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AWS Glue pros and cons

Vendor: Amazon Web Services (AWS)

3.9 out of 5

50 reviews
90% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

AWS Glue excels with its data catalog, triggers, and integration with AWS services like S3, while its serverless architecture optimizes costs for Spark jobs. The scalability, Jupyter Notebook compatibility, and schema-updating capabilities enhance data processing. However, the high start-up time, platform exclusivity, expensive pricing, technical support issues, and complex setup challenge users. It proves efficient yet requires advanced knowledge, focusing on users who prioritize seamless AWS integration.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

AWS Glue's integration with other AWS services and features such as Jupyter Notebook and S3 make it highly valuable for users.

The scalability and serverless nature of AWS Glue allow for cost-effective and efficient data processing.

The data catalog and triggers are highlighted as some of the best features, offering efficient scheduling and metadata management.

AWS Glue's ETL capabilities, including automatic schema detection and incremental data updates, simplify data transformation.

The code-generation feature and compatibility with common languages like Python enhance AWS Glue's flexibility and ease of use in data tasks.

CONS

The start-up time for jobs is currently high, requiring five to eight minutes, and would benefit from being reduced to one or two minutes.

The current support is limited to Python and Scala; adding Java would enhance customization options.

AWS Glue is considered expensive, and its pricing could be improved.

It lacks multi-cloud capability, limiting its flexibility compared to more agnostic tools.

Training materials and resources for AWS Glue usage are insufficient, making it challenging for new users to learn efficiently.

AWS Glue Pros review quotes

reviewer1412730

Senior Software Engineer at a consumer goods company with 10,001+ employees

Sep 3, 2020

Data catalog and triggers are the two best features for me. AWS Glue has its own data catalog, which makes it great and really easy to use. Triggers are also really good for scheduling the ETL process.

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AS

Team Lead at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Oct 14, 2020

Its user interface is quite good. You just need to choose some options to create a job in AWS Glue. The code-generation feature is also useful. If you don't want to customize it and simply want to read a file and store the data in the database, it can generate the code for you.

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BR

CEO and Founder at HartB

Dec 17, 2020

The facility to integrate with S3 and the possibility to use Jupyter Notebook inside the pipeline are the most valuable features.

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reviewer1688958

Net Full-Stack developer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Oct 21, 2021

One of the best features of the solution is its ability to easily integrate with other AWS services.

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reviewer1084386

ECM CONSULTANT/ARCHITECT/SOFTWARE DEVELOPER, DELUXE MN at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Dec 2, 2021

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

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Sr. Data Engineer at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jun 16, 2022

I like that it's flexible, powerful, and allows you to write your own queries and scripts to get the needed transformations.

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Data Engineer | Developer at Sakshath Technologies

Jun 21, 2022

The key role for Glue is that it hosts our metadata before rolling out our actual data. This is the major advantage of using this solution and our clients client have been very satisfied with it.

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Data Engineer at BlazeClan Technologies

Jul 1, 2022

AWS Glue's most valuable features are the data catalog, including crawlers and tables, and Glue Studio, which means you don't have to use custom code.

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Operations executive at Wipro Infotech

Jul 18, 2022

It is AWS-integrated. There is end-to-end integration with the other AWS services. It is also user-friendly.

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Data Engineer at YASH Technologies

Jul 20, 2022

The solution is stable and reliable.

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AWS Glue Cons review quotes

reviewer1412730

Senior Software Engineer at a consumer goods company with 10,001+ employees

Sep 3, 2020

The start-up time is really high right now. For instance, when you start up a new job, you have to wait for five or eight minutes before it starts. If the start-up time is reduced to one or two minutes, it will be great. It will be better to have a direct linkage to Redshift in AWS. If we can use data catalogs from Redshift, it will be so easy to create some data catalogs. Currently, we can only use data catalogs from S3.

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AS

Team Lead at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Oct 14, 2020

Currently, it supports only two languages in the background: Python and Scala. From our customization point of view, it would be helpful if it can also support Java in the background.

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BR

CEO and Founder at HartB

Dec 17, 2020

The crucial problem with AWS Glue is that it only works with AWS. It is not an agnostic tool like Pentaho. In PowerCenter, we can install the forms from Google and other vendors, but in the case of AWS Glue, we can only use AWS.

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Free Report: AWS Glue Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about AWS Glue. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.

879,711 professionals have used our research since 2012.

reviewer1688958

Net Full-Stack developer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Oct 21, 2021

Overall, I consider the technical support to be fine, although the response time could be faster in certain cases.

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reviewer1084386

ECM CONSULTANT/ARCHITECT/SOFTWARE DEVELOPER, DELUXE MN at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Dec 2, 2021

There is a learning curve to this tool.

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Sr. Data Engineer at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jun 16, 2022

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.

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Data Engineer | Developer at Sakshath Technologies

Jun 21, 2022

The technical support for this solution could be improved. In future, we would like to connect more services like Athena or Kinesis to help control more loads of data.

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Data Engineer at BlazeClan Technologies

Jul 1, 2022

If there's a cluster-related configuration, we have to make worker notes, which is quite a headache when processing a large amount of data.

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Operations executive at Wipro Infotech

Jul 18, 2022

There should be more connectors for different databases.

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Data Engineer at YASH Technologies

Jul 20, 2022

The monitoring is not that good.

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Cloud Data Integration

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) vs AWS Glue

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs AWS Glue

webMethods.io vs AWS Glue

Palantir Foundry vs AWS Glue

Elastic Search vs AWS Glue

Qlik Talend Cloud vs AWS Glue

AWS Database Migration Service vs AWS Glue

Fivetran vs AWS Glue

Denodo vs AWS Glue

Matillion Data Productivity Cloud vs AWS Glue

SnapLogic vs AWS Glue

Zapier vs AWS Glue

Jitterbit Harmony vs AWS Glue

IBM Cloud Pak for Integration vs AWS Glue

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See all alternatives

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