What's the Difference Between Amazon Athena and AWS Glue?
Compare Amazon Athena and AWS Glue side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.
Compare side-by-side
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Comparisons
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Amazon Athena
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AWS Glue
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Category
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Analytics, Query & interactive analytics |
Analytics, Data integration / ETL |
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Description
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Service to query data in S3 using SQL |
Simple, scalable, and serverless data integration |
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Best for
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Key features
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Pricing model
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Pay per query (per TB scanned) |
Pay per DPU-hour |
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Free tier
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Yes |
Yes |
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Expert take
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“Athena is the fastest path to querying data in S3 without any infrastructure. Partition your data by date or key columns and use columnar formats like Parquet to cut scan volume and costs dramatically. For recurring queries over the same data, Redshift will be more cost-effective.” |
“Glue Data Catalog is the metadata backbone for Athena, Redshift Spectrum, and EMR; it tells them where data lives and what it looks like. The ETL engine runs Spark under the hood but with serverless scaling. Use crawlers to auto-discover schemas and partitions in S3.” |
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Product page
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When to use Amazon Athena or AWS Glue
Use Amazon Athena when:
- Ad-hoc queries
- Log analysis
- Data lake analytics
- Business intelligence
Learn more about Amazon Athena »
Use AWS Glue when:
- ETL
- Data cataloging
- Data preparation
- Data lake management
- Event-driven ETL
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