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Amazon EMR vs Amazon Redshift comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

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 EMR
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
12th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (3rd)
Amazon Redshift
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon EMR is 3.0%, down from 3.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon Redshift is 6.8%, down from 9.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Prashant  Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamless data integration enhances reporting efficiency and an easy setup
Amazon EMR has multiple connectors that can connect to various data sources. The service charges are based on processing only, depending on the resources used, which can help save money. It is easy to integrate with other services for storage, allowing data to be shifted to cheaper storage based on usage.
Ved Prakash Yadav - PeerSpot reviewer
Works as a data warehouse system and collects data from different sources
In terms of improvement, I believe Amazon Redshift could work on reducing its costs, as they tend to increase significantly. Additionally, there are occasional issues with nodes going down, which can be problematic. We often encounter issues like someone dropping a column or changing the order of columns, which can cause synchronization problems when pushing data through our pipeline. It's a minor issue, but it can be annoying.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is scalable."
"Amazon EMR is a good solution that can be used to manage big data."
"The project management is very streamlined."
"The solution helps us manage huge volumes of data."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"Amazon EMR's most valuable features are processing speed and data storage capacity."
"It allows users to access the data through a web interface."
"We are using applications, such as Splunk, Livy, Hadoop, and Spark. We are using all of these applications in Amazon EMR and they're helping us a lot."
"This service can merge and integrate well with all databases."
"Redshift allows you to transform different data formats and consolidate them into one Redshift cluster. This means you can transform various siloed data sources like Excel files and CSV files into Redshift."
"The ability to reload data multiple times at different times."
"I have primarily used the Redshift Spectrum feature and found it most valuable."
"The solution is easy to set up and use."
"The solution is scalable. It handles different loads very well."
"Redshift COPY command, because much of my work involved helping customers migrate large amounts of data into Redshift."
"Easy to build out our snowflake design and load data."
 

Cons

"We don't have much control. If we have multiple users, if they want to scale up, the cost will go and increase and we don't know how we can restrict that price part."
"Amazon EMR can improve by adding some features, such as megastore services and HiveServer2. Additionally, the user interface could be better, similar to what Apache service provides, cross-platform services."
"There is room for improvement in pricing."
"The product's features for storing data in static clusters could be better."
"There is no need to pay extra for third-party software."
"The most complicated thing is configuring to the cluster and ensure it's running correctly."
"Amazon EMR is continuously improving, but maybe something like CI/CD out-of-the-box or integration with Prometheus Grafana."
"The legacy versions of the solution are not supported in the new versions."
"When working with third-party services requires additional integrations and configurations, which can sometimes add more cost."
"It would be useful to have an option where all of the data can be queried at once and then have the result shown."
"There are too many limitations with respect to concurrency."
"The OLAP slide and dice features need to be improved."
"Improvement in the immediate response and the process of getting into a call could be helpful."
"The product must become a bit more serverless."
"Compatibility with other products, for example, Microsoft and Google, is a bit difficult because each one of them wants to be isolated with their solutions."
"What would make Amazon Redshift better is improvising on the pricing structure. For example, Acronis provides backups in cybersecurity, yet the pricing is a bit lesser than Amazon Redshift."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate the tool's pricing a five out of ten. It can be expensive since it's a managed service, and if you are not careful, you can run into unexpected charges. You can make a mistake that costs you tens of thousands of dollars. That's happened to us twice, so I'm sensitive to it. We're still trying to work on that. Our smallest client probably spends a hundred thousand dollars yearly on licensing, while our largest is well over a million."
"The product is not cheap, but it is not expensive."
"You don't need to pay for licensing on a yearly or monthly basis, you only pay for what you use, in terms of underlying instances."
"Amazon EMR is not very expensive."
"There is a small fee for the EMR system, but major cost components are the underlying infrastructure resources which we actually use."
"The cost of Amazon EMR is very high."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"Amazon EMR's price is reasonable."
"If you want a fixed price, an to not worry about every query, but you need to manage your nodes personally, use Redshift."
"Redshift is very cost effective for a cloud based solution if you need to scale it a lot. For smaller data sizes, I would think about using other products."
"The best part about this solution is the cost."
"One of my customers went with Google Big Query over Redshift because it was significantly cheaper for their project."
"It's not very pricey compared to other tools. I would rate the price as 5 out of 10."
"The product is cheap considering what it provides; I rate it five out of five for affordability."
"I have heard complaints about the solution’s pricing, and thus I rate it as a five."
"BI is sold to our customer base as a part of the initial sales bundle. A customer may elect to opt for a white labeled site for an up-charge."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Educational Organization
7%
Educational Organization
64%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
3%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon EMR?
Amazon EMR is a good solution that can be used to manage big data.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EMR?
The cost of Amazon EMR is a little bit expensive, especially considering the support package, which includes a gold package.
What needs improvement with Amazon EMR?
Spark jobs take longer on Amazon EMR compared to previous experiences. This aspect could be improved to make them more efficient.
How does Amazon Redshift compare with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?
Amazon Redshift is very fast, has a very good response time, and is very user-friendly. The initial setup is very straightforward. This solution can merge and integrate well with many different dat...
What do you like most about Amazon Redshift?
The tool's most valuable feature is its parallel processing capability. It can handle massive amounts of data, even when pushing hundreds of terabytes, and its scaling capabilities are good.
 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic MapReduce
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Yelp
Liberty Mutual Insurance, 4Cite Marketing, BrandVerity, DNA Plc, Sirocco Systems, Gainsight, Blue 449
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EMR vs. Amazon Redshift and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.