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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 #2 with an average rating of 8.1. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 5.2% mindshare in CDW, compared to Microsoft’s 6.5% 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
  • 2,300 Views
  • 1,944 Comparison Views
71% willing to recommend
Microsoft Azure Synapse Ana...
Read 92 Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics reviews
  • 7,013 Views
  • 3,039 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: March 2025).
Buyer's Guide
AWS Lake Formation vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics
March 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
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
92
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of AWS Lake Formation is 5.2%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is 6.5%, down from 10.2% 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 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 solution has many features that are applicable to events such as audits."
"We use AWS Lake Formation typically for the data warehouse."
"AWS Lake Formation lets you see all your data and tables on one screen."
"AWS Lake Formation works hand in hand with other products."
"The solution operates like a typical SQL Server environment so there is no alienation in terms of technical knowledge."
"Its scalability and ease of use are valuable. It is fairly simple for a tool that's that powerful. If you have a background in Microsoft SQL Server, it is a very easy-to-transition path."
"The speed is great and the architecture is excellent."
"I like its performance. It is well-structured and offers a lot of practical options. Because of the visual design of the product, it is very easy to find icons and other visual elements. It took me more than two weeks to understand how it works. I had an intensive training session to understand it, which was enough. It was not hard to understand how it works."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is the pipeline that is the ETL tool. It's very well designed and is overall very good. We usually don't use the ETL tool in Databricks, but we use the ETL tool in this solution."
"I like how Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics integrates with other Microsoft solutions."
"Data can be stored any way you want in the data warehouse."
"Synapse Analytics' best features are notebooks, pipelines, and monitoring."
More Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics pros
 

Cons

"For the end-users, it's not as user-friendly as it could be."
"You need to have data experience to use the product."
"If I could improve AWS Lake Formation, I would add more integrations with SageMaker."
"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."
"Lake Formation could enhance its capabilities in audit logs, real-time monitoring, and advanced data governance."
"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."
"Integration with other vendors has limitations and could be improved."
"One area that could be improved is the schema management."
"Synapse Analytics' performance slows down if you don't get your distribution right because it gets queued and goes into a single node."
"With respect to what needs to be improved, concurrent connectivity has some limitations."
"I'm not entirely happy with the billing model. I'm not entirely happy with how the enterprise services are pretty expensive, but that's about it."
"Unfortunately, we have had some issues with the dashboard reporting. Sometimes, the data for specific periods would just appear blank on the dashboard. To investigate this, we worked with a Microsoft incident agent and it turned out to be a result of bugs in the platform when dealing with specific types of queries in Azure Data Factory."
"It needs strong support for social media, internet data, and native support for NoSQL."
"I wish the data governance feature could be incorporated without requiring an additional license."
More Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics cons
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"AWS Lake Formation is a bit expensive."
"The solution is very expensive because it often requires the purchase of additional storage."
"There is a cost calculator available online that allows you to input your entire scenario, and it will get back to you with information on what the costs are going to be."
"All of the prices are available online."
"This solution starts at €1000.00 a month for just the basics and can go up to €300,000.00 per month for the fastest version."
"Very costly solution and other products are available for less."
"Its price could be better. It was a school project, and I got it for free. If I try to pay through my company, it is a little bit more expensive as compared to Oracle."
"The solution is subscription-based. You can also pay to use the product as you go."
"It's very difficult to price unless you know exactly how the customer is using it."
More Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics pricing and cost advice
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
5%
Educational Organization
52%
Computer Software Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
5%
 

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?
We use an enterprise-level subscription for Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics. I would rate our satisfaction with the price around five, as I have not focused much on cost aspects presently.
See all answers
 

Comparisons

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Snowflake vs AWS Lake Formation
Compared 38% of the time
Amazon Redshift vs AWS Lake Formation Logo
Amazon Redshift vs AWS Lake Formation
Compared 19% of the time
Azure Data Factory vs AWS Lake Formation Logo
Azure Data Factory vs AWS Lake Formation
Compared 18% of the time
BigQuery vs AWS Lake Formation Logo
BigQuery vs AWS Lake Formation
Compared 8% of the time
Amazon EMR vs AWS Lake Formation Logo
Amazon EMR vs AWS Lake Formation
Compared 5% of the time
More AWS Lake Formation Competitors
SAP BW4HANA vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Logo
SAP BW4HANA vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics
Compared 16% of the time
Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Logo
Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics
Compared 14% of the time
Snowflake vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Logo
Snowflake vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics
Compared 12% of the time
Teradata vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Logo
Teradata vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics
Compared 9% of the time
Apache Hadoop vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Logo
Apache Hadoop vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics
Compared 4% of the time
More Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Competitors
 

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide
AWS Lake Formation
March 2025
AWS Lake Formation reportDownload AWS Lake Formation product report
Buyer's Guide
Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics
March 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
March 2025
Free Report: AWS Lake Formation vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics
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