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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
  • Ad-hoc queries
  • Log analysis
  • Data lake analytics
  • Business intelligence
  • Data warehousing
  • Business intelligence
  • Log analysis
  • Big data analytics
Key features
  • Serverless
  • Standard SQL
  • Federated queries
  • ACID transactions
  • Apache Spark integration
  • Columnar storage
  • Massively parallel processing
  • Redshift Serverless
  • Data sharing
  • ML integration
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.”
— Riku Kobayashi, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

“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.”
— Didier Durand, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

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

Learn more about Amazon Redshift »

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