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Amazon Athena vs Elastic Search 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
Elastic Search
Ranking in Search as a Service
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (9th), Vector Databases (3rd)
 

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 Elastic Search is 17.8%, up from 8.8% 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.
Anand_Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Captures data from all other sources and becomes a MOM aka monitoring of monitors
Scalability and ROI are the areas they have to improve. Their license terms are based on the number of cores. If you increase the number of cores, it becomes very difficult to manage at a large scale. For example, if I have a $3 million project, I won't sell it because if we're dealing with a 10 TB or 50 TB system, there are a lot of systems and applications to monitor, and I have to make an MOM (Mean of Max) for everything. This is because of the cost impact. Also, when you have horizontal scaling, it's like a multi-story building with only one elevator. You have to run around, and it's not efficient. Even the smallest task becomes difficult. That's the problem with horizontal scaling. They need to improve this because if they increase the cores and adjust the licensing accordingly, it would make more sense.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"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."
"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."
"Gives us a more user-friendly, centralized solution (for those who just needed a quick glance, without being masters of sed and awk) as well as the ability to implement various mechanisms for machine-learning from our logs, and sending alerts for anomalies."
"The most valuable features of Elastic Enterprise Search are it's cloud-ready and we do a lot of infrastructure as code. By using ELK, we're able to deploy the solution as part of our ISC deployment."
"The initial installation and setup were straightforward."
"The solution is very good with no issues or glitches."
"I appreciate the indexing capabilities and the speed of indexing in their product, which demonstrates how quickly logs are collected and stored."
"The most valuable features are the ease and speed of the setup."
"Using real-time search functionality to support operational decisions has been helpful."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its utility and usefulness."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"The solution should include a better API for query services."
"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."
"Elastic Enterprise Search's tech support is good but it could be improved."
"It needs email notification, similar to what Logentries has. Because of the notification issue, we moved to Logentries, as it provides a simple way to receive notification whenever a server encounters an error or unexpected conditions (which we have defined using RegEx​)."
"Performance improvement could come from skipping background refresh on search idle shards (which is already being addressed in the upcoming seventh version)."
"The metadata gets stored along with indexes and isn't queryable."
"There should be more stability."
"They could improve some of the platform's infrastructure management capabilities."
"This product could be improved with additional security, and the addition of support for machine learning devices."
"We'd like more user-friendly integrations."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Athena is very inexpensive for being a cloud tool."
"It doesn't cost much if you are already part of the AWS ecosystem."
"The solution operates on a serverless model so you only pay for data that you consume."
"I am happy with what they are charging and how they charge it, especially because they charge you per query, and not per series."
"We use the free version for some logs, but not extensive use."
"I rate Elastic Search's pricing an eight out of ten."
"This product is open-source and can be used free of charge."
"It can move from $10,000 US Dollars per year to any price based on how powerful you need the searches to be and the capacity in terms of storage and process."
"The solution is free."
"The solution is not expensive because users have the option of choosing the managed or the subscription model."
"An X-Pack license is more affordable than Splunk."
"The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
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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
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

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 do you like most about ELK Elasticsearch?
Logsign provides us with the capability to execute multiple queries according to our requirements. The indexing is very high, making it effective for storing and retrieving logs. The real-time anal...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
We used the open-source version of Elasticsearch, which was free.
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
It would be useful if a feature for renaming indices could be added without affecting the performance of other features. However, overall, the consistency and stability of Elasticsearch are already...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
T-Mobile, Adobe, Booking.com, BMW, Telegraph Media Group, Cisco, Karbon, Deezer, NORBr, Labelbox, Fingerprint, Relativity, NHS Hospital, Met Office, Proximus, Go1, Mentat, Bluestone Analytics, Humanz, Hutch, Auchan, Sitecore, Linklaters, Socren, Infotrack, Pfizer, Engadget, Airbus, Grab, Vimeo, Ticketmaster, Asana, Twilio, Blizzard, Comcast, RWE and many others.
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Athena vs. Elastic Search and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.