AWS Lake Formation vs Amazon EMR comparison

Amazon EMR and AWS Lake Formation are both solutions in the Cloud Data Warehouse category. Amazon EMR is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.0, while AWS Lake Formation is ranked #13 with an average rating of 7.3. Amazon EMR holds a 3.3% mindshare in CDW, compared to AWS Lake Formation’s 5.2% mindshare. Additionally, 86% of Amazon EMR users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 71% of AWS Lake Formation users who would recommend it.

Amazon EMR

Read 23 Amazon EMR reviews

1,423 Views
1,194 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

AWS Lake Formation

Read 8 AWS Lake Formation reviews

2,300 Views
1,944 Comparison Views

71% willing to recommend

Amazon EMR

AWS Lake Formation

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

Amazon EMR and AWS Lake Formation compete in the big data and cloud storage domain. AWS Lake Formation seems to have the upper hand in data governance and security, making it appealing for organizations with such priorities.

Features: Amazon EMR offers rapid data processing, flexibility in choosing processing frameworks like Spark and Hive, and integration with various data sources. AWS Lake Formation focuses on data lake management, providing fine-grained access controls, data security features, and a simplified setup process integrating well with the AWS ecosystem.

Room for Improvement: Amazon EMR could improve its user interface for easier configuration and reduce complexity for new users. Enhanced automated scaling features would benefit users handling fluctuating workloads. Improved documentation could assist users encountering challenges. AWS Lake Formation could enhance integration with more third-party tools, provide more customization options, and expand its set of workflow templates for complex data operations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon EMR integrates seamlessly into existing AWS infrastructures, offering extensive customization and scaling options, but its complexity can be challenging. AWS Lake Formation simplifies deployment with guided workflows, making it user-friendly for non-experts. Both products offer robust support, though Lake Formation's guided workflows provide an edge in terms of user-friendliness.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon EMR's pay-as-you-go model can be cost-effective for extensive data processing tasks but may incur higher operational costs due to complexity. AWS Lake Formation aims to reduce data governance overhead costs, presenting better ROI for organizations prioritizing cost-efficiency, security, and streamlined operations.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS Lake Formation vs. Amazon EMR Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

AWS Lake Formation vs. Amazon EMR

March 2025

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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

Ranking in other categories

Hadoop (3rd)

AWS Lake Formation

Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse

13th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

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 AWS Lake Formation is 5.2%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Data Warehouse

Featured Reviews

Prashant Singh

Vice President -Product Management at Paytm

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.

Read full review

Ramesh Raghavan

US South Lead, Accenture AWS Business Group at Accenture

Centralized repository, offers various cataloging mechanisms for quick data retrieval but data governance capabilities could be better

There are a couple of areas for improvement with Lake Formation. One of the main challenges, especially when dealing with rich media content, like in MarTech (Marketing Technology) or ad agencies, is its versatility. Some clients feel that Lake Formation doesn’t meet their needs and they tend to prefer competitor products for those specific use cases. The second area for improvement is in data governance. Specifically, Lake Formation could enhance its capabilities in audit logs, real-time monitoring, and advanced data governance. This includes managing the entire data lineage—where the data originated, how it moves, and where it’s currently stored. The visibility of the data as it evolves is crucial, and that’s where more advanced governance capabilities would be beneficial.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has a variety of options and support systems."

"The solution is scalable."

"In Amazon EMR it is easy to rebuild anything, easy to upgrade and has good fault tolerance."

"The ability to resize the cluster is what really makes it stand out over other Hadoop and big data solutions."

"Amazon EMR is a good solution that can be used to manage big data."

"The project management is very streamlined."

"The security of the managed workflow and the managed services are the best features for us. Since we inherited their security model and it's all managed services, those are the key benefits for our clients."

"One of the valuable features about this solution is that it's managed services, so it's pretty stable, and scalable as much as you wish. It has all the necessary distributions. With some additional work, it's also possible to change to a Spark version with the latest version of EMR. It also has Hudi, so we are leveraging Apache Hudi on EMR for change data capture, so then it comes out-of-the-box in EMR."

More Amazon EMR pros

"The most important advantage in using AWS Lake Formation is its ability to connect the data lake to the other technologies in AWS. This is what I advise my clients."

"We use AWS Lake Formation typically for the data warehouse."

"AWS Lake Formation lets you see all your data and tables on one screen."

"I can easily move data from cold storage to regular storage."

"It is seamlessly integrated within the AWS ecosystem, making it straightforward to manage access patterns for AWS-native services."

"The solution has many features that are applicable to events such as audits."

"AWS Lake Formation works hand in hand with other products."

"The solution is quite good at handling analytics. It's done a good job at helping us centralize them."

Cons

"The product must add some of the latest technologies to provide more flexibility to the users."

"The initial setup was time-consuming."

"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."

"Modules and strategies should be better handled and notified early in advance."

"There is room for improvement in pricing."

"There is no need to pay extra for third-party software."

"The problem for us is it starts very slow."

"The legacy versions of the solution are not supported in the new versions."

More Amazon EMR cons

"You need to have data experience to use the product."

"The solution could make improvements around orchestration and doing some automation stuff on AWS front automation. It would be useful if we could use automation to build images and use hardened images which are CIS compliant."

"For the end-users, it's not as user-friendly as it could be."

"If I could improve AWS Lake Formation, I would add more integrations with SageMaker."

"AWS Lake Formation's pricing could be cheaper."

"Lake Formation could enhance its capabilities in audit logs, real-time monitoring, and advanced data governance."

"It falls short when it comes to more granular access control, such as cell-level or row-level entitlements which is a significant drawback for organizations that require precise control over who can access specific rows of data."

"In our experience what could be improved are not the support, performance or monitoring, but at a managerial level, the very expensive professional services of AWS. This could be an area of improvement for them. It's too expensive to acquire their support."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is not cheap, but it is not 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."

"Amazon EMR is not very expensive."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"Amazon EMR's price is reasonable."

"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."

"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."

More Amazon EMR pricing and cost advice

"AWS Lake Formation is a bit expensive."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

26%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Government

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What do you like most about AWS Lake Formation?

It is seamlessly integrated within the AWS ecosystem, making it straightforward to manage access patterns for AWS-native services.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Lake Formation?

The pricing is expensive compared to OpenStack, but cheaper than other cloud environments. It's middle-of-the-road for regular storage yet very cost-effective when using Amazon Glacier for data.

See all answers

What needs improvement with AWS Lake Formation?

If I could improve AWS Lake Formation, I would add more integrations with SageMaker. I would have built-in functions that provide statistics for the data when using the GUI, such as SageMaker Insig...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 37% of the time

Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop vs Amazon EMR

Compared 27% of the time

Amazon Redshift vs Amazon EMR

Compared 8% of the time

Apache Spark vs Amazon EMR

Compared 7% of the time

Azure Data Factory vs Amazon EMR

Compared 4% of the time

More Amazon EMR Competitors

Snowflake vs AWS Lake Formation

Compared 38% of the time

Amazon Redshift vs AWS Lake Formation

Compared 18% of the time

Azure Data Factory vs AWS Lake Formation

Compared 18% of the time

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs AWS Lake Formation

Compared 12% of the time

More AWS Lake Formation Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EMR

April 2025

Download Amazon EMR product report

Buyer's Guide

AWS Lake Formation

April 2025

Download AWS Lake Formation product report

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic MapReduce

No data available

Overview

Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) is a web service that makes it easy to quickly and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. Amazon EMR simplifies big data processing, providing a managed Hadoop framework that makes it easy, fast, and cost-effective for you to distribute and process vast amounts of your data across dynamically scalable Amazon EC2 instances.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS Lake Formation is a service that makes it easy to set up a secure data lake in days. A data lake is a centralized, curated, and secured repository that stores all your data, both in its original form and prepared for analysis.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Sample Customers

Yelp

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday

Buyer's Guide

AWS Lake Formation vs. Amazon EMR

March 2025

Free Report: AWS Lake Formation vs. Amazon EMR

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