What's the Difference Between AWS Data Pipeline and AWS Glue?
Compare AWS Data Pipeline 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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AWS Data Pipeline
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AWS Glue
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Category
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Analytics, Data integration / ETL |
Analytics, Data integration / ETL |
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Description
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Process and move data between different AWS compute and storage services on a scheduled basis. |
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 activity and precondition |
Pay per DPU-hour |
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Free tier
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Yes |
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Expert take
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“Data Pipeline orchestrates data movement between AWS services on a schedule. For new workloads, Step Functions or Glue workflows are more modern alternatives.” |
“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 AWS Data Pipeline or AWS Glue
Use AWS Data Pipeline when:
- Scheduled data movement
- ETL workflows
- Cross-region data copy
- Data backups
Learn more about AWS Data Pipeline »
Use AWS Glue when:
- ETL
- Data cataloging
- Data preparation
- Data lake management
- Event-driven ETL
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