What's the Difference Between Amazon EMR and EMR Serverless?
Compare Amazon EMR and EMR Serverless side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.
Compare side-by-side
|
Comparisons
|
Amazon EMR
|
EMR Serverless
|
|---|---|---|
|
Category
|
Analytics, Big data processing |
Analytics, Serverless Big Data |
|
Description
|
Easily run big data frameworks |
Run big data frameworks like Apache Spark and Hive without configuring or managing clusters. |
|
Best for
|
|
|
|
Key features
|
|
|
|
Pricing model
|
Pay per instance hour + EBS storage |
Pay per vCPU, memory, and storage per second |
|
Free tier
|
No |
No |
|
Expert take
|
“EMR is the go-to for teams already invested in Spark, Hive, or Presto. Amazon EMR Serverless removes cluster sizing decisions entirely; you submit jobs and pay per vCPU-second. For teams that want SQL-only without Spark expertise, Athena or Redshift are simpler paths.” |
“Amazon EMR Serverless runs Spark and Hive jobs without managing clusters. Submit jobs and it provisions the right amount of compute, then releases it when the job completes.” |
|
Product page
|
When to use Amazon EMR or Amazon EMR Serverless
Use Amazon EMR when:
- Big data processing
- Machine learning
- ETL
- Clickstream analysis
- Genomics
Use Amazon EMR Serverless when:
- Serverless Spark
- Serverless Hive
- ETL jobs
- Data transformation
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