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Amazon Athena vs Amazon Kendra 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
8th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Amazon Kendra
Ranking in Search as a Service
4th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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 Kendra is 9.6%, down from 20.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon Kendra9.6%
Amazon Athena5.9%
Other84.5%
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.
AM
Kendra has a nice AI built-in, enhancing the search experience and highly stable solution
There are many valuable features. For example, there are many documents that contain a lot of legal information. So we want to understand whether all the documents have the required complaint-related information or not, and whether they are following the standard policies of documentation. We have multiple documents, so we don't know which document has the sought-after information. Therefore, we want to perform an enterprise search on it. So there are a lot of use cases we are trying to build using these newer technologies, specifically Kendra. Moreover, Kendra has AI, which has an upper edge, and that is really helpful. It has a nice AI inbuilt, which improves the search part of it.

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."
"The solution is very easy to use and integrations are very smooth."
"Amazon Athena is very stable. I never had any issues with it. The dashboarding tool is okay."
"It's easy to set up the product."
"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."
"Provides flexibility to tune the relevance and ranking of results."
"We have good use cases where stability is everything. So it's a stable solution."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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 time it takes for indexing documents could be reduced."
"There are some token limits."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"The pricing falls in the medium range."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
15%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise2
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Athena vs. Amazon Kendra and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
867,370 professionals have used our research since 2012.