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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
8.6
Organizations saved costs and improved performance with BigQuery, achieving significant returns despite an initial learning period.
 

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
7.1
Google BigQuery support is generally reliable and agile but lacks direct engagement compared to competitors like Teradata.
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
 

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
7.9
BigQuery excels in scalability and performance for large operations but may be costly for smaller businesses.
Scalability can be provisioned using the auto-scaling feature, EC2 instances, on-demand instances, and storage locations like block storage, S3, or file storage.
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 praised for stability, reliability, and performance but has minor glitches with room for improvement in some areas.
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's drawbacks include special character restrictions, high pricing, integration issues, and needed improvements in user interface and support.
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.
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's pricing is flexible, based on usage, with low storage costs, and customizable to enterprise needs within Google Cloud.
Cost optimization can be achieved through instance usage, cluster sharing, and auto-scaling.
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 provides scalable, fast, cost-effective data analytics with seamless GCP integration and supports complex queries and various data types.
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.
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
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon EMR is 3.3%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BigQuery is 7.0%, down from 8.2% 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.
VikashKumar1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to maintain and provides high availability
Since I used BigQuery over the GCP cloud environment, I'm not sure whether we can go through internal IDEAs like IntelliJ or DBeaver that we use to connect with databases. Instead of connecting directly to BigQuery, we connect to GCP, Cloud Run, and then to BigQuery, which is a long process. Sometimes, we face some issues, bugs, and defects. We must first connect with a VPN to check data issues while working from home. Then, it allows you to connect to the cloud. After logging into the cloud, it searches for the service we are looking for, and then we go to BigQuery. This is a long process. After that, we analyze the issues in a table. Instead, it would be very helpful if it could provide a tool that we can install on our MacBook or Windows system. Once we open this tool, we can connect directly to the BigQuery server and easily perform tasks.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
14%
Educational Organization
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
11%
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?
The price is perceived as expensive, rated at eight out of ten in terms of costliness. Still, it offers significant cost savings.
What needs improvement with BigQuery?
When I open many of the Google Cloud products, I am in an environment that I do not feel familiar with; it is a little overwhelming. In general, if I know SQL and start playing around, it will star...
 

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: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.