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Amazon Athena vs Glean Platform comparison

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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
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Glean Platform
Ranking in Search as a Service
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (2nd), AI Agent Builders (4th), AI Software Development (8th), AI Customer Support (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Search as a Service category, the mindshare of Amazon Athena is 5.3%, down from 5.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Glean Platform is 4.8%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Search as a Service Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Glean Platform4.8%
Amazon Athena5.3%
Other89.9%
Search as a Service
 

Featured Reviews

YM
Senior Software Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Serverless analytics has reduced daily data query costs and supports accurate financial reporting
The best features Amazon Athena offers are its straightforward framework to perform ad hoc analysis on the data that we have. We use it primarily as our main query engine, so we are not using anything such as Snowflake or similar solutions. We essentially ingest the data into S3 buckets, and then we use Amazon Athena for querying the data. It is our main query platform on AWS. All of our queries, for transformations, are Athena-based queries that are orchestrated via Step Functions. We only pay for the amount of data that we scan. Since we operate on a relatively lower amount of data on a daily basis, we incur a very low cost on our querying. The pay-per-query pricing of Amazon Athena impacts my daily operations significantly. For other query engines, we pay for the query execution time, but in Amazon Athena, you only pay for the amount of data that you have scanned. Our queries primarily filter out the data. Since we operate on a daily basis, we are only concerned with today's data. When querying the data, we automatically put the filter to have the data in today's timestamp only. This way, we incur very low costs compared to other query engines. Our query scans are about 10 to 20 MBs, and despite performing 100 to 150 queries per day, this keeps our costs very manageable. Amazon Athena has positively impacted my organization by providing a completely serverless infrastructure. We have Step Functions, Lambda, and S3 buckets where we store our data. Our main infrastructure is serverless. We wanted a query engine that is less demanding in terms of setup efforts and cost-efficient, so we decided to go with Amazon Athena. It fulfills all our use cases, plus the ACID compliance that it brings, because we use Iceberg on top of Amazon Athena. This ensures our queries and data are consistent, durable, and that the queries are isolated in terms of execution. Athena's ACID compliance, especially with Iceberg, impacts our data consistency and reliability. We apply Iceberg with Parquet, which helps us compress the data to a very good volume. With the applied compression algorithms, we preserve our data consistency during parallel transformations. ACID compliance helps us achieve this, ensuring we do not compromise on our data and that our GDPR for the data is preserved.
reviewer2810748 - PeerSpot reviewer
Analyst at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Creating low-code agents has transformed policy queries and now saves employees hours daily
What I would like to see is an ease by which I can have different connectors set up. Right now I have to do a lot of back and forth in order to have these connectors enabled. Having them by default on the platform would be very helpful for me. Also, when developing custom actions, having a developer portal where users can track the log of how the requests are being sent to custom endpoints created would be helpful because right now I do not have anything of that nature. It is just a final response that I get and it becomes very difficult to keep track of what is happening in the backend. Also, the latency that the platform offers is a little high right now. What I have noticed is that on a particular query, the user has to wait a long time in order to get responses. If there is a way to reduce this time and improve performance by decreasing the time for responses, that would be very good. I believe that the latency offered is a little high right now. If I can get prompt responses quickly, then that would be a real user experience enhancement. Also, what I have noticed is the problem that developers face when creating custom actions in Glean Platform, where we are not able to keep track of what is happening in the backend. A logger of sorts would be very good so that I can maintain an idea of what is happening in the backend. If that issue is resolved, along with also the issue of having custom connectors available from the start rather than going to Glean Platform and having conversations about the thing, then it would be very good. If these issues are resolved, then it would be a strong 10 out of 10 from me. But as of now, it will be an 8 out of 10. Glean Platform is a very capable platform. It is good for indexing documents and reducing manual workflows by incorporating an element of AI in it. Business usage can be increased as well. The one caveat is if there are developers who are creating actions on Glean Platform, then I must keep an eye on the logging that I have for the platform because interacting with the backend systems becomes very difficult using Glean Platform. Also, what I have noticed is that it is a real challenge in terms of latency as some of the responses may take a little while to load. However, what I have noticed is that the responses are usually very accurate, and so it is a trade-off between speed and accuracy. This is what I would advise to someone who is looking at Glean Platform.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Amazon Athena works for scalability; I query data using tagged data that uses user usage of applications that contain very big data, millions and billions of lines, and it works very well."
"Athena has a really good UI and is very compatible with on-prem products."
"Amazon Athena is very stable. I never had any issues with it. The dashboarding tool is okay."
"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."
"Amazon Athena has positively impacted my organization by providing a completely serverless infrastructure."
"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."
"When I searched for internal information spread across different systems, Glean Platform did centralize and retrieve that data for me effectively, giving me eighty percent accuracy."
"The major impact that I have noticed is how business users are now being impacted and they are using the platform because they understand it easily."
"Since I have joined, I have built around ninety agents with Glean Platform, and it has saved our organization around twenty-seven hours a week for each user, and it has also positively impacted our ARR."
"The best features Glean Platform offers include the ability to create my own agents, for example, I created a self-service agent for my stakeholders, so rather than email me, I sent them a link to an agent where the agent asks them questions and drills down to exactly what they need, and then I get a qualified response from them."
"I have used many solutions, but Glean Platform is the best, and I would truly appreciate it if everyone considers this platform."
"Glean Platform offers excellent user interface design and integration capabilities with other platforms."
"Life became so easy when we started using Glean Platform."
"Glean Platform has positively impacted my organization by speeding up a lot of repetitive tasks and making it easier for people outside of support to understand what kind of issues impact the support groups."
 

Cons

"The solution should include a better API for query services."
"You have to build out the metadata yourself because of the nature of the cloud."
"While implementing Amazon Athena, I observed an issue where, even after writing an exclusion pattern on the AWS Glue side, whenever the end user queries, it skips the exclusion pattern, overriding it and directly fetching data from the S3 bucket."
"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 use Python to query in Amazon Athena, and it's very complex and difficult just to save Amazon Athena results as an Excel file."
"Amazon Athena can be improved, especially when working with S3 tables, which is a caveat for us."
"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."
"Transaction support is one of the biggest missing features."
"There are multiple ways in which Glean Platform can be improved."
"Glean Platform can implement more models. The NLP creation could be a little faster, and while debugging is amazing, the routing also needs to provide higher quality outputs sometimes rather than extensive searching."
"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the licenses were expensive, and it was hard to convince the company to adopt based on that."
"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Glean Platform reveals limited options, and I wish there was more customization available."
"I chose seven out of ten because if I could upload PDFs and have them analyzed, or have it integrate with my Gmail and help me go through my emails, that would be very useful, but I do not think it does that."
"Currently, Glean Platform does not integrate with Teams, Microsoft-owned platforms."
"Also, the latency that the platform offers is a little high right now; what I have noticed is that on a particular query, the user has to wait a long time in order to get responses."
"In workflow agents, I would prefer that we do not use AI in every step and instead we have a toggle button or something which can configure whether AI should be used in this specific search field or not, or in this specific node or not, because currently it's using AI in all nodes which sometimes messes up the output."
 

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."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise9
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Glean Platform?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Glean Platform reveals limited options, and I wish there was more customization available.
What needs improvement with Glean Platform?
In workflow agents, I would prefer that we do not use AI in every step and instead we have a toggle button or something which can configure whether AI should be used in this specific search field o...
What is your primary use case for Glean Platform?
I use Glean Platform as an enterprise search tool and I am a power user of agents, so I mostly use this on a day-to-day basis for random searches that I need to do about a company, a website, or if...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Glean Work AI Platform
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Athena vs. Glean Platform and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
914,351 professionals have used our research since 2012.