AWS Database Migration Service vs AWS Glue comparison

AWS Database Migration Service and AWS Glue are both solutions in the Cloud Data Integration category. AWS Database Migration Service is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.1, while AWS Glue is ranked #1 with an average rating of 7.6. AWS Database Migration Service holds a 17.1% mindshare in CDI, compared to AWS Glue’s 21.3% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of AWS Database Migration Service users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of AWS Glue users who would recommend it.

AWS Database Migration Service

Read 31 AWS Database Migration Service reviews

4,892 Views
4,104 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

AWS Glue

Read 49 AWS Glue reviews

7,339 Views
5,504 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

AWS Database Migration Service

AWS Glue

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

AWS Database Migration Service and AWS Glue operate in the field of data management and transformation within the AWS ecosystem. AWS Glue holds an advantage with its comprehensive integration and ETL features, making it suitable for complex workflows, despite AWS Database Migration Service's appealing simplicity and cost.

Features: AWS Database Migration Service provides essential database migration capabilities, such as minimal downtime, automatic failovers, and reliable service stability. AWS Glue offers advanced ETL capabilities, extensive integration with AWS services, and a robust data cataloging system, positioning it for complex data workflows.

Room for Improvement: AWS Database Migration Service could benefit from enhanced flexibility for custom migration requirements and expanded support for additional database systems. AWS Glue would improve from simplifying its initial setup process and offering cost-effective solutions for smaller-scale operations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: AWS Database Migration Service is praised for its straightforward deployment and configuration, simplifying database transitions. AWS Glue offers extensive automation but has a steeper learning curve. Both services provide strong customer support, but the simplicity of AWS Database Migration Service makes it more user-friendly initially.

Pricing and ROI: AWS Database Migration Service is typically more cost-effective for straightforward database migrations due to its pay-as-you-go pricing model. AWS Glue may involve higher costs due to its extensive features but offers significant ROI for data transformation and preparation needs. Pricing varies based on specific usage scenarios, making the choice largely dependent on the complexity and scale of the workload involved.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS Database Migration Service vs. AWS Glue Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

AWS Database Migration Service vs. AWS Glue

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

AWS Database Migration Service

Ranking in Cloud Data Integration

2nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

AWS Glue

Ranking in Cloud Data Integration

1st

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud Data Integration category, the mindshare of AWS Database Migration Service is 17.1%, up from 15.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Glue is 21.3%, down from 21.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Data Integration

Featured Reviews

Avinash Gangu

Lead Architect at Fracral

Centralizing database tables enhances workflow efficiency for ease of use

I was looking for some content as part of a comparison analysis. However, one of the pain points is that it is way too free-flowing. I have to skim through all the security pages to get to the crux of it. I was looking for a table that suggests which facets such services address with proofs of reference from professional conferences. The document is a 63-page read, making it very difficult to navigate without a summary. I was looking for a summary at the start, however, if I have to do it myself, I might as well integrate from AWS Docs and then Informative Exchange. The current document contains a lot of information, which is great, but there needs to be a summary indicating the story's essence. Unless there's a correction, it is not present in the document.

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Muthuvel Sivaraman

AVP at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Handles a huge volume of data and is serverless, but it can be considered costly by some users

We use Amazon's services to provide technical support for the product. If you want to have support, Oracle and others offer a single support, and other tools have a direct support window. For Amazon, we need to pay 10 percent of my billing amount for the tool to get support services. Whether to raise a support ticket or not is an issue since ten percent is a huge amount. My company ends up using all the options without help from support. It is very difficult for any common man to understand why there is a need to pay ten percent for support. If I find an issue in the product, and I need to get support from AWS to fix it, then I need to pay ten percent of the tool's bill amount to Amazon. AWS is a very tricky tool because everything is evolving nowadays. AWS engineers are getting hired from other places, and even after that, if I am not getting any technical support, then things will be very nasty. There are some good engineers who help users outside the normal support cycle, but it doesn't meet their needs. I rate the technical support a four out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's scalable."

"The initial setup is very straightforward."

"We particularly like that this solution has the facility to integrate with all ETL tools."

"It's pretty useful when we need to migrate something big from a different type of database that AWS Data Migration Services supports."

"I am very impressed by the scalability of AWS Database Migration Service."

"DMS's architecture is highly beneficial, allowing for scalable migrations of large datasets."

"The product is cheaper than all platforms"

"AWS Database Migration Service is good for smaller workloads and provides compatibility."

More AWS Database Migration Service pros

"The most valuable feature of AWS Glue is scalability."

"It's very good to manage."

"AWS Glue is a stable and easy-to-use solution."

"AWS Glue is fast and managed by AWS. Hence, you don't have to worry about capacity and the performance of Glue jobs. It has integrations with other data stores of AWS. The product offers metadata management, logging, and ETL processing capabilities. It comes with a powerful feature, Glue Studio, which helps to do queries interactively within the community. It is a managed service and very secure. Another popular and mature service is S3."

"AWS Glue's most valuable features include its transformation capabilities, which provide data quality and shape for processing in ML or AI models."

"The solution is stable and reliable."

"Glue is a NoSQL-based data ETL tool that has some advantages over IIS and ISAs."

"The solution is highly user-friendly, and its features are easy to use. The new addition of AWS Glue Data Catalog is also very beneficial, making the tool even more helpful for its users."

More AWS Glue pros

Cons

"I think that Amazon needs to improve the migration scenarios after analytics"

"Sometimes we encounter errors, and the error messages from DMS are very ambiguous and sometimes misleading."

"The initial setup can be difficult for beginners in AWS Database Migration Service. You will need the training to complete it."

"This solution can offer more tweaks where the latency can be brought down to fifteen seconds."

"Database Migration Service could be more integrated. I think that it makes sense to add integration to these functions. For example, AWS Glue has a feature called Orchestrator to create data flows, and that's more straightforward."

"The names of the services need improvement since AWS doesn't indicate what the function of the product is presently. You need to read a lot to find the service that you want in the product."

"Migrating from here and pushing the data from on-premise to AWS cloud is a big challenge and a few more services from AWS would be helpful. For example, we are currently using ILDB internet tools which move data from on-premise to the AWS cloud. A few more services would be really helpful for me to move the master data."

"The cost is a concern. We use DMS because of its simplicity, but the price could definitely be more competitive."

More AWS Database Migration Service cons

"In the building and deployment aspects, there is room for improvement. The current process is a bit complicated and could benefit from being more user-friendly and simpler, which would help speed up the deployment process."

"AWS Glue's error handling is difficult."

"The solution should offer features for streaming data in addition to batching data."

"Improvements in the UI are needed, as it is challenging to understand some functionalities."

"There is a learning curve to this tool."

"On occasion, the solution's dashboard reports that a project failed due to runtime but it actually succeeded."

"It would be better if it were more user-friendly. The interesting thing we found is that it was a little strange at the beginning. The way Glue works is not very straightforward. After trying different things, for example, we used just the console to create jobs. Then we realized that things were not working as expected. After researching and learning more, we realized that even though the console creates the script for the ETL processes, you need to modify or write your own script in Spark to do everything you want it to do. For example, we are pulling data from our source database and our application database, which is in Aurora. From there, we are doing the ETL to transform the data and write the results into Redshift. But what was surprising is that it's almost like whatever you want to do, you can do it with Glue because you have the option to put together your own script. Even though there are many functionalities and many connections, you have the opportunity to write your own queries to do whatever transformations you need to do. It's a little deceiving that some options are supposed to work in a certain way when you set them up in the console, but then they are not exactly working the right way or not as expected. It would be better if they provided more examples and more documentation on options."

"I have encountered challenges with multi-region support."

More AWS Glue cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing for the solution is reasonable, but could still be reduced."

"I rate the product price a seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is a high price, and ten is a low price."

"AWS Database Migration Service is the least expensive solution, but is still expensive."

"I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten."

"The pricing is on the higher side."

"Pricing can be improved."

"Cost is the only factor that is challenging."

"The pricing can be better and it should be more competitive."

More AWS Database Migration Service pricing and cost advice

"I rate pricing an eight out of ten."

"AWS Glue is quite costly, especially for small organizations."

"AWS Glue uses a pay-as-you-go approach which is helpful. The price of the overall solution is low and is a great advantage."

"I rate the tool an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is expensive, and ten is expensive."

"I rate the product's pricing a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is a high price, and ten is a low price."

"Technical support is a paid service, and which subscription you have is dependent on that. You must pay one of them, and it ranges from $15,000 to $25,000 per year."

"It is not expensive. AWS Glue works on the serverless architecture. We get charged for the time the server is up. For our use case, we have to use it once in a day, and it is not expensive for us."

"The solution's pricing is based on DPUs so it is a good idea to optimize use or it can get expensive."

More AWS Glue pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

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 resources can you use to learn how to utilize AWS Database Migration Service?

As with all AWS products, you are given very useful documentation with AWS Database Migration Service. Before we started using this product, we went over it and we were able to learn the basics an...

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Would you recommend AWS Database Migration Service as a cloud data integration tool?

My current company started using AWS Database Migration Service upon my recommendation, and I continue telling people how good of a product it is. However, users should keep in mind a few things. ...

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Is AWS Database Migration Service an affordable solution?

Compared to similar solutions, AWS Database Migration Service falls somewhere in the middle price-wise, at least from my experience. This being said, it is not a very affordable solution, especial...

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How do you select the right cloud ETL tool?

AWS Glue and Azure Data factory for ELT best performance cloud services.

See all answers

How does Talend Open Studio compare with AWS Glue?

We reviewed AWS Glue before choosing Talend Open Studio. AWS Glue is the managed ETL (extract, transform, and load) from Amazon Web Services. AWS Glue enables AWS users to create and manage jobs in...

See all answers

What are the most common use cases for AWS Glue?

AWS Glue's main use case is for allowing users to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources. The product lets you use this data for analytics, application development, or ma...

See all answers

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Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 4% of the time

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Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

AWS Database Migration Service

April 2025

Download AWS Database Migration Service product report

Buyer's Guide

AWS Glue

April 2025

Download AWS Glue product report

Also Known As

AWS Data Migration Service

No data available

Overview

AWS Database Migration Service, also known as AWS DMS, is a cloud service that facilitates the migration of relational databases, NoSQL databases, data warehouses, and other types of data stores. The product can be used to migrate users' data into the AWS Cloud or between combinations of on-premises and cloud setups. The solution allows migration between a wide variety of sources and target endpoints; the only requirement is that one of the endpoints has to be an AWS service. AWS DMS cannot be used to migrate from an on-premises database to another on-premises database.

AWS Database Migration Service allows users to perform one-time migrations, as well as replications of ongoing changes to keep sources and targets in sync. Organizations can utilize the AWS Schema Conversion Tool to translate their database schema to a new platform and then use AWS DMS to migrate the data. The product offers cost efficiency as a part of the AWS Cloud, as well as speed to market, flexibility, and security.

The main use cases of AWS Database Migration Service include:

Migrating from legacy or on-premises databases to managed cloud services through a simplified migration process.
Reliable replication of backup files to minimize downtime and data loss.
Improvement of integration through building of data lakes and performing real-time processing on change data from users' data stores.

AWS Database Migration Service Components

AWS Database Migration Service consists of various components which function together to achieve users’ data migration. A migration on AWS DMS is structured in three levels: a replication instance, source and target endpoints, and a replication task. The components include the following actions:

Replication instance: AWS Database Migration Service provides users with a variety of replication instances, allowing them to select the optimal configuration for their use case. Depending on the instance class an organization selects, their replication instance provides a different amount of data storage.
Endpoint: AWS DMS uses an endpoint to access users' source or target data stores. The connection information is different and depends on the specific data store, but it usually consists of the following information: endpoint type, engine type, server name, port, encryption, and credentials. This information can easily be managed through the AWS DMS console.
Replication tasks: AWS Database Migration Service replication tasks can be used to move a set of data from the source endpoint to the target endpoint. The creation of a replication task is the last required step before starting a migration. Each replication task requires the following settings to be set: replication instance, source endpoint, target endpoint, and migration type options.
Ongoing replication or change data capture (CDC): AWS DMS also has the capacity to capture ongoing changes to the source that is stored while users migrate their data to a target.
Schema and code migration: The product requires assistance from tools such as MySQL Workbench, pgAdmin III, and Oracle SQL Developer to perform schema or code conversion, as it cannot do it on its own.

AWS Database Migration Service Benefits

AWS Database Migration Service offers its users a wide range of benefits. Among them are the following:

The solution ensures minimal downtime, as it continuously replicates the changes to the user’s source database during migration.
AWS DMS provides users with flexibility, as it supports many commonly used databases, including commercial and open-source ones.
The product is user friendly, as it offers an easy set of tasks in the AWS Management Console.
Users of Aurora, Redshift, DocumentDB, and DynamoDB can benefit from the free use of AWS DMS.
AWS Database Migration Service is very reliable because it is a self-healing service that automatically restarts in cases of interruptions.
The product supports both homogenous migrations and heterogenous migrations.
AWS DMS accelerates business growth, as it scales businesses at an affordable price.

Reviews from Real Users

Vishal S., an infrastructure lead at a computer software company, likes AWS Database Migration Service because it is easy to use and set up.

Vinod K., a data analyst at AIMLEAP, describes AWS DMS as an easy solution to save and extract data.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS Glue is a serverless cloud data integration tool that facilitates the discovery, preparation, movement, and integration of data from multiple sources for machine learning (ML), analytics, and application development. The solution includes additional productivity and data ops tooling for running jobs, implementing business workflows, and authoring.

AWS Glue allows users to connect to more than 70 diverse data sources and manage data in a centralized data catalog. The solution facilitates visual creation, running, and monitoring of extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines to load data into users' data lakes. This Amazon product seamlessly integrates with other native applications of the brand and allows users to search and query cataloged data using Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, and Amazon Redshift Spectrum.

The solution also utilizes application programming interface (API) operations to transform users' data, create runtime logs, store job logic, and create notifications for monitoring job runs. The console of AWS Glue connects all of these services into a managed application, facilitating the monitoring and operational processes. The solution also performs provisioning and management of the resources required to run users' workloads in order to minimize manual work time for organizations.

AWS Glue Features

AWS Glue groups its features into four categories - discover, prepare, integrate, and transform. Within those groups are the following features:

Automatic schema discovery: AWS Glue crawlers connect to the organization's source or target data source through a prioritized list of classifiers to determine the schema for users' data. This feature creates metadata in companies' AWS Glue Data Catalog.
Schemas for data stream management: The AWS Glue Schema Registry enables users to validate and control the evolution of streaming data through registered Apache Avro schemas for no additional charge.
Automatic scaling based on workload: This feature dynamically scales resources up and down based on workload. The feature controls job resources, removing them depending on how much the workload can be split up.
FindMatches: This feature is for machine learning-based data deduplication and cleansing, and works by finding records that are imperfect matches of each other to remove useless data copies.
Edit, debug, and test ETL code: This feature helps users who have chosen to interactively develop their ETL code by providing development endpoints for editing, debugging, and testing the code it generates for them.
AWS Glue DataBrew: An interactive, point-and-click visual interface for specialists to clean and normalize data without the need to write any code.
AWS Glue Interactive Sessions: This feature simplifies the development of data integration jobs by enabling data engineers to interactively prepare and explore data.
AWS Glue Studio Job Notebooks: This AWS Glue feature provides serverless notebooks with minimal setup, allowing developers to start working in a timely manner.
Complex ETL pipeline building: This feature allows the product to be invoked on a schedule, on demand, or based on an event, allowing users to start multiple jobs in parallel or specify dependencies to build complex ETL pipelines.
AWS Glue Studio: This AWS Glue feature allows users to visually transform data through a drag-and-drop interface. The product automatically generates the code for ETL processes for users' data.

AWS Glue Benefits

AWS Glue offers a wide range of benefits for its users. These benefits include:

Users of other AWS products can easily onboard with AWS Glue, as it is integrated across a wide range of the company's services.
The solution is serverless, which allows for a lower total cost of ownership.
AWS Glue offers more power for users, as it automates much of the effort in building, maintaining, and running ETL jobs.
The product allows customers to easily discover and search across all their AWS datasets through AWS Glue Data Catalog.
AWS Glue does not require additional payment for managing and enforcing schemas for data streams.
The solution facilitates the authority of scalable ETL jobs for beginners and non-coding experts through a drag-and-drop interface.

Reviews from Real Users

Mustapha A., a cloud data engineer at Jems Groupe, likes AWS Glue because it is a product that is great for serverless data transformations.

Liana I., CEO at Quark Technologies SRL, describes AWS Glue as a highly scalable, reliable, and beneficial pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Sample Customers

Veoci, Trimble, Nasdaq, shaadi.com, Hotelbeds, SysAid, Verizon, Expedia, Pega

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

Buyer's Guide

AWS Database Migration Service vs. AWS Glue

April 2025

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