--- 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: '2026-08-03' 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's analytics capabilities** effective for analyzing data stored in S3 efficiently. (1 reviews) - Users find Amazon Athena to be a **great solution for analyzing data stored in S3** efficiently and effectively. (1 reviews) - Users find Athena ideal for **running data analysis** on S3 storage efficiently and effectively. (1 reviews) - Users find Amazon Athena to be **very easy to use** , thanks to its user-friendly interface and versatile querying capabilities. (1 reviews) - Users appreciate the **user-friendly interface** of Amazon Athena, making it accessible for both tech and non-tech individuals. (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 experience **function limitations** with Amazon Athena, finding it unhelpful for querying and updating data. (1 reviews) - Users struggle with **limited SQL capabilities** in Amazon Athena, hindering their ability to efficiently query and update data. (1 reviews) - Users experience **poor usability** , finding it unhelpful when querying data and making updates in Amazon Athena. (1 reviews) ## Amazon Athena Reviews ### 1. Very Good service to analyze logs **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Satyam R. | DevOps Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 27, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Aws documents and blogs that available online **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Ui should be more user friendly. It should be enhanced. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Highly recommended **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Analysis of s3 logs ### 2. Data Engineering **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Satkar P. | Python Developer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 02, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Create different virtual views and used that view to create an external table **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** It takes a very long time to query the large s3 object. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Get the perticular data, Find data, visualize at Quicksight ### 3. Great service for data analysis **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 17, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Easy to use and best for data analysis. Best part we don't need to create any database for data analysis. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** I didn't find any anything, Athena helped a lot in my project for data analysis task. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** This solved the problem of cloud watch logs analysis for me. Just uploaded the file in S3 and run the sql queries on that for verification and validation. ### 4. Same as Hive Athena is very easy to use while coming from Hadoop Environment to AWS **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Online Media | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 05, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Being serverless and supporting all the Hive properties are the best features of Athena. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Doesn't support all the properties of Hive which need to be imported and added separately. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Able to query on top of widely used production data files(CSV, JSON, snappy, parquet) by creating tables and also with added properties are great benefits. ### 5. Very good **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vaibhav S. | Staff Data Scientist, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 12, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** As its serverless and no need to manage the backend infra. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** The interface could be made more user friendly **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Querying data from S3 directly. Its very fast. ### 6. Superb platform for analysing data **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Education Management | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 22, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** It is a great interactive service that helps us query data that is already available in the s3 and it only charges me for the queries I make. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** UI mainly and athena is a bit slow in times **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Mainly analyzing data. I am freelancing and thinking of changing my career towards data analytics so I can easily manipulate data. ### 7. Athena provide cost effective solution to query big data **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 18, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** serverless architecture provide cost-effective way to maintain big data **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** limit on the number of queries and time taken to complete queries **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** athena improved a lot with it's v2 version but great choice if you are looking for a serverless big data hive/presto engine **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** data analytics querying ### 8. Easy to use **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 30, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** It is fairly easy to use. No need to learn new sql syntax. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** While using athena on s3, you need to run crawlers. Navigation could be improved. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Its a great tool that can be used to query yhe data stored on s3 **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Querying s3 data using athena has made my work very easy ### 9. Athena Serverless Presto DB Querying **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 02, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Fast and Serverless,quick time execution **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Need some more dark themes for UI. Ui is pretty bad **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Using it for log analysis to get insights fir puling out meaningful data ### 10. Used to perform interactive queries very easily **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Akashraj K. | Senior Java Full Stack Engineer - Data Science Platform, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 16, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Used while performing interactive queries on large scale dataset **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** The interface and documentation is a bit abstract someplace. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Querying on data set. ### 11. Not better than Amazon Redshift **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 24, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Athena is useful for DDL queries and to determine better table settings for tables in glue catalog. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Cannot make any changes to the tables on importing it on Tableau, forced to duplicate the column to change the data type. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Amazon Redshift **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Athena helps in checking if the data is being populated properly in the catalog. ### 12. Amazon Athena review **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 28, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Better analysis of the data. The integration easiness makes it real handy for proper visualization of the data. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** No support for udfs and stored procedures makes it limited in usability. Also only works on external table. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** NA **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Being Serverless actually hepls with the low to zero maintenance cost. ### 13. Awesome **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Pharmaceuticals | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 14, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** The main features are its Usage and it's performance **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Could have been better to get more insights on the billing part. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Connect directly with S3 to query the data instead of opening the files directly for analysis and usage ### 14. Its one stop data warehousing solution **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Pharmaceuticals | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 22, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** The application is light weight easy to use with all the required features Best end user experience and cost effective. What else wud one want.. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Hardly any that i have faced while using the application **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am using it to build my data model for excel federated reporting ### 15. Excellent Service in AWS to Query S3 Data in various Formats **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 23, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Able to quey CSV, Parquet, Json, etc. Fast query result. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Nothing as such. It's giving me the feature to query different formats of data and save data to different s3 locations **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** A part of my architecture. From querying data directly to use with lambda for processing data ### 16. Athena for Advanced query **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 20, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Athena is designed to simplify the process of querying data even when data is not stored in table. The best thing is speed of query processing. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** There are no reason for me to dislike the Athena. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Analyzing s3 data without loading data in table. Running complex analytics functions. ### 17. fast, cheap. not working great with json **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Accounting | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 18, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** fast, cheap. nothing missing. great product. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** not working great with json! nothing missing **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** very fast, great for big data. ### 18. Interactive service Amazon Athena **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 05, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** easily query data which is stored in s3, **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** not all ddls are supported works only with external table **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** athena helps you to analyze any form of data you can use it to run ad hoc query etc ### 19. Amazon Athena is an excellent product for data query. I have been using it for the past 2 years **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 13, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** I love how it can easily query S3 and pull up very relevant data **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** I dislike how it is so easy to be wrong when you key in the wrong data **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Some of the problems I am solving with Amazon Athena include faster data query without servers ### 20. Server less Database that allow to query on top on of data stored in S3 **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 09, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** It is similar to Hive. Any data engineer with exposure on Hive can easily learn and use Athena. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Some features like with clause doesn't work in Athena. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Better integration with S3 **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** It can be scaled up easily. It has improved stability error messages than previous versions. ### 21. Easy to use query engine **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Accounting | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 19, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** I like the fact that it is easy to use and has a very simple user interface. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** I dislike that cost is sometimes unreasonable. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have different datasets that require continous analysing and require the need for super fast querrying. ### 22. Good for spark and big data processing **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 08, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Ease of use for spark. Quick turn around time. No lags **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** More memory consumption Less memory intensiveThreads need to run on background More CPU consumption **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Working on petabytes of unstructured data using spark Churning web crawling of specific content using Athena ### 23. Amazon Athena Review **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 11, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Performance and work is good. Nice database to work **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Nothing..all good so I. Happy with athena **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have loaded data for further analytics ### 24. Amazon Athena **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Amar P. | Finance Manager, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 04, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Very user friendly and able to support large database for client with monthly refresh **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** NA, overall a very useful tool and easy to use **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data refresh thst is sent monthly with secure transfer ### 25. Simple and easy solution to review data in s3 **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Pharmaceuticals | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 15, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Easy setup and charged only for query execution **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Classifier are complex to implement and choice of file type or few **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** To run adhoc queries on data in AWS s3 ### 26. Serverless Database with SQL Capbilities **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Harsh G. | Tech Consultant, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 19, 2021 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Amazon Athena is a serverless Service to perform Analytics (Say S3 files). Use SQL language to query files. Has a JDBC/ODBC driver . Pricing -Pay per query. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** No Doubt Amazon Athena is a powerful Service, but you need to take care of pricing as you have to pay per query or amount of data scanned **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** We used Amazon Athena for analytics and reporting . Very Useful for Business Intelligence. Benefits- SQL language to query Data Supports CSV,JSON ### 27. Less Expensive Server less service to access S3 reading, data analytical purpose **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 11, 2022 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Price is per tb and pay as we use, Serverless, data analytical purpose it's a great tool **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Some of the queries still doesn't support in athena **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data analysis with great performance, tuning and monitoring ### 28. Athena performance review **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Automotive | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 20, 2021 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Easy set up with S3 objects and help full for querying and analysis of S3 objects **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Query performance . Query is quite slow on Athena. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Trying to analyse log data stored in S3 and Athena is quite helpful for this. ### 29. Amazon Athena SQL query **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Telecommunications | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 22, 2020 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Friendly interface using web browser and didn't require to install any software on the client side **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Cannot save all the queries for different sessions **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Learn how to use this tool to query and manage data in S3 bucket. Save all the queries locally so that it can be reused at the later time. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Search and query data in S3 buckets. The benefit here is having a SQL tools in the cloud and have direct access to data that are saved in a S3 bucket ### 30. Very good tool if you just want to query the data in csv **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** rishabh s. | Sr Software engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 25, 2019 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** we can directly query in CSV , a great tool created for handling all such request where without opening a file or taking all the data into database or olap we are required to check the same can be checked and verified in file itself , you can perform all the kind of analysis you need to , this is what is required in day to day operation for a data analyst , when you have huge data set , and you are not sure what is it looks like then athena can be used to perform the operation , you will be able to check structure , you will be able to review the header , you can perform group operations or the functions like aggregation filter using where clause or can perform join between the tables , all the sql related operations in one package , you dont need to store them explicitly you only can have them in s3 and can perform all the operation which you need to perform via sql way to find the insights of the data , since it is cloud tool very easy to use and easy to perform operations only on the available browser you have in you laptop , no big license fees not to perform any big installation , few click and you have all the data you need **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** great product , but if amazon can add some tips and track to use the same it will be helpfull for the users to gain the skills more easily , it is sql but have some deviation from the core sql queries **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** If you want to perform the operations where data sanity is required and you dont want to process all the data , then go ahead and use athena **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data Analysis related and data sanity related operations , before processing the data we can perform the analysis and make use of it ### 31. Excellent Data Store for external tables **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Leisure, Travel & Tourism | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 25, 2020 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** The way it is compatible with hive and you can even call AWS Athena API from your service is great. You can make a synchronous as well asynchronous call using Athena. It's cost effective as well since it charges for the data scanned only. It's really great to scan a bunch of data in your S3 and write queries on top of it. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** I feel the errors it gives when query is wrong is too generic. It should give a more detailed explanation of what is wrong with the query **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am adding partitions to amazon athena tables to scan data from my S3. ### 32. Cloud Query Engine - Pay as you go **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 24, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Having stored plenty of data in S3 in both csv and parquet format, I was looking for an easy way to run queries on the files, and Athena satisfied my requirements. For running ad-hoc queries which needs to be done quickly, you can define the data in S3 as an external table and run SQL queries. Additionally AWS Glue catalog also helps with finding metadata about the data and makes the table definition easy. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** No major dislikes with the way Athena works. The only issue I found was, there is no separate workspace for each user, so basically the queries are visible to everyone in the organization, so it might not be good for confidential data. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** It is very good for running queries on data lake implementation on S3, etc. Would highly recommend using Athena in combination with the AWS Glue catalog for storing table metadata. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Running adhoc queries to generate reports, analyze data in S3 bucket by combining S3 Inventory report with Athena. ### 33. quering through log files are made simple **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Monish K. | Snowflake busted up our performance, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 25, 2019 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** searching through the log files are made essay , and the process is simple and fast **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** the syntax of queering was little different & i initially took help in setting it up **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** we wrote a system that will alert us if a manual user added are removes any thing from s3 , using cloud watch loges ### 34. Its a great alternative, hard to see downsides **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Steven S. | Compliance Consultant- Investment Compliance, Investment Management, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 20, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Ok so before the transition to AWS i was using traditional SQL run from the firm mainframe to the remote server. Paid large monthly flat fees but had dependable service and customer service. What i love about AWS im not limited to running query only on the server and you only pay for what you use! This is great because its only $5 a query. Unless your a heavy user this works to your advantage and easy to use **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Only disadvantage is your kind of on your own for support. Sure you can call general line and wait to get questions answered but only downside is there is no personal touch. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Athena mostly to solve decision making situations. Think of it as a workflow with hundreds of possibilities and Athena can randomize and test scenarios based on data generated over the month or inputted. Its quite good and easy to use. No server means i can use my personal computer at home instead of the work laptop which is a plus though ### 35. Great Concept - Still Needs Some Work **Rating:** 2.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Amy S. | Senior Creative Director, Marketing and Advertising, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 20, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Great for one off queries on existing data stored in S3. Athena's Interface allows to save queries, review and download results and easily access all meta store data (DBs, Tables, Columns etc.). Which is great, because I hate having to replicate my data, or rerun reports. Supports syntax and reading of all file formats including TSV, CSV, Parquet, ORC, and Logs. Also supports access based on AWS IAM policies to restrict external or even internal access to the service. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Works only with External Tables. No support of UDFs (User Defined Functions). No support of stored procedures. Athena (for now) is only available in - Us-east1, us-east2, us-west-2, WW will be available by summer (Theoretically, You can query data from a different region - but you will need to pay for the data transfer between regions). LZO compression not supported. No support of Restful API for automation. No support in any kind of Scheduling Solutions. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Athena still does not support many crucial elements that allow you to fulfill it's potential and make it your Analytical service of choice like allowing to build custom UDFs, schedule and automate jobs and most importantly - you cannot write back to S3! **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Basic reporting. ### 36. Too simple, as should be **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 14, 2019 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** It's really simple, really useful, you don't need too much training to do something. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** You have to really understand data processing in order to be more effective and reduce costs. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Analiza data that is arriving ### 37. Acting on data stored in compressed text files has never been this easy **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Adam N. | Systems Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 04, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Before Athena, I had to decompress data, and import into a relational database. Now, I just run a SQL query against the compressed text as-is, and Athena does all the work. You only get charged for the amount of data processed, if your data is compressed - you pay for the compressed size. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Sometimes the Presto documentation can be difficult to follow, but support is always available when I run into a blocker. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Read the docs, give it a shot, and don't look back. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** No more spending hours digging through text files and logs: write a SQL query and let Athena find what I need. I can now deliver results in a more responsive manner, and make better use of the data I already have available. ### 38. A great start but needs some work **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nate G. | Director of Data Management, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 30, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** The main benefit I've seen from Athena is the ease and speed with which I can use SQL-syntax to query large(ish) datasets stored in Amazon S3. Adding tables is a breeze, and can also be done with AWS Glue (though this adds flexibility it also adds a lot of complexity.) Querying is simple and easy, as the Presto syntax is mostly standard SQL. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** The biggest problem is speed, coupled with a 30min timeout - on large datasets, Athena just doesn't work. On small datasets it works great. Once the dataset grows large (hundreds of GB to TB) or if the query is complex with multiple joins, the queries are either very slow, or they time out after 30 min, making the exercise essentially worthless. This is unfortunate, and hopefully will be improved in the future. I have used Google BigQuery in the past and while I haven't done any true head-to-head, from my recollection BigQuery was much faster. Note however that with the datasets I'm using I'm not able to take advantage of partitioning, which would help. The web interface is also subpar but Amazon has rolled out improvements over the past six months that I've been using it, so hopefully that will improve as well. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Definitely try out Athena and see if it will work for you. Given the pricing model it doesn't hurt to try. And even if there are issues, keep an eye on the release notes as there are product updates about once a month, and these can be significant - Athena is still fairly young. Also look for ways to improve performance such as partitioning your datasets. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have large quantities of raw data stored in AWS S3 and wanted a way to easily query this data using a SQL-like syntax, without having to set up a database and ETL the data into it, and Athena has proven very beneficial in most of thees cases, outside of the previously-mentioned issues with larger datasets. Its ability to query data in-place has saved time and money. ### 39. A nice data aggregator, and convenient if you're already on AWS. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chris B. | Senior Software Engineer, Internet, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 26, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** We have a ton of data sources on amazon and Athena gives us a very convenient aggregation interface to be able to query fundamental metrics across all of these services without a lot of additional work. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Interface and UI could be improved to be more intelligent. Performance tuning and query visualizations of could be useful as well. Some speed improves could be made as well. Amazon has/continues made some improvements here over time which is appreciated. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Allows a lower cost alternative to the full suite of something like new relic. We're able to effectively query and retrieve information about slowest running queries, how many api calls we're receiving, and global configuration settings from different service tables. ### 40. Amazon Athena is the ideal tool to perform data queries easily and quickly **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alejandra H. | Administrador de gestión de proyectos, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 28, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** It is a very interactive and easy to use software to perform data analysis in Amazon S3 with standard SQL. Athena allows users to make queries instantly without the need to configure or manage servers and also allows access to all S3 data without having to configure cumbersome processes to transform, extract and upload data (ETL). Advantages is the cost, since the payment is made only for the queries executed. In addition, Amazon Athena uses presto with ANSI SQL support and also supports a large number of different standard data formats. It is a very attractive software because of its speed and its interactive performance. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** The software interface is complex and lacks some tools and functionalities. The least I like about amazon athena is that it does not allow executing several queries simultaneously in a single panel. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Before implementing Amazon Athena it is advisable to test it and make sure that the software meets our expectations. It is a very profitable alternative given that its cost is low and has a high performance. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** This tool allows you to quickly and very efficiently consult the data in S3 without having to configure the database and ETL. Amazon Athena allows us to save time and money. ### 41. Ready to use! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tyrone H. | Course Director/ Lecturer - Digital Media and Culture, Higher Education, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 20, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** I love the interactivity, particularly for querying procedures. It makes data analysis so powerfully simple. I no longer worry about double checking etc because of the efficiency of the querying capabilities. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** The columnar form is my least favourite. I also wish I could input info more readily in document format and combine. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Don't make the usual mistake of relying on the intuitive nature of the tool to learn how to manipulate it. READ THE MANUAL. Some fantastic little features are highlighted that will make your user-experience so much more meaningful. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am using these to work through data from a multi-country study and it is very useful for our multi-member team. Coordination and productivity concerns are fully under management with Athena, ### 42. very good application for analyzing large data sets **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jamie D. | Data Analyst, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 20, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** I love how versatile it is. You can really easily manage and transform your data into a useful form that maximizes efficiency in the workplace. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** You do need some background knowledge with databases such as SQL to use Amazon Athena. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** I would definitely recommend this product to new start ups looking to merge or implement a new scheme for their data bases and/or data collecting methods. It is very streamline and employees will use this product with ease. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are trying to analyze large scale data regarding our most profitable consumer market and amazon Athena makes it very streamline and easy to implement data structure changes. ### 43. Athena Review **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 04, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** The easiest way to query directly to S3, we usually had to download the data, then upload it to an data base o create a script to make some queries or ETL, now with Athena we just need to define the table and start to query, this save us a lot of time **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** some times i got timeout because my data was too large, maybe it was issue from my side but thats the inly think that I can say **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** This service is so easy for query your data directly to s3, pretty cool for adhoc request from your clients **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** adhoc request, that the clients demands in short time, this kind of situations are being benefits for us ### 44. Great software for SQL database management and for running lengthy SQL queries **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 28, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Athena is very easy to use to manage your database - there are clear areas and dropdown menus for you to select your production environment in addition to the tables you would like to view. Running your SQL queries on Athena is also incredibly simple - you can copy and paste your query into the textbox, and it will give you a nicely formatted table of results with all of the pertinent information you requested. Similar to mySQL Workbench, it will also give you the execution time of the query. Oftentimes, I find it beneficial to use Athena to run some of my more complex and lengthy queries since it is less taxing on our databases. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Logging in does take a little bit more time than normal software applications do due to very cryptic login credentials, but I suppose that is good for enhanced security. The application doesn't look as modern as its competitors - it still feels very old in terms of design, but its functionality is fine and that's what matters on the bottom line. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Definitely consider using Athena if you're in search of a easy to use SQL management system at your company. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using Athena to optimize and run SQL queries against databases amongst different environments. Athena is beneficial due to its ease of use and clarity to users. It is also much less taxing on our databases to run queries on AWS Athena. ### 45. Almost Useful Tool for Non-Operational Processes **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Elizabeth T. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 27, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** All the benefits of an AWS service, for a really awesome open source tool (Presto). The built in examples are great, as expected from Amazon. The integration with Glue, is a huge benefit. The engineering use cases for Athena (like tables over log files locations on S3) work perfectly. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Lack of features at this point is the only downside. The major disadvantage for analytic purposes is the fact that you can't run multiple queries in a single pane. Our analysts like to build out workflows and run several queries in sequence. As far as I can tell, you have to open a different pane for each query. The saved queries and workspaces also don't seem to be set up for multiple users in an account. If we put all 20 of our analysts in there, the UI would be a mess to find anything in. There needs to be more organizational structuring if it is supposed to be a tool for analytic teams to use. As far as operational purposes go, we haven't been able to POC because Glue does not yet support external metastores. There seemed to be some lack in automation from my first glances - cloudformation and holes in IAM. -Example, I could not restrict users from making tables that pointed to the wrong region. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** The ability to quickly query data in s3. We already have Qubole, which allows us to do the same thing and is built out more than Athena - but this is a great tool for getting started if you don't already use Presto with S3. As Amazon continues to build our Athena, I believe it will become the go to tool for this purpose. ### 46. Athena has given me a meaning in life. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alexander W. | Technology Specialist, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** I really like that I do not need to run a standard database and can leverage the infinite scalability of S3 to analyze my data. Providing a JDBC and ODBC driver is extermely helpful for visualizations **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Not much yet.. i really like it. I really really really like it. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Great production to analyze data stored in S3. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** We need to increase the retention of our existing database but do not want to scale out the database cluster. ### 47. AWS athena review **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ankush K. | Data Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 11, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** It's best ever I've ever seen for analyzing the data you have stored in the cloud. You could easily integrate with a data pipeline involving cloud storage for your data. Once your data pipeline is ready it's the best option I've used to do queries on that and you could specify a whole directory or subdirectory on which you would like to perform SQL query or do any other analysis. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** They charge for every query you do. Sometimes the query shows an error and you don't know about the reason for that and you've to raise a ticket to aws support. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Please show error at the same time, waiting for your ticket response is annoying. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Using it in Data pipelines for doing analysis on data. ### 48. AWesome service **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sarang A. | Technical Product Manager, Data Platform, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** The 'serverlessness'' of Athena helps eliminate operational complexity for this use case where predectability of load can be a challenge. Great set of new features this year. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Would have said lack of cost control and access federation but these features have been released recently so looking forward to use them. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using Athena to make data lake accesible to wider audience at our org. ### 49. Athena meets our multi-TB scaling needs **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Shane A. | Principal Engineer I, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 29, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** I really like the serverless aspect of it. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** If something is wrong with it, it's hard to tell what the problem is. There are no logs or helpful error messages. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Being able to provide our customers with access to their data. We've seen the system be able to scale beyond our prior system built on ElasticSearch and at a cheaper cost. ### 50. Great for simple debugging; terrible for analytics **Rating:** 2.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Malina K. | Principal Technical Architect, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon Athena?** Works very well for simple diagnostic queries that process small data samples. Quite useful for general debugging or light data exploration. **What do you dislike about Amazon Athena?** Hard timeouts and large data scans mean that complex analytic queries are a non-starter on Athena. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon Athena:** Great for simple diagnostics. **What problems is Amazon Athena solving and how is that benefiting you?** Has been very useful for debugging ETL pipeline issues. Also good for simple examinations of data in a friendly format. ## 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?page=3§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-08-03+12%3A14%3A01+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=a231d2a1-9bf5-4b3c-b8eb-1b6452ce500d&secure%5Btoken%5D=73913406a757c6c412552cc2488bc853cb5af94753f10112a830e217ddbc8e01&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 (712 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)