--- title: Amazon EMR Reviews meta_title: 'Amazon EMR Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 70 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Amazon EMR works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.2 review_count: 70 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-17' parent_category: name: Big Data url: https://www.g2.com/categories/big-data --- # Amazon EMR Reviews **Vendor:** Amazon Web Services (AWS) **Category:** [Big Data Processing And Distribution Systems](https://www.g2.com/categories/big-data-processing-and-distribution) **Average Rating:** 4.2/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 70 ## About Amazon EMR Amazon EMR is a web-based service that simplifies big data processing, providing a managed Hadoop framework that makes it easy, fast, and cost-effective to distribute and process vast amounts of data across dynamically scalable Amazon EC2 instances. ## Amazon EMR Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users value the **data integration capabilities** of Amazon EMR, effectively handling large datasets from multiple sources. (1 reviews) - Users find Amazon EMR's **ease of use** helpful for running single jobs and obtaining precise error logs. (1 reviews) - Users value the **capability to process large datasets** efficiently, enhancing data handling from multiple sources. (1 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users experience **performance issues** when scaling Amazon EMR, requiring manual tuning to ensure optimal functionality. (1 reviews) - Users experience **poor performance** with slow auto scaling, leading to job failures from insufficient cluster resources. (1 reviews) - Users experience **slow performance** in auto scaling, often leading to job failures from insufficient cluster resources. (1 reviews) ## Amazon EMR Reviews ### 1. Easy Morning Relaxation **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Insurance | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 29, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon EMR?** I love the transient nature of the solution. Easy to spin up, bootstrap with additional services and configurations, and get going. **What do you dislike about Amazon EMR?** No big complaints. Failover of the master could be better. **What problems is Amazon EMR solving and how is that benefiting you?** Batch analysis and transformation for ingest into data lakes and Redshift. ### 2. EMR Review **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon EMR?** The best part of EMR is the auto scaling option. This is highly cost effective. **What do you dislike about Amazon EMR?** Sometimes the scaling is delyed. Whether its upscaling and douwnscaling. The jobs wait for resources and they dont get it **Recommendations to others considering Amazon EMR:** Please enhance the autoscaling timing **What problems is Amazon EMR solving and how is that benefiting you?** Big Data Processing ### 3. Good as long as you aren't in a hurry **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon EMR?** Great for not in memory querying and data access. Powerful for very big data. **What do you dislike about Amazon EMR?** In-memory solutions like Presto are very limited in data size. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon EMR:** Make sure you know your requirements for speed and size. **What problems is Amazon EMR solving and how is that benefiting you?** Joining and filtering internal and external data sets. ### 4. Hadoop cluster deployment made easy **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon EMR?** auto scaling feature, integration of jupyter notebooks, Easy deployment of haoop cluster **What do you dislike about Amazon EMR?** One management node, if the management node goes down, then cluster goes down and the work is lost **What problems is Amazon EMR solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data processing of unstructured data ### 5. Ease of use **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon EMR?** It is easy to use EMR for me as I come from an on-prem background. **What do you dislike about Amazon EMR?** Not sure of which instance to use. Given so many options in the hardware selection. **What problems is Amazon EMR solving and how is that benefiting you?** Machine Learning, Training ### 6. EMR **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 04, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon EMR?** The auto scaling option to evaluate, transform and load the data without need to set up new settings. **What do you dislike about Amazon EMR?** The hard understanding of the user interface. **What problems is Amazon EMR solving and how is that benefiting you?** ETL and process logs ### 7. Easy to Scale Hard to Migrate **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 26, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon EMR?** Eas y to scale based on the latest config **What do you dislike about Amazon EMR?** Its hard to Migrate to a new cluster types, as the Master is still stuck at the initial config. **What problems is Amazon EMR solving and how is that benefiting you?** Real Time Reporting ### 8. EMR **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon EMR?** Flexibility, ease of learning, ease of use **What do you dislike about Amazon EMR?** There really isn't much to dislike yet. We haven't really challenged the product. **What problems is Amazon EMR solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data Ingestion from on prem to AWS S3 and query ### 9. Sqoop and spark operations in EMR **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Marketing and Advertising | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon EMR?** Ability to spin up hadoop clusters and scale them up or down as needed **What do you dislike about Amazon EMR?** Long running EMR cluster ends up with bad nodes **What problems is Amazon EMR solving and how is that benefiting you?** Incremental data pipeline, ETL process using pyspark ### 10. emr **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Semiconductors | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon EMR?** i like that it is fast, and pretty easy to use **What do you dislike about Amazon EMR?** i dont like how its hard to start jupyter notebooks from it **What problems is Amazon EMR solving and how is that benefiting you?** write machine learning models ### 11. Review for AWS EMR **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon EMR?** Managed Hadoop cluster clears a lot of operational hazards and optimizes cost. **What do you dislike about Amazon EMR?** Nothins as such. It has been really nice using amazon EMR **What problems is Amazon EMR solving and how is that benefiting you?** Analytocs ### 12. Amazon EMR **Rating:** 0.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** aditya b. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 25, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon EMR?** make the organization of medical records very easy to process. **What do you dislike about Amazon EMR?** the user interface can be kind of tricky to use. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon EMR:** use it with other software as a complement **What problems is Amazon EMR solving and how is that benefiting you?** makes the organization easier to process ### 13. Best last resort. **Rating:** 2.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 24, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon EMR?** Allows us to handle massive data sets when our local hardware won't allow it. **What do you dislike about Amazon EMR?** Takes a very long time to spin up a cluster, and is relatively expensive. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon EMR:** Requires a decent amount of technical knowledge to get started. **What problems is Amazon EMR solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are solving the problem of handling large amounts of biological data. We are able to more quickly analyze our data using EMR. ### 14. We've moved our hadoop processing here **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chris H. | Test Engineering Manager, Professional Training & Coaching, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 26, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon EMR?** Ease of spinning up clusters on-demand to save $$$ **What do you dislike about Amazon EMR?** Not much! We had a fairly easy tiime getting Spark on EMR running. Was a little troublesome at first, but once we learned the platform, we love it! **What problems is Amazon EMR solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have moved our hadoop/sqoop data processing here. This allows us to offload the MV refresh process we used to have in place inside Oracle, thus saving us valuable throughput and DB load. ### 15. Emergency review **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Food & Beverages | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 24, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon EMR?** I like the way it is organized and easy to use **What do you dislike about Amazon EMR?** Very complex. Felt like the instruction could’ve been explained better **Recommendations to others considering Amazon EMR:** Learn carefully. Group learning **What problems is Amazon EMR solving and how is that benefiting you?** That platform is very organized and easy to use. Learning the gist of this program was easy to follow. ### 16. Pretty good for cloud based Hadoop **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 24, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon EMR?** It's really good for handling fast generating, unstructured data. **What do you dislike about Amazon EMR?** It is not very user friendly and requires massive amounts of memory. **What problems is Amazon EMR solving and how is that benefiting you?** We run Spark jobs on EMR, which are used our machine learning applications for better user recommendations. ### 17. Using Amazon EMR to evaluate the data on Spark networks **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 25, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon EMR?** Very user friendly interface, no need to maintain any libraries **What do you dislike about Amazon EMR?** Does not provide 'on premises' options. It's all setup at launch time. The bootstrapping feature is useful. **What problems is Amazon EMR solving and how is that benefiting you?** Evaluating data on Hadoop networks. Useful statistics generated ### 18. Amazon EMR **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 17, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon EMR?** It is easy to use with lots of documentation available online. Also, with Amazon EMR we can provision one, hundreds, or thousands of compute instances to process data at any scale. It is extremely low cost as well. **What do you dislike about Amazon EMR?** Not much to dislike. We faced issues initially going through the documentation to set up EM clusters. **What problems is Amazon EMR solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using Amazon EMR t process huge dataset withing no time ### 19. Easy way to run Big data applications in the cloud **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 20, 2017 **What do you like best about Amazon EMR?** Amazon EMR is easy to setup and use. There are plenty of ways to get started, such as the AWS EMR console, or you can automate the whole thing using AWS command line tool awscli, or the boto3 api for Python. We use a combination of awscli and boto3 for automation. It provides best in class tools built in, and integration with other amazon services such as s3 for data as well as log aggregation, etc. It also provides a way to use AWS EC2 Spot instances, which reduce the cost to run Map Reduce jobs by 50-80% on average. **What do you dislike about Amazon EMR?** There are no major dislikes about EMR, but in general, they could provide more options to monitor the cluster, and also provide ways to troubleshoot the failed jobs and provide ways to recover failed jobs. But Amazon is going in the right direction and hope they address those things as well. **Recommendations to others considering Amazon EMR:** If you are on AWS and looking to run Hadoop/Spark, look no further than Amazon EMR, and it might save a lot of time in setting up your cluster, and helps you focus more on the application business logic than worrying about the infrastructure configuration and setup. **What problems is Amazon EMR solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use EMR primarily for data analytics and big data processing using Spark, Hadoop and we also use S3 for storing the output. ### 20. Cloud is everything. **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 10, 2018 **What do you like best about Amazon EMR?** Working environment, all in one platform. **What do you dislike about Amazon EMR?** Complexity and if anything fails whole system goes down **What problems is Amazon EMR solving and how is that benefiting you?** Instances and cloud data. User friendly. ## Amazon EMR Discussions - [What is Amazon EMR used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-amazon-emr-used-for) - [What is the main use of EMR in AWS?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-the-main-use-of-emr-in-aws) - [When should I use Amazon EMR?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/when-should-i-use-amazon-emr) - [How do I use Amazon EMR?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/how-do-i-use-amazon-emr) - [What is Amazon EMR?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-amazon-emr) - [View Amazon EMR pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-emr/reviews?page=2§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-30+10%3A36%3A12+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=8f88a228-b710-40d6-9611-f2e912a475be&secure%5Btoken%5D=97e60913b5a325248293d3d16953d0001bef4736101f63ce73dc28b6c4669bfb&format=llm_user) ## Amazon EMR Integrations - [Amazon CloudWatch](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-cloudwatch/reviews) - [Amazon S3 Glacier](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-s3-glacier/reviews) - [Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-simple-email-service-amazon-ses/reviews) - [AWS Glue](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-glue/reviews) - [AWS Lambda](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-lambda/reviews) - [AWS Step Functions](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-step-functions/reviews) ## Amazon EMR Features **Database** - Real-Time Data Collection - Data Distribution - Data Lake **Integrations** - Hadoop Integration - Spark Integration **Platform** - Machine Scaling - Data Preparation - Spark Integration **Processing** - Cloud Processing - Workload Processing **Building Reports** - Data Transformation - Data Modeling - WYSIWYG Report Design - Integration APIs **Platform** - Mobile User Support - Customization - User, Role, and Access Management - Internationalization - Sandbox / Test Environments - Performance and Reliability - Breadth of Partner Applications ## Top Amazon EMR Alternatives - [Databricks](https://www.g2.com/products/databricks/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (1,326 reviews) - [Snowflake](https://www.g2.com/products/snowflake/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (711 reviews) - [Qubole](https://www.g2.com/products/qubole/reviews) - 4.0/5.0 (237 reviews)