What's the Difference Between Amazon EMR and AWS Glue?
Compare Amazon EMR 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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Amazon EMR
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AWS Glue
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Category
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Analytics, Big data processing |
Analytics, Data integration / ETL |
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Description
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Easily run big data frameworks |
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 instance hour + EBS storage |
Pay per DPU-hour |
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Free tier
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No |
Yes |
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Expert take
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“EMR is the go-to for teams already invested in Spark, Hive, or Presto. 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.” |
“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 Amazon EMR or AWS Glue
Use Amazon EMR when:
- Big data processing
- Machine learning
- ETL
- Clickstream analysis
- Genomics
Use AWS Glue when:
- ETL
- Data cataloging
- Data preparation
- Data lake management
- Event-driven ETL
AWS product comparisons
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