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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
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Algolia is 8.2%, down from 11.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon Athena is 5.0%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Algolia8.2%
Amazon Athena5.0%
Other86.8%
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

"The tool is easy to use, but you need to know how it works."
"Algolia provides some cool functionalities like filtering, indexing, and searching."
"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."
"We were working with search products, brands, and different attributes specific to the product; it's faster and easier. The implementation is easy."
"Algolia has significantly improved our user experience, and we saw search conversion rates increase by around 15% after implementing it."
"Algolia has impacted my organization positively in a good way, as it has shaped the product and it feels as though the product has a premium search engine behind it."
"The tool provides users with personalization features that can be used to improve user interface."
"It's easy to set up the product."
"Amazon Athena's ability to query structured and unstructured data has been beneficial."
"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."
"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."
"Amazon Athena has positively impacted my organization by providing a completely serverless infrastructure."
"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."
"Athena has a really good UI and is very compatible with on-prem products."
 

Cons

"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."
"The documentation for the service is not as good as it could be."
"The deployment could be easier for beginners."
"I would prefer if Algolia offered some sort of volume discounts if that is possible, as right now they are not the best when it comes to discounts, and it is a bit expensive as we grow, to be straightforward."
"When indexing the products, one may face some issues with the tool."
"Pricing can be steep as usage scales up, so a more flexible or transparent tiering model might help."
"The high cost of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"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."
"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."
"Amazon Athena can be improved, especially when working with S3 tables, which is a caveat for us."
"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."
"Transaction support is one of the biggest missing features."
"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."
"You have to build out the metadata yourself because of the nature of the cloud."
"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."
"In terms of its integration capabilities, I would say it's not straightforward. It works, but it's a little bit tricky."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
12%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Performing Arts
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Computer Software 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 Enterprise3
 

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?
Amazon Athena can be improved, especially when working with S3 tables, which is a caveat for us. It does not work very well with Amazon Athena, as we have to do multiple settings in terms of provid...
What is your primary use case for Amazon Athena?
My main use case for Amazon Athena is querying data that sits in S3 buckets. Currently, I am working for an aviation client for which we receive data on a daily basis. We take this data from a sour...
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon Athena?
Regarding Amazon Athena's AI capabilities, we do not utilize them. However, data governance is ensured, and security is adequate since we operate within the VPC. ACID compliance helps preserve GDPR...
 

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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: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.