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Amazon Athena vs Elastic Search comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Athena
Ranking in Search as a Service
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Elastic Search
Ranking in Search as a Service
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
87
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (6th), Vector Databases (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon Athena is 5.5%, down from 12.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Elastic Search is 18.5%, up from 13.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Search18.5%
Amazon Athena5.5%
Other76.0%
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

Ciro Baldim Guerra - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Analytics Engineer at Itau Unibanco S.A.
Have struggled with exporting complex data and have disabled code suggestions due to inefficiency
I think there is room for improvement in Amazon Athena, and the first thing I will put is the data output. I use Python to query in Amazon Athena, and it's very complex and difficult just to save Amazon Athena results as an Excel file. The only option is copying the data, but sometimes if it exceeds 100 lines, if you copy and paste in Excel, it's very bad. You can't copy above 100 lines. The other option is downloading a CSV file, but the CSV file is not UTF-8 Unicode. Here in Brazil, we speak Portuguese, and there are a lot of special characters in the words and even names, and everything gets garbled when you put it in a CSV. You have to decode, encode, and there are a lot of problems. It could easily save as an Excel file since there are a lot of engines to help with it, so an XLSX file extension could be this way. Another point I would mention is the word completion. When I'm coding and making statements and queries, Amazon Athena tries to help me write the code, and that's very problematic. Sometimes I'm using some tables that I use every day, and Amazon Athena doesn't get the tables I'm using and suggests very improbable data. I have access to more than 30 databases and hundreds of tables. So, I turn it off, I disable the word completion because when I'm coding, the word completion makes the coding slower. It's very difficult, and every time I have to press escape to skip the completion. It's very ineffective, so I disable it because in other applications it functions very well, such as VS Code.
MichaelSmith9 - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Unified search has powered feature‑driven research with minimal maintenance overhead
We haven't had the opportunity to use the hybrid search with Elastic Search yet. I think there's a place for it in our long-term solution, but we're not quite there yet. We haven't yet used any AI features built into Elastic Search. To do what we want to do with Elastic Search, the queries can get complex and require a fuller understanding of the DSL. Once we start to build that understanding, it's another muscle we have, so it's not a bad thing, but it just takes a while to get up and running with expertise for our engineers. It's not hard to learn how to use more complex things in Elastic Search; it's just a challenge we're going to face.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Amazon Athena works for scalability; I query data using tagged data that uses user usage of applications that contain very big data, millions and billions of lines, and it works very well."
"One of the most valuable features is the ability to partition your databases. I also like the federal query functionality, for cases when you have to query outside your S3 storage, or even completely outside of the AWS platform."
"Amazon Athena is very stable. I never had any issues with it. The dashboarding tool is okay."
"The solution is very easy to use and integrations are very smooth."
"It's easy to set up the product."
"Athena has a really good UI and is very compatible with on-prem products."
"Decision-making has become much faster due to real-time data and quick responses."
"I would recommend Elastic Search to other people who want to have fast search in their applications."
"My favorite feature is the ease of use, particularly in how you integrate the agent; I've been using it since version 7, and we're on version 9 now, and I've seen the progress from using Beats to using the agent, making it so simple today to enroll a server with the Elastic Agent."
"A good use case is saving metadata of your systems for data cataloging. Various systems, like those opened in metadata and similar applications, use Elasticsearch to store their text data."
"I like how it allows us to connect to Kafka and get this data in a document format very easily. Elasticsearch is very fast when you do text-based searches of documents. That area is very good, and the search is very good."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its utility and usefulness."
"Helps us to store the data in key value pairs and, based on that, we can produce visualisations in Kibana."
"It provides deep visibility into your cloud and distributed applications, from microservices to serverless architectures. It quickly identifies and resolves the root causes of issues, like gaining visibility into all the cloud-based and on-prem applications."
 

Cons

"One improvement I can suggest is that Athena needs to work better with third-parties. For example, the process of querying a Microsoft SQL warehouse could be improved."
"The solution should include a better API for query services."
"You have to build out the metadata yourself because of the nature of the cloud."
"I think it would be better if the product were more mature. It's still a young product compared to Power BI or Qlik. I find that development is a bit difficult, but it might be because I'm used to other tools. The dashboarding capabilities could be better. The reporting and statement generation could be better. I couldn't technically initiate picture-perfect reporting, for example, to send out statements every month for banking customers."
"If you compare it with Palantir, if you have some data and you want to quickly have a look at it, then that feature is not available in Amazon Cloud."
"We'd like more user-friendly integrations."
"The documentation for Elastic Search can be challenging if you're not already familiar with the platform."
"They should improve its documentation. Their official documentation is not very informative. They can also improve their technical support. They don't help you much with the customized stuff. They also need to add more visuals. Currently, they have line charts, bar charts, and things like that, and they can add more types of visuals. They should also improve the alerts. They are not very simple to use and are a bit complex. They could add more options to the alerting system."
"Elasticsearch could improve by honoring Unix environmental variables and not relying only on those provided by Java (e.g. installing plugins over the Unix http proxy)."
"Dashboards could be more flexible, and it would be nice to provide more drill-down capabilities."
"I have not explored Elastic Search at the most. Searching from vector DB is available in Elastic Search, and there is one more concept of graph searching or graph database searching. I have not explored it, but if it is not there, that would be an improvement area where Elastic Search can improve."
"Elastic Search needs to improve its technical support. It should be customer-friendly and have good support."
"We see the need for some improvements with Elasticsearch. We would like the Elasticsearch package to include training lessons for our staff."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Athena is very inexpensive for being a cloud tool."
"It doesn't cost much if you are already part of the AWS ecosystem."
"I am happy with what they are charging and how they charge it, especially because they charge you per query, and not per series."
"The solution operates on a serverless model so you only pay for data that you consume."
"There is a free version, and there is also a hosted version for which you have to pay. We're currently using the free version. If things go well, we might go for the paid version."
"We are using the free open-sourced version of this solution."
"The price could be better."
"We are using the Community Edition because Elasticsearch's licensing model is not flexible or suitable for us. They ask for an annual subscription. We also got the development consultancy from Elasticsearch for 60 days or something like that, but they were just trying to do the same trick. That's why we didn't purchase it. We are just using the Community Edition."
"An X-Pack license is more affordable than Splunk."
"The pricing model is questionable and needs to be addressed because when you would like to have the security they charge per machine."
"I rate Elastic Search's pricing an eight out of ten."
"The price of Elastic Enterprise is very, very competitive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise42
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon Athena?
I don't have any specific answer on how Amazon Athena can be improved. This integration is more on the Glue side rather than on Amazon Athena, I would guess. Nothing comes to my mind here. In terms...
What is your primary use case for Amazon Athena?
The typical use case for Amazon Athena is that we have data in a data lake, and if we need to query the data from the data lake, we use Amazon Athena before it gets to the data warehouse where we w...
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon Athena?
I have experience of integration of Amazon Athena with AWS Glue. I think the pricing of Amazon Athena is quite reasonable as we use it in pay-as-you-go mode. On a scale from one to ten, I rate Amaz...
What do you like most about ELK Elasticsearch?
Logsign provides us with the capability to execute multiple queries according to our requirements. The indexing is very high, making it effective for storing and retrieving logs. The real-time anal...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
Elastic Search's pricing totally depends on the server. Managed services from AWS are used, and we have worked on a self-managed Elastic Search cluster. On the AWS side, it is very expensive becaus...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
To be honest, there is only one downside of Elastic Search that makes sense because we use a basic license, which is a free license. We do not have some features available because of the free licen...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
T-Mobile, Adobe, Booking.com, BMW, Telegraph Media Group, Cisco, Karbon, Deezer, NORBr, Labelbox, Fingerprint, Relativity, NHS Hospital, Met Office, Proximus, Go1, Mentat, Bluestone Analytics, Humanz, Hutch, Auchan, Sitecore, Linklaters, Socren, Infotrack, Pfizer, Engadget, Airbus, Grab, Vimeo, Ticketmaster, Asana, Twilio, Blizzard, Comcast, RWE and many others.
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Athena vs. Elastic Search and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
880,490 professionals have used our research since 2012.