nodes, and provides the ability to query both relational and non-relational data.

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is built with these 4 components:

  1. Synapse SQL
  2. Spark
  3. Synapse Pipeline
  4. Studio

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Features

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics has many valuable key features, including:

  • Cloud Data Service: WIth Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics you can operate services (data analytics, machine learning, data warehousing, dashboarding, etc.) in a single workspace via the cloud.

  • Structured and unstructured data: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics supports both structured and unstructured data and allows you to manage relational and non-relational data - unlike data warehouses and lakes that tend to store them respectively.

  • Effective data storage: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics offers next-level data storage with high availability and different tiers.

  • Responsive data engine: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics uses Massive Parallel Processing (MPP) and is designed to handle large volumes of data and analytical workloads efficiently without any problems.

  • Several scripting languages: The solution provides language compatibility and supports different programming languages, such as Python, Java, Spark SQL, and Scala.

  • Query optimization: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics works well to facilitate limitless concurrency and performance optimization. It also simplifies workload management.

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Benefits

Some of the benefits of using Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics include:

  • Database templates: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics offers industry-specific database templates that make it easy to combine and shape data.

  • Better business insights: With Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics you can expand discovery of insights from all your data and apply machine learning models to all your intelligent apps.

  • Reduce project development time: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics makes it possible to have a unified experience for developing end-to-end analytics, which reduces project development time significantly.

  • Eliminate data barriers: By using Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, you can perform analytics on operational and business apps data without data movement.

  • Advanced security: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics provides both advanced security and privacy features to ensure data protection.

  • Machine Learning: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics integrates Azure Machine Learning, Azure Cognitive Services, and Power BI.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics users who are currently using the solution.

PeerSpot user Jael S., who is an Information Architect at Systems Analysis & Design Engineering, comments on her experience using the product, saying that it is “Scalable, intuitive, facilitates compliance and keeps your data secure”. She also says "We also like governance. It looks at what the requirements are for the company to identify the best way to ensure compliance is met when you move to the cloud."

Michel T., CHTO at Timp-iT, mentions that "the features most valuable are the simplicity, how easy it is to create a dashboard from different information systems."

A Senior Teradata Consultant at a tech services company says, "Microsoft provides both the platform and the data center, so you don't have to look for a cloud vendor. It saves you from having to deal with two vendors for the same task."


Microsoft
 

Sample Customers

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
Toshiba, Carnival, LG Electronics, Jet.com, Adobe, 
Buyer's Guide
AWS Lake Formation vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics
June 2025
Free Report: AWS Lake Formation vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics
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