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Amazon AWS CloudSearch 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

Amazon Athena
Ranking in Search as a Service
6th
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Amazon AWS CloudSearch
Ranking in Search as a Service
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon Athena is 8.4%, down from 14.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon AWS CloudSearch is 8.5%, down from 10.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

Manilal Kasera - PeerSpot reviewer
A great AWS application that is easy to set up and simple to expand
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. We'd like it better if, for example, when you have some data, you can easily query it and you can easily read it at a glance. We'd like it to just be almost like a drag-and-drop situation. In Amazon Cloud, you actually have first to upload the data into S3. For that, you have to create a bucket. Now you have to create a Glue service, which will get you the schema. Then that schema would create basically a database and a table. After that, you have to go to Athena to query the data. It's a three-step process in Amazon Cloud. In Palantir, you just have to drag and drop.
AmrIssa - PeerSpot reviewer
A scalable and fully managed search service with diverse data type support and robust security
We use it as our hosting solution, serving as the backbone for our systems, which include Rubrik and SAP It is remarkably efficient and beneficial. A reboot should be enhanced. There are issues with the VBC collection. I have been working with it for four years. I would rate the stability ten…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Athena has a really good UI and is very compatible with on-prem products."
"It's easy to set up the product."
"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 is very stable. I never had any issues with it. The dashboarding tool is okay."
"Document indexing, text-based search API, and Geospatial searches are all good features."
"The quality of the solution is good."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon AWS CloudSearch is the cloud aspect. I do not need to have the physical infrastructure, everything is in the cloud."
"It is remarkably efficient and beneficial."
"It's the best solution for any company. It has a hosting ERP system for any task. AWS is stable. AWS is more flexible and its elastic concept is a new concept. AWS is also very secure. It has many layers of security, like hardware security and software security. This is a big issue."
"AWS CloudSearch's best features are good performance under high CPU and memory use, and ease of deployment and scaling."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon AWS CloudSearch is its ability to receive data quickly. You can access your data easily in a short time."
"The best feature is its scalability in that Cloud is always on the fly."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution should include a better API for query services."
"I would say that it needs to keep its cost competitive in the market, especially in comparison to other clouds."
"AWS CloudSearch's documentation isn't very clear. Also, the on-premise version of the solution is less stable than the cloud version."
"Maybe they are common in Egypt, but you should make a request on Amazon to create a function to monitor CPU performance, memory, and files. It is very difficult in AWS. I would tell them it should be simple, just drag and drop. I think they could develop this option so we can drag and drop to monitor performance of the processor and memory."
"Security is a concern but they're working on it."
"We'd like to see more database features."
"Latlon data type only supports single value per document. All other types support multiple values. We faced issues with this because we had scenarios where, for each document, we needed to store multiple latlon values for different geographical locations."
"The price of the solution can be expensive."
"A reboot should be enhanced."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"I am happy with what they are charging and how they charge it, especially because they charge you per query, and not per series."
"It doesn't cost much if you are already part of the AWS ecosystem."
"I'm not sure how much we pay a year. It might be around $30,000 a year."
"Amazon AWS CloudSearch charging is based on how many resources you consume or and the solution is known to be a bit expensive."
"Our license costs around $4,000 per month."
"In comparison to IBM and Microsoft, the pricing is more favorable."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one point is cheap, and ten points are expensive, I rate the pricing as medium or reasonable."
"There was no license needed to use this solution."
"We chose AWS because of its cost and stability."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Computer Software Company
16%
Government
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Athena?
Athena has a really good UI and is very compatible with on-prem products.
What needs improvement with Amazon Athena?
You have to build out the metadata yourself because of the nature of the cloud.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon AWS CloudSearch?
In comparison to IBM and Microsoft, the pricing is more favorable. I would rate it eight out of ten.
What needs improvement with Amazon AWS CloudSearch?
A reboot should be enhanced. There are issues with the VBC collection.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
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Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon AWS CloudSearch vs. Amazon Athena and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.