--- title: Amazon Athena Reviews meta_title: 'Amazon Athena Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 173 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Amazon Athena works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.4 review_count: 173 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-06-24' parent_category: name: Database Software url: https://www.g2.com/categories/database-software --- # Amazon Athena Reviews **Vendor:** Amazon Web Services (AWS) **Category:** [Database as a Service (DBaaS) Providers](https://www.g2.com/categories/database-as-a-service-dbaas) **Average Rating:** 4.4/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 173 ## About Amazon Athena Amazon Athena is a serverless, interactive query service that enables users to analyze large datasets directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. With no infrastructure to manage, Athena allows for quick, ad-hoc querying without the need for complex ETL processes. It automatically scales to execute queries in parallel, delivering fast results even for complex queries and large datasets. Key Features and Functionality: - Serverless Architecture: Athena requires no server management, automatically handling infrastructure scaling and maintenance. - Standard SQL Support: Users can run ANSI SQL queries, facilitating easy data analysis without learning new languages. - Broad Data Format Compatibility: Supports various data formats, including CSV, JSON, ORC, Avro, and Parquet, allowing flexibility in data storage and analysis. - Integration with AWS Glue: Seamlessly integrates with AWS Glue Data Catalog for metadata management, enabling schema discovery and versioning. - Security and Compliance: Provides robust security features, including data encryption at rest and in transit, and integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for fine-grained access control. Primary Value and User Solutions: Amazon Athena simplifies the process of analyzing vast amounts of data stored in Amazon S3 by eliminating the need for complex infrastructure setup and management. Its serverless nature and support for standard SQL make it accessible to users with varying levels of technical expertise. By enabling quick, cost-effective querying of large datasets, Athena addresses challenges related to data analysis speed, scalability, and operational overhead, empowering organizations to derive insights efficiently. ## Amazon Athena Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users find Amazon Athena to be a great fit for **running analysis on S3-stored data**. (1 reviews) - Users find that Amazon Athena is a great fit for **running analysis on S3 data** , simplifying their data handling needs. (1 reviews) - Users find that Athena is a great fit for **running analysis on data stored in S3**. (1 reviews) - Users find Amazon Athena remarkably **easy to use** , thanks to its user-friendly interface and versatile querying capabilities. (1 reviews) - Users appreciate the **user-friendly interface** of Amazon Athena, enabling easy querying of diverse data sources. (1 reviews) - Users value the **ease of querying various data sources** with Amazon Athena, making it accessible for everyone. (1 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find **function limitations** frustrating, particularly when needing to query and update data effectively. (1 reviews) - Users find the **limited SQL capabilities** frustrating for querying and updating data effectively in Amazon Athena. (1 reviews) - Users find **poor usability** affects their ability to efficiently query and update data in Amazon Athena. (1 reviews) ## Amazon Athena Reviews ### 1. Athena Makes S3 Data Validation Fast and Infrastructure-Free **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** mani s. | data engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 26, 2026 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** I use Amazon Athena in my day-to-day work for our project. What I like most about Athena is that it can query large datasets directly from Amazon S3 without having to manage any infrastructure. In my workplace, I use Athena regularly to validate processed data after Spark ETL jobs complete, and I compare source and target datasets with the help of Athena. After the ETL pipelines finish writing Parquet or CSV files into S3, I use Athena tables connected through the AWS Glue Data Catalog, then run SQL queries to verify record counts, null values, duplicates, partitioned data, and transformation outputs. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** I don’t have any major dislikes. It’s a good final product, and it helps me a lot. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Amazon Athena solves the problem of analyzing large data stored in Amazon S3 without requiring a dedicated database server. In my workplace, it has benefited me for ETL validation and has helped with troubleshooting by allowing direct SQL queries on files stored in S3. I use Athena to quickly validate transformed data in my day-to-day work, and it makes the process much quicker. ### 2. Simple, Scalable and Cost-Effective Analytics with Amazon Athena **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Pradip G. | Technology Lead, Computer Software, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 19, 2026 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** What I like best about Amazon Athena is that it is very easy to use and fully serverless. We don’t need to manage any infrastructure, and we can directly query data stored in S3 using simple SQL. It saves time for data analysis and is very cost effective because we only pay for the data we scan. It also integrates well with other AWS services, which makes it very useful for analytics and reporting use cases **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** One thing I dislike about Amazon Athena is that the cost can increase quickly if queries are not optimized properly, since pricing is based on data scanned. For large and unpartitioned datasets, it becomes expensive. Also, performance sometimes depends heavily on how well the data is structured in S3. It is not ideal for very low-latency or real-time analytics use cases. Query debugging can also be slightly difficult for beginners. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Amazon Athena is solving the problem of quickly analyzing large amounts of data stored in S3 without setting up servers or managing infrastructure. Earlier, we needed dedicated databases or clusters for analytics, which required time and cost to maintain. With Athena, we can directly run SQL queries on data and get insights within minutes. This is benefiting us by reducing infrastructure cost, saving operational effort, and enabling faster decision-making. It is especially helpful for ad-hoc analysis, log analysis, and reporting purposes. Overall, it improves productivity and makes data analytics more accessible for the team. ### 3. Ad-hoc serverless analysis in S3 with SQL, natively integrated with AWS Glue **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Caleb F. | Data & IA Specialist, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 11, 2026 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** What I value most is that it is serverless: it allows you to run standard SQL queries directly on data in Amazon S3, without having to provision infrastructure or move the information through ETL processes. In practice, it is super useful for performing quick and ad-hoc exploratory analysis on Parquet or JSON files within our Data Lake. Additionally, by integrating natively with the AWS Glue Data Catalog, metadata management becomes almost transparent and much simpler. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** What I like the least is that the charge per TB scanned can become quite unpredictable if the queries are not well optimized (for example, when there are no partitions or compression is not used). A simple "SELECT" on a large dataset can turn out to be surprisingly expensive. Additionally, performance drops significantly with the typical problem of many small files in S3 (small file problem), and that ends up forcing us to add extra compaction processes with AWS Glue to maintain efficiency. And, finally, it is not the best option for low-latency reports or with high concurrency: in those scenarios, Redshift still performs better. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps us analyze raw data that is in our Data Lake on S3 immediately, without having to first build complex ETL pipelines or load everything into a Data Warehouse. The biggest benefit is agility: we can validate the quality of the data and perform exploratory (ad-hoc) queries with standard SQL in a matter of seconds. This greatly accelerates our development cycle and also reduces costs, because we avoid processing and storing data in Redshift that we don't yet know will actually be useful. ### 4. Amazon Athena: Simple, Fast Data Exploration That Saves Money **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chetan M. | Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 02, 2026 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Amazon Athena helps us explore and test data easily without having to set up a lot of things. It’s very simple to use, works well with AWS, and delivers faster results. It also saves money, is easy to get started with, and includes smart features that help us use our data better. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** The screen is simple, but it can be confusing for beginners. Query costs can also get high, and performance really depends on how the data is organized. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps us validate ETL job data, catch problems early, and make sure our ETL jobs are working the right way. This saves time and improves data quality. ### 5. Easy, Fast, and Affordable ANSI SQL with Smooth Language Integrations **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chaim and Liora S. | Senior Data Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 23, 2026 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** It's easy to use, very fast performance, uses ANSI SQL, relatively cheap compared to other options and it's easy to integrate with programming languages using libraries. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** It’s harder to monitor performance issues. Since it’s basically file-based on S3, concurrency can also be a problem when using regular tables, especially compared to Iceberg. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Excellent for quick data analysis on large datasets stored in a data lake. ### 6. Straightforward S3 Data Extraction Made Easy **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Telecommunications | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 28, 2026 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** It’s been great working with S3 data. I really loved the data extraction feature that uses an S3 bucket—it made pulling the data I needed straightforward. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** I’m not able to use UPDATE statements in Athena, which is a drawback for me. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** We can directly query the S3 data coming from CloudFront and then forward it for analysis using QuickSight for visualization and other things, which is great. ### 7. Streamlined Analytics with Serverless Scalability **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Atharva P. | Cloud BI Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 08, 2026 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** I like that Amazon Athena offers serverless querying directly on data without having to manage any infrastructure. It's very fast to set up, which is ideal for our analytics needs. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Query cost can increase with large datasets and file formats if they are not optimized properly. Performance tuning also requires careful data organization. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** n/a ### 8. I work as a Cloud Data Engineer and I use Athena daily. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Zoe M. | Data & BI Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 10, 2025 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** It is easy to use Athena, whether you are a tech or a non-tech person. It has a very user-friendly interface, and the thing that I like the most is that you can query many types of source input data. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** I don't find it helpful when I need to query the data and make updates. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Athena by querying data in s3, our Data LakeHouse. Athena has a very nice, easy user interface, it is cheap and very helpful for querying many types of data. ### 9. Athena Makes S3 Data Analysis Fast and Easy **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 19, 2026 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Athena is a great fit when I need to run analysis on data stored in S3. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** It is cloud-native with respect to AWS. We need a solution that sits on top of the AWS cloud and also supports a multi-cloud setup. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Athena helps me run analysis on data stored in S3, and it can also connect with other AWS data stores. ### 10. A Powerful and Cost-Effective Serverless Query Service for Big Data **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Milan S. | Senior Data Analyst, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 12, 2023 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Amazon athena is very powerful serverless solution and it's very cost-effective. I like the user-friendly interface that athena provides to query data from any table present in the S3. I use athena to query data almost on a regular basis. The customer support is also very helpful with the queries regarding anything. It was very easy to implement because of very powerful documentation provided by AWS. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** There are very few things that I don't like about athena, like occasional lags when querying large datasets, there are also some features missing that could have helped the user a lot. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is helping me by removing manual scaling of infrastructure when more data starts flowing in, it saves a lot of time. And also its helping by handling queries to extract large datasets. It has made my life very easy. ### 11. Powerful tool for querying big data **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Josh S. | Analyst, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 09, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Quick, powerful analytical tools. Uses familiar syntax. Uses S3 buckets to build the database. Allow several queries to be saved. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Navigating AWS can be difficult at times. May not be as fast as some other solutions. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Gain insights from big databases. Answer ad hoc questions that may not be available in other tools ### 12. Good option for database as service, seamless integration **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Aditya S. | Manager - Data Science and Analytics, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2023 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** I have worked on multiple databases so far. I found it to be better than traditional hive systems. Within a minute the queries run for many gigabytes of storage. On top of that, no need to have a system to run. Since it is a service, anybody can login on web and see the data. It predominantly helped me serve product people where they can tweak my query and do things on their own when usually I was involved everytime. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** I did not like some integration with languages like R. RJDBC package had some bugs. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Seamlessly integration of S3 files without worrying for creating a specific database that can only run on authorized systems. If I want to look at some information urgently, I could do it with logging in. Also it is very fast. Usually no need to get into tiring config editing. ### 13. Amazon Athena Serverless service for analyzing the data in s3 **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Manufacturing | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 13, 2023 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** serverless architecture no requried infrastructure to manage. pay only for what we queries we run, its make cost effecitve. it supports major all the file formats example parquet, json, text and many more we can integrate with aws glue service for ETL jobs. due to serverless its more in performance. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** its less performance when we query on large datasets. it has limited ETL functionalities when we compare to other services. its highly dependent on s3 service. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** quering the data available on top of s3 using its serverless compatibality. perform on queries on all the file formats like paruqet,json, avro and many more. ### 14. We are using Amazon Athena V3 for quering the data on S3 **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Anirudh J. | Senior SDET, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 07, 2023 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** It is very easy, cost efficient and time saving solution to create ETLs, manage your metadata and quickly query from the untyped data present in S3 **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Amazon Athena should work on optimizing the process of running the query over big data. Sometimes, we have to use thrift servers just to query fast on big data. Other point is error messages should be more precise. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** I don't have to transform data to particular format. I could just use different SerDer Packages to create table over untype data formats and then use those tables to create ETLs. ### 15. Athena best tool to analyze data where it lives with ease and flexibility **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Daniel R. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 11, 2024 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Pricing and ease to use, you can do queries of data with SQL syntax **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Not all SQL syntax allowed, you can't create tables from a query. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Query information from an S3 bucket in real time ### 16. Amazon Athena makes it easy to access Datalake with traditional SQL queries **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vijaykumar J. | Data Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 02, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** You can write SQL-like queries to access data on S3. The user does not require to adopt a new skill to use Athena. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** The performance gets hit with the volume of data. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** This is one of the best services from Athena which allows you to read data sitting on S3 in a much easier way. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using Athena for our Audit related data which is important to have it inorder to understand the story of the data flow between multiple stages. The performance is high compared to regular RDBMS DB. ### 17. Great data management tool for with fast and efficient query resolve time **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Oil & Energy | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 26, 2023 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** I like that it uses the S3 files in the backend and uses distributed computing to doing queries on those files. It uses Postgres SQL in the backend and I like that bacuase the queries for this would not be outdated. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** It is a great tool for stakeholder to look in the data when the queries are there and weasy to modify and use on web. But integration sometimes causes issues when data has to be pulled. The problem I faced is only for a few systems when working on older laguages. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** You don't need to setup databases, it uses the S3 stored files seamlessly. And anybody in the organization can go through the data easily while logining into aws. ### 18. AmazonAthena good option for cost saving but limited to certain use cases **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ulka K. | Data Engineering Anayst, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 24, 2023 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** There are number of AWS services that many data driven companies use. This makes Athena a feasible and efficient to store and analyse data. It also supports data partitioning which has improved the performance when running tedeous queries which is a frequent task for Data professionals. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Not all format of data is effectively analysed. We often have to priorities parquet format when working with Athena is involved. Also there can be diffulties when working in complicated data. Cleaner data is better analyzed in Athena. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Processing millions of data everyday is costing to a company with Athena, as its a pay-as you go service, the cost is considerably reduced for simple regular analytical task. Also integration of Athena with widely used other AWS services. ### 19. Great for External tables querying and adhoc analysis **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Abdul Nabi G. | Aws Data Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 24, 2023 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Athena is helpful to query on data lakes for adhoc analysis of business data. Athena combined with glue crawlers is an excellent combination for ingesting data from multiple sources. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Stored procedures are not supported in athena, that's a drawback. Many common sql statements like ctas, merge, update is not supported in athena limiting its analytical usage. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** In the organization we use athena to query intermediate data in the etl pipeline, also create external tables on top source file in s3 to access source data which is in another account ### 20. Data processing made easy using aws Athena **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 01, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Amazon Athena can be easily used to process and query large amount of data weather stored in S3 bucket or any other data source. Use Athena with aws glue to rapidly create database table and you are ready to query your data using structured query language. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Athena supports most of the type of data but there are some edge cases in type of data where we cannot create a database table and query data using aws Athena. A user in such cases generally face issue of SER-DER is not a valid. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Amazon Athena can be used with different services like aws lambda. To make data processing. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Since s3 bucket store a large amount of data . Querying the whole data is costly and inefficient. Here comes Athena in picture where a user can query the limited amount of data using the concept of partitioning hence can save the cost and time. ### 21. Amazon Athena - Data analytics made easy ! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Madhankkumar S. | Senior Data Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 26, 2023 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Crawlers can be scheduled . Kafka makes the select on the data seem less. ANSI SQL support. Best application to crawl through source files for data analytics. The staging of file can be avoided to see the data with in it . **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** UI could have been better. The schedule should be more configurable. The table partition at times goes wrong. Access other cloud storage will help for various business needs. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** You dont need to build a dedicated data pipline to understand the business data , Athena makes the life easy by simple crawling through the files and get the data for us , The support of ANSI SQL place a vital role here . ### 22. Cloud Reporting -Athena **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Saravanan M. | Software Developer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 09, 2023 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Supporting the presto SQL model for easy querying for real time data **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Costs is major factor and can not support some query models **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Mainly for reporting,it fetches the data by querying from s3 real time live data.Since it is mainly used for reporting purposes ### 23. Connect to any data source globally **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Yash G. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 10, 2023 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Easy to connect to any data source and start querying **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** There is nothing specific that I dislike about this **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** I mostly use it to connect to data source and integrate it with quicksight so that I can visualyse my data on quicksight ### 24. Amazon Athena **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 31, 2023 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** host of fucntionalities that athena provides **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** frequent changes and support required for some **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** we are using this as a DBMS ### 25. A holistic review on Amazon Athena **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 18, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Amazon Athena is something that I use almost everyday to create table and analyze my huge-volume data, I'm a data analyst and I happen to read , query and use TBs of our data for which Amazon Athena is my go to tool, the most exciting part is that is almost like a sql workbench and you can query upon Athena using QSL queries which makes it easy to use and seemless to peruse my data, basically, you can use the simple storage service to store any volume of data, create Athena tables over it and query your data, most importantly you are only charged for the queries that you run on your tables, the whole thing is serverless and self managed by Amazon you need not worry about the infrastructure as its already been taken care off, the queries that you run are parallelly processed and this saves you a lot of time are the it can process terrabytes of data in seconds. Summary of above: -You can run SQL scripts over Athena Tables, -Athena can read huge data within seconds, -Its fast and allows you to download queried data as comma separated files. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Nothing specific to dislike, its easy to use, reliable and fast. However, like alwasy Amazon products are a bit pricey when compared to its competitors in the segment, the pricing could be lowered a bit but definately comensates for the quality. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** We need to create table and use our data for analysis purposes which becomes seemingly fast using Athena, let me explain you how fast this is, for instance, it took me around 50 minutes to read 60GB of csv data directly using Simple Storage Service and BOTO3 python library, whereas I could perform the same operation using Athena in probably 25 seconds. We make use of Athena to access our csv data, create Athena tables over the same and use them anytime use or to perform analysis. ### 26. Athena helps with data lineage! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** LindaRuth M. | Data Architect, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 04, 2023 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Athena helps with data lineage by analyzing data from S3 buckets and many other sources including Snowflake. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Stored procedures are not supported and you could reach performance issues if too many partitions. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is a serverless tool for building and querying large datasets and is providing value for my data and analytics products. ### 27. Amazon Athena **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 30, 2023 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** the best advantage of amazon athena in my opinion is the simplicity of configuration and use: Athena does not require any infrastructure configuration and users can start running ad hoc queries within minutes. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** The biggest disadvantage is the limitation of queries: Athena has limitations on query size and resource utilisation, which may limit its ability to handle complex queries on large data sets. At least for now. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** In my use case amazon athena solved the problem of quickly and easily analysing a considerable amount of data saved in my s3 bucket. Thus increasing the productivity and speed of the team ### 28. Amazon Athena has an amazing Query editor **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Manpreet S. | Lead BI Specialist, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 11, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** The Amazon Athena Query editor is very user friendly. If the SQL query is not correct, it shows the exact line with the error and also suggests how to resolve the error **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** In case of huge data processing, the cost increases a lot. For clients with less data Athena costs won't be huge. But clients with huge amount of data will cost a lot and using AWS Redshift is better for such clients **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Amazon Athena has very user friendly query editor. We use it to extract data from DB by writing SQL in the query editor. As it is a SaaS product you do not need to download anything and it can be access over the internet ### 29. As it's Easy to use and easy to configure as per our needs **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Naveen V. | Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 29, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** The best thing which I like about the service is its ease to use , one can easily use it or integrate with thier code, also as it's queries are very much similar to sql it make more easier **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** There are few data source integration which is not so easy with Athena , Also it's a little slow on fetching the result when a particular query is done as it stores the data at se level **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Amazon Athena is a great product build over presto engine , it's serveless design reduces it overhead it's easy use and manage and we pay for the queries we run. As it uses sql there is no learning curve for querying and it allows us to run queries to over multiple data sources. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** We build our whole data ingestion and retrieval pipeline through Athena We had integrated multiple tools like superset and metabase on top of Athena so that we can create custum dashboards and graphs which make figures smooth and easy to understand ### 30. AWS has really helped overcome the server issues and other reporting related problems. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Burhan B. | SDE I | Frontend Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 01, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** AWS console and the reporting and customer care service regarding any downtime. In fact, there is very less downtime. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** The cost is very high compared to other providers. And the transparency of pricing for each module after the purchase. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Please work on the price transparency and inform the user prior to the billing. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** The main problem was to manage the server and hire an entire team to manage the server room. Now that is entirely on the cloud we don't need to worry about it and we can get any number of servers with any configuration within seconds. ### 31. Security and manage data **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vaibhaw R. | Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 12, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** I am using S3 from past 2 years the query editir I generally use for SQLs is so good also, the processing time for commands in EC2 is so fast. Overall It is very good, but the expenses of using it a bit more in comparing other cloud providers. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Only the higher cost on usage, if that could be made more flexible little bit. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's really giving top notch quality of processing and availability for our product as real time availability to the world, which helping to disrupt the current market ### 32. Process customer data on AWS Athena **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Zexi G. | Java Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 18, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** 1. Athena do efficient queries on AWS S3 data. It shows great performance even our data is Tb size. 2. Athena provide friendly UI to help user do queries and track their history queries. 3. Work well with AWS Quicksight to do data visualizations **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** 1. Searching history queries not globally searching but in 500 history for each time. 2. There is few samples in AWS Athena handbook, not easy to get help from there **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** 1. Friendly to users who has already familiar with SQL 2. Good tools but have to consider the price you need to spend on it **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** 1. Generated monthly customer data for sales force team via Athena, which is big size data. 2. Based on AWS Athena tables, I did lots of visualizations from them on AWS Quicksight. ### 33. Athena Review **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Arjun S. | Data Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 29, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** I've been working on Athena as well as Bigquery. Athena's querying speeds are insane. One of the best available Data Warehouses out there.No hassles when it comes to integrate it with other AWS tools. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** BigQuery allows for direct integrations with Data Studio, which is really handy when we have to send, share reports with BI team, whereas Athena's integration with QuickSight could've been better.Also Athena's UI as compared to BigQuery's new UI seems a bit outdated. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Brilliant DWH, would definitely suggest / consider going ahead with it. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** I head the Data Engineering team at Zenius.Whilst working with Athena I realized how easy and quick it becomes to bridge the gap between BI and DE teams. Seemless query speeds and integrations are the major perks of this tool. ### 34. Relatively Quick and Easy Diving Into Load Balancer and S3 Logs **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nung B. | Sr. DevOps Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 14, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** I like how quick it is to get started using Athena if you already have log data or text data residing in S3. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** I dislike that I don't use it enough and have to refresh my query building when I do go in. It would be nice if there were a way to organize stored queries more extensively than the way Athen does now. External source control can easily suffice, but nice to have in the console. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Just get started. Use it right away to view load balancer logs **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Many times it helps us aggregate http error codes and helps us zero in on IP addresses for problem sources, or gather data to help resolve http 500 series type error codes that Sentry is not able to help us nail. ### 35. Athena for Analytical Use **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Parthasarathy S. | Senior Architect, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 11, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Very easy to use. It helps the analysts to do their work in a very effective way. It is connected with Tableau to bring most of the user interface how they want with the legacy systems too. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Cost associated with each query. If the charges are on monthly/yearly basis then ot is a cost effective tool. Sometimes the performance is slower when we want to scan the data with more than one key. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Business which needs transformation in an more effective way can choose Athena **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Solved the performance issues when the use connects with on premise database for their visuvalization. On the other hand reduced the license cost of other software to perform the same analysis. ### 36. AWS Review - would recommend **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Divyansh B. | Associate Data Analyst, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 06, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** The security features it offers are best for everyone. Apart from security, the speed and the automatic updates are the cherry on the cake. It also helps to connect our data with looker. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Price is too high, packages are complex to understand, billing is also difficult for a normal person. I feel it is not accessible to every part of the world as of now. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Try it once, you won't regret **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps in increasing speed and agility, helps us to connect with our co workers instantly in different parts of the globe. It's availability and scalability are the other benefits. ### 37. Amazon athena is a great tool to query s3 data but still isn't enough to convince me **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tanishq D. | Business Technology Solutions Associate , Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 24, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Its ease of use and cost-effectiveness as it does not require any clusters or warehouses to run the queries on top of those. It uses a syntax which is very similar to SQL so that a plus. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** As it does not use any dedicated clusters or compute resources the results for some queries are time taking. Also, it has very little support to connect with other data sources. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** I would prefer to use Dstabricks SQL instead of athen as it has a one-stop solution for all BI, analytics and data science needs. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** We just run some custom queries to see the data what type of data is stored and what it looks like. We prefer to use spark SQL in most of the cases as Athena is not that good at running heavy/non optimized queries. ### 38. Preferred athena service for Serveless interactive query service **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nimesh V. | Software Dev, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 30, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Amazon athena is serverless, cost effective easy to use and widely accessible as it run using sql queries also athena's open and versatile architecture doesn't restrict us to a specific tools and technology **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Although amazon athena service is great but still it has few limitations like no data optimization as athena doesn't offer a lot of optimization capabilities. Also it lacks indices, requires partitioning, lacks data manipulation operations **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** I have build multiple data pipelines and data ingestion and data extraction pipeline using this also have used the Amazon athena service on the top of a few tools for creating dashboards and apis as per use cases ### 39. Amazing and easy to use Query Editor **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 08, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Amazon Athena provides a very simple and user-friendly query editor. It helps to find the exact error even in complex of SQL queries **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** I haven't faced any major issues till now. Sometimes it's a little slow to fetch the result from a query **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Amazon Athena is a very easy-to-use query editor. We use it to query the data using SQL ### 40. Highly Recommend Amazon Athena **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Suraj B. | Senior Software Development Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 15, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** I like the performance of Athena over other datalake services in the market. Moreover the UI is proving query at ease even for multiple dtabases available in athena. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** When there is a error, sometimes we need to re open new tab and do the query, also pagination is not there for result set. Could you please imporove these two things:) **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Must use console for datalake and analysis **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have amazon Glue jobs for data analytic purposes and using athena to query the data before writing the final query into job. This allows us faster development and reduce developer time. ### 41. Tried to use athena to manage metrics **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 22, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** It seems easy enough to use, query data and visualize it. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Athena could have a better looking user interface **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** For my use case I wanted to use athena to do periodical queries on metrics ### 42. Athena **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Robert K. | Data Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 31, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Querying has became very easier when compared to some other tools available in the market **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Nothing there is to dislike. I am super happy with Amazon Athena **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Just go for it. It is very easy to use for data warehousing solutions **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Querying time has reduced and analysis became easier ### 43. Great Platform to analyse data **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Defense & Space | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 21, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** I am using athena to query data that is stored in s3 path. I can easily query data using athena from my database by just paying for the money I query. I think that is the most advantageous case here. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Though athena is a great service sometimes it delays the querying process. have reached out to the support but have to pay extra to get the answers for that as well which is a bit annoying. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am also doing data analytics because I have an immense interest in data and I am aware of the fact that data is the fuel for all the problem solving from now on. So I analyze data using athena and since the cost is less I really love this service ### 44. Very fast processing and easy to use. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 09, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** The processing speed is one of the fastest on even huge hive tables where data resides on s3. Moreover, the interface is simple and easy to use. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** For huge data select statements, it takes up to a few minutes. It should not load whole data at one go, and sometimes user fires a query not knowing how big the data size is. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** User can query complex queries on hive tables and get 100 times faster result. ### 45. Amazon Athena experience was quite good, but still far away from its competitor - Google Big Query **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Oded K. | Data Team Lead, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 02, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Ease of access and the ability to query databases directly. We are usually working on Amazon Athena by groups of analysts/data science, and therefore, it's quite easy to separate between them. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Unable to autocomplete or use various extensions or assistants. In GCP (Google Big Query), there was a possibility of attachments that would auto-complete your code. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Consider GCP as well. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Mainly queries and databases management. We are using it to access different tables and query them across different teams. In addition, data engineers use it to maintain our data bases. ### 46. Amazone Athena Review **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Piyush P. | Senior Data Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 11, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** As it help us to access s3 data directly and allow as to query the data using sql syntax. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** As I don't see any, but it should be on same line as hive works, that would be great. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Try to make it little fast as in terms of query execution, and also use same syntax as what hive is. using **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** we are getting new data every day we can query those data, also if archive few data on s3 we can query and comsume it ### 47. Analytics using Athena **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gautam R. | Technology Analyst, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 20, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Athena service in AWS can be used to query and analyse large sets of data stored and the best part is the serverless features and integration available with other services which can help us in many different ways. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** The Athena is an amazing service but it also comes with certain disadvantages which can be rectified by the team in maybe near future, this may include the shared resources making it uncomfortable for people concerned about their confidential data's and lack of data optimisation. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** I have used Athena for analysing the logs within our VPC to look for any anomalous behaviour to ensure our environment is safe and secure, also the use cases includes AWS cost analysis. ### 48. Ad hoc analysis querying for charts in dashboard for webapplication **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Aditya T. | Data Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 10, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** It allows you to query on flat files that are extremely powerful and useful and serverless that is easy to scale and can use SQL which is familiar to developers **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** SQL version it uses is not the latest and uses an old version and which the syntax and limited functionality to such a powerful tool and another thing is the UI for tool can be improved. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am trying to solve ad hoc on raw is simple using Athena and then if you want to use the toll on data and query huge data infrequent then it uses else it is on the expensive side. ### 49. Athena + SQL **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 01, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** It uses SQL notation to query S3 buckets **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** There is nothing that I dislike at the moment **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** It makes the file search a lot more efficient ### 50. Amazon Athena Reveiw **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kallesha C. | Data Enigneer - Consultant II , Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 07, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** > Athena is serverless service mainly used to create external schemas to s3 and hive metastore > Users just need to pay for the quries i,e amount/number of records scanned > Its removed the burden of complex ETLs to analyse the data from external objects like s3, hive **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** > Athena is like legacy service in AWS as its not directly integrated with services like Redshift > we were just using to analyse the s3 objects and can not be directly used, i,e an workaround required to use the external schemas in DB services > Athena now its integrated with Glue and used for catalog creations **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** > we were using to analyse the objects on s3 and to create external schema objects of hive metastore > we useed hive external schemas to read from different format of files like AVRO, Parquet and Jsons > we use as pre-processing analytic service ## Amazon Athena Discussions - [Is AWS Athena free?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/is-aws-athena-free) - 1 comment - [How do I use AWS Athena?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/how-do-i-use-aws-athena) - 1 comment - [View Amazon Athena pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-athena/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-26+13%3A59%3A51+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=0e29d7e1-5bc6-4bfd-aaed-6184cebae75b&secure%5Btoken%5D=5da7d8887b133525c11243b051edfc8d2a3406f46c56ad72a7cb635ea2fe22b8&format=llm_user) ## Amazon Athena Integrations - [Amazon QuickSight](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-quicksight/reviews) - [Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-simple-storage-service-s3/reviews) - [AWS Glue](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-glue/reviews) - [Microsoft Power BI](https://www.g2.com/products/microsoft-microsoft-power-bi/reviews) - [Python](https://www.g2.com/products/python/reviews) ## Amazon Athena Features **Management** - Data dictionary - Data Replication - Query Language - Data Modeling - Performance Analysis **Configuration** - Application Performance - Orchestration - Database Monitoring - Anomaly Detection - Network Security **Maintenance** - Data Migration - Backup and Recovery - Multi-User Environment **Database Administration** - Provisioning - Governance - Auditing **Security** - Data Encryption - User Access Control **Availability** - Scalability - Backup - Archiving - Indexing **Security** - Data Masking - Authentication And Single Sign-On - Data Anonymization **Data Management** - Data Replication - Advanced Data Analytics ## Top Amazon Athena Alternatives - [Snowflake](https://www.g2.com/products/snowflake/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (707 reviews) - [Microsoft SQL Server](https://www.g2.com/products/microsoft-sql-server/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (2,127 reviews) - [DBeaver](https://www.g2.com/products/dbeaver/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (168 reviews)