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Algolia vs Amazon Athena comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Algolia
Ranking in Search as a Service
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Amazon Athena
Ranking in Search as a Service
7th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Algolia is 9.0%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon Athena is 4.9%, down from 8.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Algolia9.0%
Amazon Athena4.9%
Other86.1%
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

Kozykorpesh Tolep - PeerSpot reviewer
software engineer at a non-tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real-time search has improved device monitoring and now needs better relevance tuning and cost clarity
One area for Algolia's improvement is the relevance of tuning and configuration because it can take some time to properly configure ranking and filtering for a specific use case. If you are new to this or do not have experience with the tuning and configuration of the search, that can take some time to adapt and use this search engine. To make it better, I would appreciate improvement in the relevance of tuning and configuration, as it takes time to properly configure ranking and filtering. I can also say that transparency for scaling usage and cost transparency for when you are scaling would be beneficial.
Ciro Baldim Guerra - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Analytics Engineer at Itau Unibanco S.A.
Have struggled with exporting complex data and have disabled code suggestions due to inefficiency
I think there is room for improvement in Amazon Athena, and the first thing I will put is the data output. I use Python to query in Amazon Athena, and it's very complex and difficult just to save Amazon Athena results as an Excel file. The only option is copying the data, but sometimes if it exceeds 100 lines, if you copy and paste in Excel, it's very bad. You can't copy above 100 lines. The other option is downloading a CSV file, but the CSV file is not UTF-8 Unicode. Here in Brazil, we speak Portuguese, and there are a lot of special characters in the words and even names, and everything gets garbled when you put it in a CSV. You have to decode, encode, and there are a lot of problems. It could easily save as an Excel file since there are a lot of engines to help with it, so an XLSX file extension could be this way. Another point I would mention is the word completion. When I'm coding and making statements and queries, Amazon Athena tries to help me write the code, and that's very problematic. Sometimes I'm using some tables that I use every day, and Amazon Athena doesn't get the tables I'm using and suggests very improbable data. I have access to more than 30 databases and hundreds of tables. So, I turn it off, I disable the word completion because when I'm coding, the word completion makes the coding slower. It's very difficult, and every time I have to press escape to skip the completion. It's very ineffective, so I disable it because in other applications it functions very well, such as VS Code.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Algolia provides some cool functionalities like filtering, indexing, and searching."
"The tool is easy to use, but you need to know how it works."
"Algolia has significantly improved our user experience, and we saw search conversion rates increase by around 15% after implementing it."
"It's scalable. It can be scaled massively."
"Since Algolia is a SaaS solution, we didn't have to maintain servers, look at the indexes, and monitor services."
"We were working with search products, brands, and different attributes specific to the product; it's faster and easier. The implementation is easy."
"Algolia provides extremely fast search performance, which is particularly useful for projects with big data and many data points."
"The tool is worth the money, and I have seen an ROI."
"Athena has a really good UI and is very compatible with on-prem products."
"Amazon Athena's ability to query structured and unstructured data has been beneficial."
"It's easy to set up the product."
"The best feature of Amazon Athena is that we can use Glue to build the schema from the data and then we can query the data directly on S3."
"The solution is very easy to use and integrations are very smooth."
"One of the most valuable features is the ability to partition your databases. I also like the federal query functionality, for cases when you have to query outside your S3 storage, or even completely outside of the AWS platform."
"Amazon Athena works for scalability; I query data using tagged data that uses user usage of applications that contain very big data, millions and billions of lines, and it works very well."
"Athena is serverless, so we don’t have to provision or manage compute clusters, and we can simply point Athena at our data in S3 and run SQL queries immediately."
 

Cons

"I believe that Algolia could be better economically; it should work in a way whereby you can provide better pricing patterns."
"The high cost of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The documentation is not beginner-friendly."
"I think they could improve the analytics view."
"The biggest issue is cost; Algolia gets expensive fast as your record count and search operations grow."
"Joining is quite complex."
"Algolia provides a certification, which is pretty basic, and I think it can be improved in terms of a bit more detail and more elaborative content."
"The deployment could be easier for beginners."
"In terms of its integration capabilities, I would say it's not straightforward. It works, but it's a little bit tricky."
"The solution should include a better API for query services."
"Transaction support is one of the biggest missing features."
"I think it would be better if the product were more mature. It's still a young product compared to Power BI or Qlik. I find that development is a bit difficult, but it might be because I'm used to other tools. The dashboarding capabilities could be better. The reporting and statement generation could be better. I couldn't technically initiate picture-perfect reporting, for example, to send out statements every month for banking customers."
"You have to build out the metadata yourself because of the nature of the cloud."
"One improvement I can suggest is that Athena needs to work better with third-parties. For example, the process of querying a Microsoft SQL warehouse could be improved."
"I use Python to query in Amazon Athena, and it's very complex and difficult just to save Amazon Athena results as an Excel file."
"If you compare it with Palantir, if you have some data and you want to quickly have a look at it, then that feature is not available in Amazon Cloud."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For any developer starting out, it is worth it."
"I have heard that Algolia is an expensive solution."
"In terms of the cost of Algolia, the tool is really expensive for us in Brazil since it comes to about half a million dollars."
"The product is cheap."
"We are currently on a contract with Algolia for licensing and price."
"Algolia is a cool, super-easy-to-use, and affordable tool."
"The solution operates on a serverless model so you only pay for data that you consume."
"It doesn't cost much if you are already part of the AWS ecosystem."
"I am happy with what they are charging and how they charge it, especially because they charge you per query, and not per series."
"Athena is very inexpensive for being a cloud tool."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Performing Arts
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise2
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Algolia?
Pricing can be steep as usage scales up, so a more flexible or transparent tiering model might help. I would like to suggest having more detailed cost prediction tools so teams can forecast usage s...
What needs improvement with Algolia?
One improvement I suggest for Algolia is offering even more granular control in the dashboard for A/B testing and search configurations, which could help refine relevance more quickly. Pricing can ...
What is your primary use case for Algolia?
Our main use case for Algolia is powering our website's product search, and it helps customers instantly find relevant items, even with partial queries. Algolia solved a unique challenge for us by ...
What needs improvement with Amazon Athena?
I don't have any specific answer on how Amazon Athena can be improved. This integration is more on the Glue side rather than on Amazon Athena, I would guess. Nothing comes to my mind here. In terms...
What is your primary use case for Amazon Athena?
The typical use case for Amazon Athena is that we have data in a data lake, and if we need to query the data from the data lake, we use Amazon Athena before it gets to the data warehouse where we w...
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon Athena?
I have experience of integration of Amazon Athena with AWS Glue. I think the pricing of Amazon Athena is quite reasonable as we use it in pay-as-you-go mode. On a scale from one to ten, I rate Amaz...
 

Comparisons

 

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Sample Customers

Birchbox, Twitch, Lacoste, Stripe, WW, Medium, Cousera, National Geographic, Zendesk, Magento
bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
Find out what your peers are saying about Algolia vs. Amazon Athena and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,988 professionals have used our research since 2012.