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AWS Lake Formation 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

AWS Lake Formation
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Dremio
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Data Science Platforms (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of AWS Lake Formation is 5.5%, up from 5.2% 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%
AWS Lake Formation5.5%
Other85.6%
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Ciro Baldim Guerra - PeerSpot reviewer
Has improved data governance by enabling clear ownership and structured access across teams
In my company, Itaú, we don't utilize all AWS offerings due to rigorous security measures. We operate approximately six to eight months behind other available services. I'm uncertain if gaps exist because of this limitation, though the system functions effectively for us. AWS Lake Formation offers column-level access control for databases, but we haven't implemented this feature either because it hasn't been approved by our compliance, governance, or security areas. In our current setup, everyone from my business unit uses the same consumer account. When access is requested for a table, everyone using that business unit account receives access. This could present a security concern, though it benefits new team members who automatically receive all necessary access permissions. However, I struggle to identify specific improvements needed in AWS Lake Formation.
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

"I can easily move data from cold storage to regular storage."
"There is no doubt that this place exceeded my expectations with its incredible ambiance, attentive service, and mouthwatering menu."
"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."
"AWS Lake Formation significantly improves the structure of the data mesh, making it superior to previous structures we used."
"The features and capabilities of AWS Lake Formation that I have found most valuable are that it is really convenient to see all the different data assets that were configured and understand who has and what type of service has or does not have access to those services."
"The LF-Tag system with granular permissions was key to the project as a functionality of AWS Lake Formation."
"We have observed measurable benefits in terms of cost savings, time savings, resource savings, and efficiency improvements in our workflows."
"AWS Lake Formation lets you see all your data and tables on one screen."
"Overall, you can rate it as eight out of ten."
"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 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."
"We primarily use Dremio to create a data framework and a data queue."
"Dremio allows querying the files I have on my block storage or object storage."
"Dremio gives you the ability to create services which do not require additional resources and sterilization."
"Dremio is very easy to use for building queries."
 

Cons

"Rather than creating an additional hundred tools, optimizing a tool to have a centralized location to do governance would be beneficial."
"The initial onboarding process is challenging because creating a plan takes a month to a month and a half to build out."
"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."
"If I could improve AWS Lake Formation, I would add more integrations with SageMaker."
"The main challenge we faced with AWS Lake Formation was related to cross-account sharing. Granting access to other AWS accounts for tables or databases in a different AWS account was somewhat difficult."
"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."
"I haven't seen any measurable benefits from using AWS Lake Formation, such as time saving, resource saving, or efficiency improvements."
"I would appreciate online support, which I don't have access to in my corporation at the bank, so that is important."
"They have an automated tool for building SQL queries, so you don't need to know SQL. That interface works, but it could be more efficient in terms of the SQL generated from those things. It's going through some growing pains. There is so much value in tools like these for people with no SQL experience. Over time, Dermio will make these capabilities more accessible to users who aren't database people."
"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."
"There are performance issues at times due to our limited experience with Dremio, and the fact that we are running it on single nodes using a community version."
"We've faced a challenge with integrating Dremio and Databricks, specifically regarding authentication. It is not shaking hands very easily."
"Dremio takes a long time to execute large queries or the executing of correlated queries or nested queries. Additionally, the solution could improve if we could read data from the streaming pipelines or if it allowed us to create the ETL pipeline directly on top of it, similar to Snowflake."
"I cannot use the recursive common table expression (CTE) in Dremio because the support page says it's currently unsupported."
"They need to have multiple connectors."
"They need to have multiple connectors. Starburst is rich in connectors, however, they are lacking Salesforce connectivity as of today."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"AWS Lake Formation is a bit expensive."
"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
20%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
29%
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 Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

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?
I don't understand much about the pricing of AWS Lake Formation, but I know how to search for the cost of Glue jobs, and I use the calculator in Amazon. I use a tool to preview the cost based on th...
What needs improvement with AWS Lake Formation?
I don't know any features that I would want to see included in the future releases of AWS Lake Formation. Making queries in SQL is a reality now, and in the future, it would be beneficial if AWS im...
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

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
UBS, TransUnion, Quantium, Daimler, OVH
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Lake Formation vs. Dremio and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.