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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.

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Comparisons
Amazon Athena
AWS Glue
Category

Analytics, Query & interactive analytics

Analytics, Data integration / ETL

Description

Service to query data in S3 using SQL

Simple, scalable, and serverless data integration

Best for
  • Ad-hoc queries
  • Log analysis
  • Data lake analytics
  • Business intelligence
  • ETL
  • Data cataloging
  • Data preparation
  • Data lake management
  • Event-driven ETL
Key features
  • Serverless
  • Standard SQL
  • Federated queries
  • ACID transactions
  • Apache Spark integration
  • Data Catalog
  • ETL engine
  • Crawlers
  • Job bookmarks
  • DataBrew
Pricing model

Pay per query (per TB scanned)

Pay per DPU-hour

Free tier

Yes

Yes

Expert take

“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.”
— Riku Kobayashi, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

“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.”
— Giovanni Lauria, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

Product page

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

Learn more about AWS Glue »

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