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Amazon EMR vs BigQuery comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.3
Companies using Amazon EMR often experience significant ROI, with savings up to 20% and substantial returns over on-premise systems.
Sentiment score
7.4
Organizations experienced improved performance and cost savings after adopting BigQuery, achieving a 75% cost reduction and efficient data management.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.6
Amazon EMR support is generally proactive and efficient, but experiences vary, especially during open-source product integration.
Sentiment score
7.2
Customers generally find BigQuery support helpful, but integration challenges and resource availability need improvement despite positive responsiveness.
They help with billing, cost determination, IAM properties, security compliance, and deployment and migration activities.
rating the customer support at ten points out of ten
I have been self-taught and I have been able to handle all my problems alone.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Amazon EMR effectively scales to enterprise needs, with auto-scaling and adaptability, despite occasional peak demand resource allocation delays.
Sentiment score
8.0
BigQuery offers impressive scalability and efficiency for large data, but may be costly and present integration challenges for smaller users.
Scalability can be provisioned using the auto-scaling feature, EC2 instances, on-demand instances, and storage locations like block storage, S3, or file storage.
It is a 10 out of 10 in terms of scalability.
The scalability is definitely good because we are migrating to the cloud since the computers on the premises or the big database we need are no longer enough.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon EMR is generally stable and reliable, despite occasional data-related stability issues, with robust failover and monitoring features.
Sentiment score
8.5
BigQuery is highly stable and reliable for cloud data analytics, efficiently handling large volumes with minor issues.
Regular updates, patch installations, monitoring, logging, alerting, and disaster recovery activities are crucial for maintaining stability.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon EMR struggles with a steep learning curve, complex configurations, unpredictable costs, and needs enhancements in stability and support.
BigQuery users face challenges with migration, integration, cost, scaling, user interfaces, and call for better machine learning capabilities.
There is room for improvement with respect to retries, handling the volume of data on S3 buckets, cluster provisioning, scaling, termination, security, and integration between services like S3, Glue, Lake Formation, and DynamoDB.
BigQuery is already integrating Gemini AI into the data extraction process directly in order to reduce costs.
In general, if I know SQL and start playing around, it will start making sense.
Troubleshooting requires opening each pipeline individually, which is time-consuming.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EMR's costs vary by resources used, with potential high monthly expenses, requiring careful management to prevent surprises.
BigQuery offers flexible, pay-as-you-go pricing based on data usage, with low storage costs and adaptable enterprise plans.
Cost optimization can be achieved through instance usage, cluster sharing, and auto-scaling.
Being able to optimize the queries to data is critical. Otherwise, you could spend a fortune.
The price is perceived as expensive, rated at eight out of ten in terms of costliness.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EMR is scalable, easy to use, cost-effective, integrates well with Hadoop, and supports diverse analytics applications.
BigQuery excels in scalability, performance, cost-efficiency, and integration with Google products, making it ideal for complex data analyses.
Amazon EMR helps in scalability, real-time and batch processing of data, handling efficient data sources, and managing data lakes, data stores, and data marts on file systems and in S3 buckets.
It is really fast because it can process millions of rows in just a matter of one or two seconds.
The features I find most valuable in this solution are the ability to run and handle large data sets in a very efficient way with multiple types of data, relational as SQL data.
BigQuery processes a substantial amount of data, whether in gigabytes or terabytes, swiftly producing desired data within one or two minutes.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EMR
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
12th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (3rd)
BigQuery
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
41
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon EMR is 3.4%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BigQuery is 6.8%, down from 8.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Prashant  Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamless data integration enhances reporting efficiency and an easy setup
Amazon EMR has multiple connectors that can connect to various data sources. The service charges are based on processing only, depending on the resources used, which can help save money. It is easy to integrate with other services for storage, allowing data to be shifted to cheaper storage based on usage.
Luís Silva - PeerSpot reviewer
Handles large data sets efficiently and offers flexible data management capabilities
The features I find most valuable in this solution are the ability to run and handle large data sets in a very efficient way with multiple types of data, relational as SQL data. It is kind of difficult to explain, but structured data and the ability to handle large data sets are key features. The data integration capabilities in BigQuery were, in fact, an issue at the beginning. There are two types of integrations. As long as integration is within Google, it is pretty simple. When you start to try to connect external clients to that data, it becomes more complex. It is not related to BigQuery, it is related to Google security model, which is not easy to manage. I would not call it an integration issue of BigQuery, I would call it an integration issue of Google security model.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
25%
Computer Software Company
13%
Educational Organization
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Retailer
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon EMR?
Amazon EMR is a good solution that can be used to manage big data.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EMR?
Compared to others, Amazon seems efficient and is considered good for Big Data workloads. Costs are involved based on cluster resources, data volumes, EC2 ( /products/amazon-ec2-reviews ) instances...
What needs improvement with Amazon EMR?
There is room for improvement with respect to retries, handling the volume of data on S3 ( /products/amazon-s3-reviews ) buckets, cluster provisioning, scaling, termination, security, and integrati...
What do you like most about BigQuery?
The initial setup process is easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BigQuery?
I believe the cost of BigQuery is competitive versus the alternatives in the market, but it can become expensive if the tool is not used properly. It is on a per-consumption basis, the billing, so ...
What needs improvement with BigQuery?
I have not used BigQuery for AI and machine learning projects myself. I know how to use it, and I can see where it would be useful, but so far, in my projects, I have not included a BigQuery compon...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic MapReduce
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Yelp
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EMR vs. BigQuery and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.