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Amazon Athena vs Amazon OpenSearch Service comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 11, 2025

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
8th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Amazon OpenSearch Service
Ranking in Search as a Service
3rd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (25th), Log Management (20th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon Athena is 5.9%, down from 14.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon OpenSearch Service is 4.6%, down from 15.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon OpenSearch Service4.6%
Amazon Athena5.9%
Other89.5%
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

Ciro Baldim Guerra - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Johnny Suleiman - PeerSpot reviewer
Scalability is a key feature as it allows easy scaling of the platform without downtime
OpenSearch is used as a search engine for specific logs, mainly in e-commerce and monitoring the logs themselves. It is very valuable for e-commerce, enabling data analysis on application logs and customer behavior, and can be integrated with other services, including AI and machine learning…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is very easy to use and integrations are very smooth."
"Athena has a really good UI and is very compatible with on-prem products."
"It's easy to set up the product."
"Amazon Athena is very stable. I never had any issues with it. The dashboarding tool is okay."
"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 stability of the product is good."
"The initial set up is very easy...We really appreciate Amazon!"
"Amazon OpenSearch Service has enhanced our organization's ability to store and search large amounts of data efficiently."
"We retrieve historical data with just a click of a button to move it from cold to hot or warm because it's already stored in the backend storage"
"I would definitely recommend Amazon OpenSearch Service to other professionals due to its fast and reliable search capabilities."
"In case there is a failure, Elastic manages everything well, and there no major downtime."
"The customer service is excellent, rated nine out of ten."
"The business analytics capabilities are the most important feature it provides."
 

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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution should include a better API for query services."
"The price is fair yet leans towards the expensive side. I'd rate it five out of ten with respect to capabilities vs. cost."
"Amazon Elasticsearch can improve the bullion in the near search and the ease of integration with Kibana. Additionally, there could be more flexibility in the configuration and documentation."
"One improvement I would like to see is support for auto-scaling."
"One improvement I would like to see is support for auto-scaling."
"There is a problem with the database. Amazon only provides the hosting to run our applications bias, but there is no option to manage the database within the Elasticsearch product."
"The configuration should be more straightforward because we had to select a lot of things."
"I would say that, basically, the configuration part is an area with a shortcoming...Some upgradation is required on the configuration side so that we can get to use it."
"One glaring issue was with our mapping configuration as the system accepted the data we posted, but after a few months, when we attempted complex queries, we realized the date formatting had become problematic."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"You only pay for what you use."
"The solution is not expensive, but priced averagely, I will say."
"Compared to other cloud platforms, it is manageable and not very expensive."
"There is a community edition available and the price of the commercial offering is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
25%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise2
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon Athena?
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 A...
What is your primary use case for Amazon Athena?
I have experience using Amazon Athena, and this service I have more experience with, actually. I use Amazon Athena for my daily activity; I was using it just now for getting data, and we use Amazon...
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon Athena?
It is okay by me to have my name, my job, and my company when you post the review. I rate Amazon Athena a 10 out of 10.
What do you like most about Amazon OpenSearch Service?
We retrieve historical data with just a click of a button to move it from cold to hot or warm because it's already stored in the backend storage
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon OpenSearch Service?
I would consider the pricing as a six based on how much data we are handling; if we handle minimal data, it's cheap, but for large data, it becomes costly. Our clients usually pay between $1,000 to...
What needs improvement with Amazon OpenSearch Service?
In terms of data handling capabilities with Amazon OpenSearch Service, they can be complex and managing data in comparison to other SIM solutions is a major drawback, as it is very hard to handle t...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Amazon Elasticsearch Service
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
VIDCOIN, Wyng, Yellow New Zealand, zipMoney, Cimri, Siemens, Unbabel
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Athena vs. Amazon OpenSearch Service and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,229 professionals have used our research since 2012.