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AWS Lake Formation vs Amazon Redshift comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 22, 2025

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 Redshift
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
AWS Lake Formation
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
13th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon Redshift is 7.6%, down from 8.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Lake Formation is 5.7%, up from 5.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Sriram-Natesan - PeerSpot reviewer
The ability to create a lot of views or materialized views is beneficial
Improvement in the immediate response and the process of getting into a call could be helpful. We have had to wait for at least twenty-four hours to get a call and then wait for a couple more hours for a solution. Improved connectivity to different BI tools and already published connectors for major tools in AWS could enhance the service.
Ramesh Raghavan - PeerSpot reviewer
Centralized repository, offers various cataloging mechanisms for quick data retrieval but data governance capabilities could be better
There are a couple of areas for improvement with Lake Formation. One of the main challenges, especially when dealing with rich media content, like in MarTech (Marketing Technology) or ad agencies, is its versatility. Some clients feel that Lake Formation doesn’t meet their needs and they tend to prefer competitor products for those specific use cases. The second area for improvement is in data governance. Specifically, Lake Formation could enhance its capabilities in audit logs, real-time monitoring, and advanced data governance. This includes managing the entire data lineage—where the data originated, how it moves, and where it’s currently stored. The visibility of the data as it evolves is crucial, and that’s where more advanced governance capabilities would be beneficial.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"For the on-premises version of Amazon Redshift, we need to start from scratch. However, with the cloud version whenever you want to deploy, you can scale up, and down, and it has a data warehousing capability. Redshift has many features."
"The feature that we find most useful is the ability to do analytics on the fly."
"Easy to build out our snowflake design and load data."
"The solution is scalable. It handles different loads very well."
"The product offers good support for the data lake."
"The most valuable feature is the scalability, as it grows according to our needs."
"Amazon Redshift offers a relatively flexible structure...I rate the technical support a nine out of ten."
"It's very easy to migrate from other databases to Redshift. There are migration tools dedicated for this purpose, enabling migration from other databases like MS SQL directly to Redshift. The majority of the scripts will be automatically transposed."
"AWS Lake Formation lets you see all your data and tables on one screen."
"It is seamlessly integrated within the AWS ecosystem, making it straightforward to manage access patterns for AWS-native services."
"We use AWS Lake Formation typically for the data warehouse."
"The solution is quite good at handling analytics. It's done a good job at helping us centralize them."
"I can easily move data from cold storage to regular storage."
"The solution has many features that are applicable to events such as audits."
"AWS Lake Formation works hand in hand with other products."
"The most important advantage in using AWS Lake Formation is its ability to connect the data lake to the other technologies in AWS. This is what I advise my clients."
 

Cons

"We recently moved from the DC2 cluster to the RA3 cluster, which is a different node type and we are finding some issues with the RA3 cluster regarding connection and processing. There is room for improvement in this area. We are in talks with AWS regarding the connection issues."
"Pricing is one of the things that it could improve. It should be more competitive."
"What would make Amazon Redshift better is improvising on the pricing structure. For example, Acronis provides backups in cybersecurity, yet the pricing is a bit lesser than Amazon Redshift."
"The customer support could be more responsive."
"The product must become a bit more serverless."
"Pricing needs improvement as the solution is expensive."
"They should provide a better way to work with interim data in a structured way than to store it in parquet files locally."
"The solution has four maintenance windows so, when it comes to stability, I think it would be better to decrease their number."
"For the end-users, it's not as user-friendly as it could be."
"AWS Lake Formation's pricing could be cheaper."
"It falls short when it comes to more granular access control, such as cell-level or row-level entitlements which is a significant drawback for organizations that require precise control over who can access specific rows of data."
"If I could improve AWS Lake Formation, I would add more integrations with SageMaker."
"The solution could make improvements around orchestration and doing some automation stuff on AWS front automation. It would be useful if we could use automation to build images and use hardened images which are CIS compliant."
"You need to have data experience to use the product."
"Lake Formation could enhance its capabilities in audit logs, real-time monitoring, and advanced data governance."
"In our experience what could be improved are not the support, performance or monitoring, but at a managerial level, the very expensive professional services of AWS. This could be an area of improvement for them. It's too expensive to acquire their support."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The part that I like best is that you only pay for what you are using."
"BI is sold to our customer base as a part of the initial sales bundle. A customer may elect to opt for a white labeled site for an up-charge."
"The price of Amazon Redshift is reasonable because it depends on the usage that you use and for DWH for the long term."
"It is an expensive product."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The cost is comparable to Snowflake."
"If you want a fixed price, an to not worry about every query, but you need to manage your nodes personally, use Redshift."
"For Amazon Redshift, we pay around INR 60,000 annually. The cost factor also depends on the number of existing customers."
"AWS Lake Formation is a bit expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
University
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Amazon Redshift compare with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?
Amazon Redshift is very fast, has a very good response time, and is very user-friendly. The initial setup is very straightforward. This solution can merge and integrate well with many different dat...
What do you like most about Amazon Redshift?
The tool's most valuable feature is its parallel processing capability. It can handle massive amounts of data, even when pushing hundreds of terabytes, and its scaling capabilities are good.
What do you like most about AWS Lake Formation?
It is seamlessly integrated within the AWS ecosystem, making it straightforward to manage access patterns for AWS-native services.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Lake Formation?
The pricing is expensive compared to OpenStack, but cheaper than other cloud environments. It's middle-of-the-road for regular storage yet very cost-effective when using Amazon Glacier for data.
What needs improvement with AWS Lake Formation?
If I could improve AWS Lake Formation, I would add more integrations with SageMaker. I would have built-in functions that provide statistics for the data when using the GUI, such as SageMaker Insig...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Liberty Mutual Insurance, 4Cite Marketing, BrandVerity, DNA Plc, Sirocco Systems, Gainsight, Blue 449
bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Lake Formation vs. Amazon Redshift and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
864,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.