AWS Glue vs SAS Access comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and SAS are both solutions in the Cloud Data Integration category. Additionally, 90% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of SAS users who would recommend it.

AWS Glue

Read 50 AWS Glue reviews

7,756 Views
4,809 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

SAS Access

Read 3 SAS Access reviews

508 Views
366 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

AWS Glue

SAS Access

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between AWS Glue and SAS Access based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Cloud Data Integration solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS Glue vs. SAS Access Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

AWS Glue vs. SAS Access

September 2025

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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

AWS Glue

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Data Integration (1st)

SAS Access

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Integration (63rd)

Featured Reviews

Saurabh Jaiswal

Python AWS & AI Expert at a tech consulting company

Enables seamless integration and data preparation with robust transformation capabilities

AWS Glue's most valuable features include its transformation capabilities, which provide data quality and shape for processing in ML or AI models. It offers transformation options on canvas or through ETL pipelines, notebooks, and code. Additionally, it supports data preparation, cleaning, and filtering seamlessly. AWS Glue also enhances job scheduling and orchestration capabilities, integrating with AWS Glue Studio for comprehensive data workflow management.

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Robert Heck

Co Owner at Hecht und Heck GmbH

The solution is stable, scalable, and flexible

I rate the solution eight out of ten. The number of people required to maintain the solution is dependent on the other applications running. The solution in itself does not require a lot of maintenance. The solution is flexible and I recommend it when you have more complex applications with special requirements.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is serverless so it allows us to transform data while optimizing the cost and performance of Spark jobs."

"What I like best about AWS Glue is its real-time data backup feature. Last week, there was a production push, and what used to take almost ten days to send out around fifty-six thousand emails now takes only two hours."

"AWS Glue is a stable and easy-to-use solution."

"The product has a valuable feature for data catalog."

"One aspect that I would like to highlight is the Glue Crawler, which we utilize when working with large datasets to ensure the schema updates seamlessly without requiring end-team knowledge."

"It is a very scalable solution."

"The most valuable features currently are glue studio, jobs, and triggers."

"AWS Glue is a good solution for developers, they have the ability to write code in different languages and other software."

More AWS Glue pros

"The most valuable part of SAS/ACCESS is what it is made for: connecting to remote systems that are not part of your physical SAS environment."

"The most valuable feature is you have native access to the external databases."

"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the ease of access to the data in those databases."

Cons

"Setting up pipelines is challenging, especially with version control and testing requirements."

"The solution should offer features for streaming data in addition to batching data."

"While working on AWS Glue, I could not find any training material for it."

"It would be better if it were more user-friendly. The interesting thing we found is that it was a little strange at the beginning. The way Glue works is not very straightforward. After trying different things, for example, we used just the console to create jobs. Then we realized that things were not working as expected. After researching and learning more, we realized that even though the console creates the script for the ETL processes, you need to modify or write your own script in Spark to do everything you want it to do. For example, we are pulling data from our source database and our application database, which is in Aurora. From there, we are doing the ETL to transform the data and write the results into Redshift. But what was surprising is that it's almost like whatever you want to do, you can do it with Glue because you have the option to put together your own script. Even though there are many functionalities and many connections, you have the opportunity to write your own queries to do whatever transformations you need to do. It's a little deceiving that some options are supposed to work in a certain way when you set them up in the console, but then they are not exactly working the right way or not as expected. It would be better if they provided more examples and more documentation on options."

"Improvements in the UI are needed, as it is challenging to understand some functionalities."

"It is very difficult to learn the tool and remember the syntaxes comparatively."

"One area that could be improved is the ETL view. The drag-and-drop interface is not as user-friendly as some other ETL tools."

"The drawbacks associated with the product stem from the fact that, based on the data volume, it can become very costly."

More AWS Glue cons

"The pricing model needs to be reconsidered and adjusted."

"The solution can provide access to the newer databases that come out sooner."

"I can't really recall any missing feature or general improvement that is needed. We don't really add too many new kinds of databases and therefore our needs are already met."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Technical support is a paid service, and which subscription you have is dependent on that. You must pay one of them, and it ranges from $15,000 to $25,000 per year."

"AWS Glue follows a pay-as-you-go model, wherein the cost of the data you use will be counted as a monthly bill."

"It is an expensive product. I rate its pricing a nine out of ten."

"If you are using the solution for an enterprise business, it will be expensive."

"The pricing is a bit higher than other solutions like Athena and EC2. If the pricing becomes more scaled or flexible, it will be good because you have to pay 44 cents just for one DPU for an hour. If you increase DPUs to 5 or 10, the pricing gets multiplied. There are also some time limits like 0 to 10 minutes or 10 to 20 minutes. If the pricing is according to the minutes, it would be better because you have to limit your job to 10 minutes or 20 minutes."

"I rate pricing an eight out of ten."

"I would rate the solution a six or seven on a scale of one to ten, with ten being very expensive. Specifically, I rate its pricing a six out of ten."

"It is not expensive. AWS Glue works on the serverless architecture. We get charged for the time the server is up. For our use case, we have to use it once in a day, and it is not expensive for us."

More AWS Glue pricing and cost advice

"The pricing model is complex and is based on modular packages as well as the size of the applicable environment."

"The solution's pricing and licensing are expensive."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

21%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Insurance Company

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	32

No data available

Questions from the Community

How do you select the right cloud ETL tool?

AWS Glue and Azure Data factory for ELT best performance cloud services.

See all answers

How does Talend Open Studio compare with AWS Glue?

We reviewed AWS Glue before choosing Talend Open Studio. AWS Glue is the managed ETL (extract, transform, and load) from Amazon Web Services. AWS Glue enables AWS users to create and manage jobs in...

See all answers

What are the most common use cases for AWS Glue?

AWS Glue's main use case is for allowing users to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources. The product lets you use this data for analytics, application development, or ma...

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Comparisons

AWS Database Migration Service vs AWS Glue

Compared 31% of the time

SSIS vs AWS Glue

Compared 6% of the time

Oracle Integration Cloud Service vs AWS Glue

Compared 6% of the time

Palantir Foundry vs AWS Glue

Compared 5% of the time

SnapLogic vs AWS Glue

Compared 5% of the time

More AWS Glue Competitors

Teradata vs SAS Access

Compared 52% of the time

SAP Analytics Hub vs SAS Access

Compared 48% of the time

More SAS Access Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

AWS Glue

October 2025

Download AWS Glue product report

Buyer's Guide

Data Integration

September 2025

Download SAS Access product report

Also Known As

No data available

SAS/Access

Overview

AWS Glue is a serverless cloud data integration tool that facilitates the discovery, preparation, movement, and integration of data from multiple sources for machine learning (ML), analytics, and application development. The solution includes additional productivity and data ops tooling for running jobs, implementing business workflows, and authoring.

AWS Glue allows users to connect to more than 70 diverse data sources and manage data in a centralized data catalog. The solution facilitates visual creation, running, and monitoring of extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines to load data into users' data lakes. This Amazon product seamlessly integrates with other native applications of the brand and allows users to search and query cataloged data using Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, and Amazon Redshift Spectrum.

The solution also utilizes application programming interface (API) operations to transform users' data, create runtime logs, store job logic, and create notifications for monitoring job runs. The console of AWS Glue connects all of these services into a managed application, facilitating the monitoring and operational processes. The solution also performs provisioning and management of the resources required to run users' workloads in order to minimize manual work time for organizations.

AWS Glue Features

AWS Glue groups its features into four categories - discover, prepare, integrate, and transform. Within those groups are the following features:

Automatic schema discovery: AWS Glue crawlers connect to the organization's source or target data source through a prioritized list of classifiers to determine the schema for users' data. This feature creates metadata in companies' AWS Glue Data Catalog.
Schemas for data stream management: The AWS Glue Schema Registry enables users to validate and control the evolution of streaming data through registered Apache Avro schemas for no additional charge.
Automatic scaling based on workload: This feature dynamically scales resources up and down based on workload. The feature controls job resources, removing them depending on how much the workload can be split up.
FindMatches: This feature is for machine learning-based data deduplication and cleansing, and works by finding records that are imperfect matches of each other to remove useless data copies.
Edit, debug, and test ETL code: This feature helps users who have chosen to interactively develop their ETL code by providing development endpoints for editing, debugging, and testing the code it generates for them.
AWS Glue DataBrew: An interactive, point-and-click visual interface for specialists to clean and normalize data without the need to write any code.
AWS Glue Interactive Sessions: This feature simplifies the development of data integration jobs by enabling data engineers to interactively prepare and explore data.
AWS Glue Studio Job Notebooks: This AWS Glue feature provides serverless notebooks with minimal setup, allowing developers to start working in a timely manner.
Complex ETL pipeline building: This feature allows the product to be invoked on a schedule, on demand, or based on an event, allowing users to start multiple jobs in parallel or specify dependencies to build complex ETL pipelines.
AWS Glue Studio: This AWS Glue feature allows users to visually transform data through a drag-and-drop interface. The product automatically generates the code for ETL processes for users' data.

AWS Glue Benefits

AWS Glue offers a wide range of benefits for its users. These benefits include:

Users of other AWS products can easily onboard with AWS Glue, as it is integrated across a wide range of the company's services.
The solution is serverless, which allows for a lower total cost of ownership.
AWS Glue offers more power for users, as it automates much of the effort in building, maintaining, and running ETL jobs.
The product allows customers to easily discover and search across all their AWS datasets through AWS Glue Data Catalog.
AWS Glue does not require additional payment for managing and enforcing schemas for data streams.
The solution facilitates the authority of scalable ETL jobs for beginners and non-coding experts through a drag-and-drop interface.

Reviews from Real Users

Mustapha A., a cloud data engineer at Jems Groupe, likes AWS Glue because it is a product that is great for serverless data transformations.

Liana I., CEO at Quark Technologies SRL, describes AWS Glue as a highly scalable, reliable, and beneficial pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

SAS/ACCESS is an out-of-the-box solution for integrating SAS and third-party databases. You can read, write and update data regardless of the database or platform. Because the data appears native to SAS, there is no need to learn Structured Query Language (SQL) or any other database-specific query languages.

SAS

Sample Customers

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday

Los Angeles County, West Midlands Police, Credit Guarantee Corporation, Canada Post, Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty

Buyer's Guide

AWS Glue vs. SAS Access

September 2025

Free Report: AWS Glue vs. SAS Access

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