Amazon EMR vs Firebolt comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Firebolt are both solutions in the Cloud Data Warehouse category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.0, while Firebolt is ranked #15 with an average rating of 9.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 3.3% mindshare in CDW, compared to Firebolt’s 0.4% mindshare. Additionally, 86% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Firebolt users who would recommend it.

Amazon EMR

Read 23 Amazon EMR reviews

1,423 Views
1,194 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

Firebolt

Read 1 Firebolt review

272 Views
144 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon EMR

Firebolt

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon EMR and Firebolt based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Microsoft, Google and others in Cloud Data Warehouse.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloud Data Warehouse Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Data Warehouse

April 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)

Firebolt

Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse

15th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

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 Firebolt is 0.4%, up from 0.4% 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

Iqbal Hossain Raju

Junior Software Engineer at IQVIA

Can quickly query it to generate quick results

We have used Snowflake before. We support both. Firebolt has better performance, executing queries much quicker than Snowflake. However, Snowflake has more functionality. Depending on the client's needs, we can recommend the best option. Firebolt is a relatively new technology. Snowflake has many functionalities. Firebolt does not support unloading data to S3. There is no built-in way to do this in Firebolt. Alternatively, the data can be retrieved using API calls and loaded to S3 manually. Data can be unloaded to S3 directly using Snowflake. Firebolt significantly improves our performance over Snowflake because it takes less time to execute queries. This is especially important for our company because we use some KPIs that require fast loading times.

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

"The solution helps us manage huge volumes of data."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"The solution is scalable."

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

"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."

"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."

"The solution is pretty simple to set up."

"This is the best tool for hosts and it's really flexible and scalable."

More Amazon EMR pros

"Firebolt is fast for analytical purposes. For example, we have analytical data in our data warehouse, and Firebolt can quickly query it to generate quick results."

Cons

"There were times where they would release new versions and it seemed to end up breaking old versions, which is very strange."

"The product's features for storing data in static clusters could be better."

"There is room for improvement in pricing."

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

"The solution can become expensive if you are not careful."

"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."

"Spark jobs take longer on Amazon EMR compared to previous experiences."

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

More Amazon EMR cons

"Firebolt's engine takes a long time to start because it needs to make engine calls."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a small fee for the EMR system, but major cost components are the underlying infrastructure resources which we actually use."

"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."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"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."

"Amazon EMR's price is reasonable."

"The cost of Amazon EMR is very high."

"Amazon EMR is not very expensive."

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

More Amazon EMR pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

26%

Computer Software Company

14%

Educational Organization

Manufacturing Company

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

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 Firebolt?

Firebolt is fast for analytical purposes. For example, we have analytical data in our data warehouse, and Firebolt can quickly query it to generate quick results.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Firebolt?

Firebolt's engine takes a long time to start because it needs to make engine calls. Currently, the data size of Firebolt is small. It can be increased.

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Firebolt?

One way to retrieve data from firewalls is to add query parameters to the connection string. For example, you can use the REST API to retrieve the security query. Some firewalls have been deployed ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Snowflake vs Amazon EMR

Compared 37% of the time

Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop vs Amazon EMR

Compared 28% of the time

Amazon Redshift vs Amazon EMR

Compared 8% of the time

Apache Spark vs Amazon EMR

Compared 7% of the time

AWS Lake Formation vs Amazon EMR

Compared 5% of the time

More Amazon EMR Competitors

Snowflake vs Firebolt

Compared 100% of the time

More Firebolt Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EMR

April 2025

Download Amazon EMR product report

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Data Warehouse

April 2025

Download Firebolt 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)

Firebolt is a cloud-native data warehouse that enables organizations to process massive amounts of data at lightning-fast speeds. This is achieved through its unique architecture that utilizes a cloud-native approach, allowing for elastic scaling and parallel processing.

Firebolt helps organizations with a scalable and cost-effective solution for their data warehousing needs. It eliminates the need for expensive hardware and maintenance costs associated with traditional data warehouses. Firebolt's real-time analytics capabilities also enable businesses to make data-driven decisions quickly, giving them a competitive edge in their respective industries.

Firebolt

Sample Customers

Yelp

Information Not Available

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