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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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.3
Companies using Amazon EMR often experience significant ROI, with savings up to 20% and substantial returns over on-premise systems.
Sentiment score
6.2
Amazon Redshift offers mixed returns; beneficial for high data volumes, but concerns arise over rising costs and limited data effectiveness.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.6
Amazon EMR support is generally proactive and efficient, but experiences vary, especially during open-source product integration.
Sentiment score
6.8
Amazon Redshift's support is responsive but costly, with quick responses for routine issues, though advanced support can be inconsistent.
They help with billing, cost determination, IAM properties, security compliance, and deployment and migration activities.
It's costly when you enable support.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Amazon EMR effectively scales to enterprise needs, with auto-scaling and adaptability, despite occasional peak demand resource allocation delays.
Sentiment score
7.3
Amazon Redshift is generally praised for scalability, though experience varies with larger clusters and specific configurations.
Scalability can be provisioned using the auto-scaling feature, EC2 instances, on-demand instances, and storage locations like block storage, S3, or file storage.
The scalability part needs improvement as the sizing requires trial and error.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon EMR is generally stable and reliable, despite occasional data-related stability issues, with robust failover and monitoring features.
Sentiment score
7.4
Amazon Redshift is praised for stability, high availability, and performance, despite occasional challenges with complex queries and environment changes.
Regular updates, patch installations, monitoring, logging, alerting, and disaster recovery activities are crucial for maintaining stability.
Amazon Redshift is a stable product, and I would rate it nine or ten out of ten for stability.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon EMR struggles with a steep learning curve, complex configurations, unpredictable costs, and needs enhancements in stability and support.
Amazon Redshift faces challenges in performance, integration, cost, and compatibility, needing improvements in speed, security, and serverless options.
There is room for improvement with respect to retries, handling the volume of data on S3 buckets, cluster provisioning, scaling, termination, security, and integration between services like S3, Glue, Lake Formation, and DynamoDB.
They should bring the entire ETL data management process into Amazon Redshift.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EMR's costs vary by resources used, with potential high monthly expenses, requiring careful management to prevent surprises.
Amazon Redshift offers competitive pricing for large enterprises, but smaller organizations might find it more costly than alternatives.
Cost optimization can be achieved through instance usage, cluster sharing, and auto-scaling.
The cost of technical support is high.
It's a pretty good price and reasonable for the product quality.
The pricing of Amazon Redshift is expensive.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EMR is scalable, easy to use, cost-effective, integrates well with Hadoop, and supports diverse analytics applications.
Amazon Redshift provides scalable, efficient data processing with AWS integration, offering robust analytics, security, and user-friendly features.
Amazon EMR helps in scalability, real-time and batch processing of data, handling efficient data sources, and managing data lakes, data stores, and data marts on file systems and in S3 buckets.
Amazon Redshift's performance optimization and scalability are quite helpful, providing functionalities such as scaling up and down.
Scalability is also a strong point; I can scale it however I want without any limitations.
Security configurations are implemented across all processes, such as AWS Config and GuardDuty.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EMR
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
12th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
23
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
70
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon EMR is 3.3%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon Redshift is 7.2%, down from 9.2% 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.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
8%
Educational Organization
64%
Financial Services Firm
6%
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: March 2025.
847,772 professionals have used our research since 2012.