--- 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: '2026-07-17' 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 value the **seamless data analysis** capabilities of Amazon Athena for processing S3 stored data efficiently. (1 reviews) - Users find that Athena is a perfect choice for **efficiently handling big data** stored in S3 for analysis. (1 reviews) - Users find Amazon Athena ideal for **data analysis** on S3, streamlining their analytics processes with ease. (1 reviews) - Users find Amazon Athena to have an **intuitive interface** , making it accessible for both tech and non-tech individuals. (1 reviews) - Users appreciate the **user-friendly interface** of Amazon Athena, making it simple 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 find the **query and update limitations** of Amazon Athena unhelpful for their data management needs. (1 reviews) - Users find the **limited SQL capabilities** of Amazon Athena hinder their ability to effectively query and update data. (1 reviews) - Users find **poor usability** in Amazon Athena when querying data and making updates, hindering their overall experience. (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 AI Engineer, Apparel & Fashion, 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. ## 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/amazon-athena-review-7631830?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-17+02%3A05%3A50+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=ce469fd3-d7df-4c14-9814-3cb794ffa00f&secure%5Btoken%5D=3e5e8f269347d54eb7e88bb81cf45bba9ecdc116343b5b9e2cc2067516dd3e7c&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 (706 reviews) - [Microsoft SQL Server](https://www.g2.com/products/microsoft-sql-server/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (2,128 reviews) - [DBeaver](https://www.g2.com/products/dbeaver/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (168 reviews)