What's the Difference Between Amazon Athena and Amazon Redshift?
Compare Amazon Athena and Amazon Redshift side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.
Compare side-by-side
|
Comparisons
|
Amazon Athena
|
Amazon Redshift
|
|---|---|---|
|
Category
|
Analytics, Query & interactive analytics |
Analytics, Data warehouse |
|
Description
|
Service to query data in S3 using SQL |
Fast, simple, cost-effective data warehousing |
|
Best for
|
|
|
|
Key features
|
|
|
|
Pricing model
|
Pay per query (per TB scanned) |
On-Demand, Reserved, or Serverless |
|
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.” |
“Redshift is optimized for analytical workloads; it uses columnar storage and massively parallel processing to scan terabytes in seconds. Use it when your queries involve aggregations, joins across large tables, and complex calculations that power dashboards and reports.” |
|
Product page
|
When to use Amazon Athena or Amazon Redshift
Use Amazon Athena when:
- Ad-hoc queries
- Log analysis
- Data lake analytics
- Business intelligence
Learn more about Amazon Athena »
Use Amazon Redshift when:
- Data warehousing
- Business intelligence
- Log analysis
- Big data analytics
Next steps with AWS for Analytics
AWS product comparisons
Did you find what you were looking for today?
Let us know so we can improve the quality of the content on our pages