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  3. Amazon Athena
Logo of Amazon Athena

Amazon Athena

byAmazon Web Services (AWS)
in Hadoop Distributions
4.4

Overview

Product Information on Amazon Athena

Updated 13th October 2025

What is Amazon Athena?

Amazon Athena is a software that allows users to analyze data directly in Amazon Simple Storage Service using standard SQL queries. It is serverless, removing the need for infrastructure management, and is designed to handle structured, unstructured, and semi-structured datasets. The software provides features such as querying, data catalog integration, and compatibility with various file formats including JSON, CSV, and Parquet. Amazon Athena can be used to retrieve insights from data for reporting, analytics, and data exploration purposes, enabling organizations to address business problems related to extracting value from large and complex datasets stored in the cloud.

Amazon Athena Pricing

Amazon Athena is a software that uses a pay-per-query pricing model, where users are charged based on the volume of data scanned by each query. Pricing does not involve upfront costs or complex licensing, and storage is billed separately according to the amount of data stored in Amazon S3.

Overall experience with Amazon Athena

ENGINEER
500M - 1B USD, Media
FAVORABLE

“Athena Offers Simple SQL Querying But Faces Challenges With Speed and Syntax”

4.0
Nov 30, 2025
Athena has been easy to use to query our long term event data storage
AWS Cloud Engineer
250M - 500M USD, IT Services
CRITICAL

“Analyzing AWS Athena's Strengths and Weaknesses for Industrial Businesses”

3.0
Jan 30, 2025
This platform is great for small data querying but on large databases it is difficult to manage because of the complex queries. My overall view of this platform is that it has decent capabilities for small industrial business, but needs more functionality and growth for AWS services.

About Company

Company Description

Updated 6th March 2025

Amazon Web Services (AWS), established in 2006, is focused on providing essential infrastructure services to businesses globally in the form of cloud computing. The key advantage offered through cloud computing, particularly via AWS, is its capacity to shift fixed infrastructure expenses into flexible costs. Businesses have been able to forgo extensive planning and procurement of servers and other Information Technology (IT) resources, owing to AWS. AWS seeks to provide businesses with prompt and cost-effective access to resources using Amazon's expertise and economies of scale, as and when their business requires. Currently, AWS offers a robust, scalable, economic infrastructure platform on the cloud powering an extensive array of businesses worldwide. It operates across numerous industries with data center locations in various parts of the globe including U.S., Europe, Singapore, and Japan.

Company Details

Updated 23rd December 2024
Company type
Public
Year Founded
2006
Head office location
Seattle, United States
Number of employees
10001+
Website
http://aws.amazon.com

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Key Insights

A Snapshot of What Matters - Based on Validated User Reviews

Reviewer Insights for: Amazon Athena
Performance of Amazon Athena Across Market Features

Amazon Athena Likes & Dislikes

Like

Athena is easy to use given that its language is SQL. Team/access management has mare it certain that only those eligible to access specfici data has

Like

We can easily run our SQL queries on S3 data without any need for other platform, also this is a serverless platform and comfortable, also storage and computing power is great.

Like

The versatility of the product made me feel like it may be a good fit for other products.

Dislike

Athena can be very slow to query. Creating glue tables can be difficult. Errors on syntax are not always helpful.

Dislike

AWS Athena takes a lot of time when we fire a long query, so depending upon the large database it takes more time to scan and manage the data, optimizing query is also difficult, there is a need for documentation for the beginners.

Dislike

If there was one item that I would say as a negative, it was the learning curve to setup the service.

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Peer Discussions

Amazon Athena Reviews and Ratings

4.4

(90 Ratings)

Rating Distribution

5 Star
42%
4 Star
49%
3 Star
9%
2 Star
0%
1 Star
0%
Why ratings and reviews count differ?

Customer Experience

Evaluation & Contracting

4.5

Planning & Transition

4.6

Delivery & Execution

4.8

Integration & Deployment

4.5

Service & Support

4.4

Product Capabilities

4.4

Filter Reviews
Sort By:
Most helpful
Last 12 Months
Star Rating
Reviewer Type
Reviewer's Company Size
Reviewer's Industry
Reviewer's Region
Reviewer's Job Function
  • ENGINEER
    50M-1B USD
    Media
    Review Source

    Athena Offers Simple SQL Querying But Faces Challenges With Speed and Syntax

    4.0
    Nov 30, 2025
    Athena has been easy to use to query our long term event data storage
  • MANAGER, IT SECURITY AND RISK MANAGEMENT
    <50M USD
    IT Services
    Review Source

    Comprehensive AWS Dashboard Tool Shows Strengths

    5.0
    Oct 15, 2025
    Overall we utilized Athena for in-depth reporting and dashboard management within AWS to great success.
  • Data and Analytics Manager
    1B-10B USD
    Insurance (except health)
    Review Source

    Serverless Design and Speed Praised Yet Procedure Functions Are Missing

    4.0
    Dec 1, 2025
    Athena serverless is great for use cases where we dont need to manage huge database clusters for analytics
  • Chief Executive Officer
    <50M USD
    Services (non-Government)
    Review Source

    Product Praised For Ease Of Use, Speed and Affordable Pricing

    5.0
    Dec 2, 2025
    really easy to use and integrate with our company operation
  • Data Analyst
    50M-1B USD
    Services (non-Government)
    Review Source

    SQL Queries Simplify Data Lake Access But Permission Setup Is Challenging

    5.0
    Jul 16, 2025
    Makes querying data lakes really easy by just using SQL. I really love that I can access the common crawl dataset using this tool.
...
Showing Result 1-5 of 135

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