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Amazon EMR vs Dremio 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EMR
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
13th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (3rd)
Dremio
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Data Science Platforms (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon EMR is 3.3%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dremio is 8.9%, up from 8.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Dremio8.9%
Amazon EMR3.3%
Other87.8%
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.
KamleshPant - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution offers quick data connection with an edge in computation
It's almost similar, yet it's better than Starburst in spinning up or connecting to the new source since it's on SaaS. It is a similar experience between the based application and cloud-based application. You just get the source, connect the data, get visualization, get connected, and do whatever you want. They say data reflection is one way where they do the caching and all that. Starburst also does the caching. In Starburst, you have a data product. Here, the data product comes from a reflection perspective. The y are working on a columnar memory map, columnar computation. That will have some edge in computation.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Amazon EMR is a good solution that can be used to manage big data."
"Amazon EMR's most valuable features are processing speed and data storage capacity."
"When we grade big jobs from on-prem to the cloud, we do it in EMR with Spark."
"The project management is very streamlined."
"The solution is pretty simple to set up."
"Amazon EMR has multiple connectors that can connect to various data sources."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"One of the valuable features about this solution is that it's managed services, so it's pretty stable, and scalable as much as you wish. It has all the necessary distributions. With some additional work, it's also possible to change to a Spark version with the latest version of EMR. It also has Hudi, so we are leveraging Apache Hudi on EMR for change data capture, so then it comes out-of-the-box in EMR."
"Dremio has positively impacted my organization by helping us create a single source of truth, a singular data warehouse where we can have access to all of the data sets."
"Dremio is very easy to use for building queries."
"The most valuable feature of Dremio is it can sit on top of any other data storage, such as Amazon S3, Azure Data Factory, SGFS, or Hive. The memory competition is good. If you are running any kind of materialized view, you'd be running in memory."
"Everyone uses Dremio in my company; some use it only for the analytics function."
"Dremio enables you to manage changes more effectively than any other data warehouse platform. There are two things that come into play. One is data lineage. If you are looking at data in Dremio, you may want to know the source and what happened to it along the way or how it may have been transformed in the data pipeline to get to the point where you're consuming it."
"The first feature that stands out for me in Dremio is the federated type of query, which allows the possibility to use multiple endpoints without worrying about writing custom SQL that runs only for SQL Server or for Postgres and Redshift."
"Overall, you can rate it as eight out of ten."
"Dremio gives you the ability to create services which do not require additional resources and sterilization."
 

Cons

"The problem for us is it starts very slow."
"As people are shifting from legacy solutions to other technologies, Amazon EMR needs to add more features that give more flexibility in managing user data."
"The legacy versions of the solution are not supported in the new versions."
"Amazon EMR can improve by adding some features, such as megastore services and HiveServer2. Additionally, the user interface could be better, similar to what Apache service provides, cross-platform services."
"The dashboard management could be better. Right now, it's lacking a bit."
"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."
"We don't have much control. If we have multiple users, if they want to scale up, the cost will go and increase and we don't know how we can restrict that price part."
"There is no need to pay extra for third-party software."
"Dremio doesn't support the Delta connector. Dremio writes the IT support for Delta, but the support isn't great. There is definitely room for improvement."
"We've faced a challenge with integrating Dremio and Databricks, specifically regarding authentication. It is not shaking hands very easily."
"We had a memory leak on some versions, which sometimes stopped the service."
"They need to have multiple connectors."
"It shows errors sometimes."
"They need to have multiple connectors. Starburst is rich in connectors, however, they are lacking Salesforce connectivity as of today."
"I cannot use the recursive common table expression (CTE) in Dremio because the support page says it's currently unsupported."
"Dremio could be improved by making it easier for data cataloging, especially when working with open table formats, as you have to choose a data format and then go into it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is no need to pay extra for third-party software."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"Amazon EMR is not very expensive."
"There is a small fee for the EMR system, but major cost components are the underlying infrastructure resources which we actually use."
"You don't need to pay for licensing on a yearly or monthly basis, you only pay for what you use, in terms of underlying instances."
"I rate the tool's pricing a five out of ten. It can be expensive since it's a managed service, and if you are not careful, you can run into unexpected charges. You can make a mistake that costs you tens of thousands of dollars. That's happened to us twice, so I'm sensitive to it. We're still trying to work on that. Our smallest client probably spends a hundred thousand dollars yearly on licensing, while our largest is well over a million."
"The product is not cheap, but it is not expensive."
"The cost of Amazon EMR is very high."
"Right now the cluster costs approximately $200,000 per month and is based on the volume of data we have."
"Dremio is less costly competitively to Snowflake or any other tool."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
13%
Educational Organization
12%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise5
 

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?
I have used AWS Glue with S3 for making tables and databases, but regarding Amazon EMR, I do not remember much as we are currently using it very minimally. This is my observation: In EKS, we have h...
What do you like most about Dremio?
Dremio allows querying the files I have on my block storage or object storage.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dremio?
The licensing is very expensive. We need a license to scale as we are currently using the community version.
What needs improvement with Dremio?
They need to have multiple connectors. Starburst is rich in connectors, however, they are lacking Salesforce connectivity as of today. They don't have Salesforce connectivity. However, Starburst do...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic MapReduce
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Yelp
UBS, TransUnion, Quantium, Daimler, OVH
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EMR vs. Dremio and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
872,778 professionals have used our research since 2012.