What's the Difference Between Amazon Redshift and Redshift Serverless?
Compare Amazon Redshift and Redshift Serverless side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.
Compare side-by-side
|
Comparisons
|
Amazon Redshift
|
Redshift Serverless
|
|---|---|---|
|
Category
|
Analytics, Data warehouse |
Analytics, Serverless Data Warehouse |
|
Description
|
Fast, simple, cost-effective data warehousing |
Run analytics and get insights from data without managing data warehouse infrastructure. |
|
Best for
|
|
|
|
Key features
|
|
|
|
Pricing model
|
On-Demand, Reserved, or Serverless |
Pay per RPU-hour of compute used |
|
Free tier
|
Yes |
Yes |
|
Expert take
|
“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.” |
“Redshift Serverless removes cluster management entirely. You run queries and pay per RPU-second, scaling automatically based on workload complexity without provisioning nodes.” |
|
Product page
|
When to use Amazon Redshift or Redshift Serverless
Use Amazon Redshift when:
- Data warehousing
- Business intelligence
- Log analysis
- Big data analytics
Learn more about Amazon Redshift »
Use Redshift Serverless when:
- Ad-hoc analytics
- Development workloads
- Variable workloads
- Data exploration
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