Amazon Athena vs. Google BigQuery

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Athena
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can point Athena at their data stored in S3 and begin using standard SQL to run ad-hoc queries and get results in seconds. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to setup or manage, and customers pay only for the queries they run. You can use Athena to process logs, perform ad-hoc analysis, and run…
$5
per TB of Data Scanned
Google BigQuery
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Google's BigQuery is part of the Google Cloud Platform, a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) supporting the querying and rapid analysis of enterprise data.
$0.04
Pricing
Amazon AthenaGoogle BigQuery
Editions & Modules
Price per Query
$5.00
per TB of Data Scanned
Standard edition
$0.04 / slot hour
Enterprise edition
$0.06 / slot hour
Enterprise Plus edition
$0.10 / slot hour
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon AthenaGoogle BigQuery
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon AthenaGoogle BigQuery
Features
Amazon AthenaGoogle BigQuery
Database-as-a-Service
Comparison of Database-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Athena
8.6
Ratings
1% below category average
Google BigQuery
8.4
Ratings
3% below category average
Automatic software patching8.20 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Database scalability9.00 Ratings9.20 Ratings
Automated backups7.70 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Database security provisions9.20 Ratings8.60 Ratings
Monitoring and metrics8.00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Automatic host deployment9.20 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon AthenaGoogle BigQuery
Small Businesses
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon AthenaGoogle BigQuery
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(0 ratings)
8.6
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.1
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
7.7
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon AthenaGoogle BigQuery
Likelihood to Recommend
Best suited for analyzing huge amounts of data by just querying on Amazon Athena. Amazon Athena is also best to integrate with Amazon Quickight for visualization and reporting of data. Easy to work with CSV, JSON, and columnar data formats like Parquet, and ORC. Less appropriate to work with AVRO data format and also stored procedures are not supported in Amazon Athena. The size of a single row is also limited to 32 MB.
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Google BigQuery is great for being the central datastore and entry point of data if you're on GCP. It seamlessly integrates with other Google products, meaning you can ingest data from other Google products with ease and little technical knowledge, and all of it is near real-time. Being serverless, BigQuery will scale with you, which means you don't have to worry about contention or spikes in demand/storage. This can, however, mean your costs can run away quickly or mount up at short notice.
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Pros
  • Load Balance traffic analysis
  • Big data report generation
  • Micro services pattern query analysis
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  • Its serverless architecture and underlying Dremel technology are incredibly fast even on complex datasets. I can get answers to my questions almost instantly, without waiting hours for traditional data warehouses to churn through the data.
  • Previously, our data was scattered across various databases and spreadsheets and getting a holistic view was pretty difficult. Google BigQuery acts as a central repository and consolidates everything in one place to join data sets and find hidden patterns.
  • Running reports on our old systems used to take forever. Google BigQuery's crazy fast query speed lets us get insights from massive datasets in seconds.
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Cons
  • Every dialect of SQL has some missing functions. I wish there was automated GROUP BY options here.
  • There are connection problems back to Power BI occasionally.
  • If you don't watch certain queries, it's possible that it takes a long time to run and charges you a lot of money.
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  • It is challenging to predict costs due to BigQuery's pay-per-query pricing model. User-friendly cost estimation tools, along with improved budget alerting features, could help users better manage and predict expenses.
  • The BigQuery interface is less intuitive. A more user-friendly interface, enhanced documentation, and built-in tutorial systems could make BigQuery more accessible to a broader audience.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
We have to use this product as its a 3rd party supplier choice to utilise this product for their data side backend so will not be likely we will move away from this product in the future unless the 3rd party supplier decides to change data vendors.
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Usability
Easy to use. Scalable. Gets the job of data warehousing setup done. Using the datalake on S3 has become super convenient.
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web UI is easy and convenient. Many RDBMS clients such as aqua data studio, Dbeaver data grid, and others connect. Range of well-documented APIs available. The range of features keeps expanding, increasing similar features to traditional RDBMS such as Oracle and DB2
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
I have never had any significant issues with Google Big Query. It always seems to be up and running properly when I need it. I cannot recall any times where I received any kind of application errors or unplanned outages. If there were any they were resolved quickly by my IT team so I didn't notice them.
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Performance
No answers on this topic
I think Google Big Query's performance is in the acceptable range. Sometimes larger datasets are somewhat sluggish to load but for most of our applications it performs at a reasonable speed. We do have some reports that include a lot of complex calculations and others that run on granular store level data that so sometimes take a bit longer to load which can be frustrating.
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Support Rating
No answers on this topic
BigQuery can be difficult to support because it is so solid as a product. Many of the issues you will see are related to your own data sets, however you may see issues importing data and managing jobs. If this occurs, it can be a challenge to get to speak to the correct person who can help you.
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon Athena, a product from Amazon, competes with offerings from Google and Microsoft. Overall, I think your database choice depends on some of the other applications you are running at your company. For example, if you are using Microsoft Power BI for reporting needs, you might want to consider going the Azure route.
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Google BigQuery of course collects a much much larger array of raw data and can handle (practically) an unlimited amount of data. For a large enterprise like ours that relies on large-scale analytics, this is absolutely imperative. Google BigQuery can also combine GA4 data with external sources (like CRM tools), so our analytics can be unified. Due to our heavy reliance on GA4, Google BigQuery is the natural choice since it is a Google product and has better integration.
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Scalability
No answers on this topic
We have continued to expand out use of Google Big Query over the years. I'd say its flexibility and scalability is actually quite good. It also integrates well with other tools like Tableau and Power BI. It has served the needs of multiple data sources across multiple departments within my company.
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Return on Investment
  • It's easy to store and query data on S3. Multiple teams can query the same data to generate their reports. It removes the need for a full-fledged data warehouse for a startup. Saves costs.
  • Improved team efficiency on monitoring user activities by easy logging and reporting.
  • As the dataset gets heavier on S3, one needs to understand partitioning and that leads to the requirement of expertise.
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  • In some places, Google BigQuery has helped us save some money by avoiding the need for expensive infrastructure and reducing some of the operational costs.
  • Scalability is up-to-date and really helpful in multiple places.
  • Knowledge transfer is easy as it is very user-friendly, so the learning curve has been reduced.
  • Also, it gives us more insights from our data, helping us make smarter decisions for our business.
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ScreenShots

Google BigQuery Screenshots

Screenshot of Migrating data warehouses to BigQuery - Features a streamlined migration path from Netezza, Oracle, Redshift, Teradata, or Snowflake to BigQuery using the fully managed BigQuery Migration Service.Screenshot of bringing any data into BigQuery - Data files can be uploaded from local sources, Google Drive, or Cloud Storage buckets, using BigQuery Data Transfer Service (DTS), Cloud Data Fusion plugins, by replicating data from relational databases with Datastream for BigQuery, or by leveraging Google's data integration partnerships.Screenshot of generative AI use cases with BigQuery and Gemini models - Data pipelines that blend structured data, unstructured data and generative AI models together can be built to create a new class of analytical applications. BigQuery integrates with Gemini 1.0 Pro using Vertex AI. The Gemini 1.0 Pro model is designed for higher input/output scale and better result quality across a wide range of tasks like text summarization and sentiment analysis. It can be accessed using simple SQL statements or BigQuery’s embedded DataFrame API from right inside the BigQuery console.Screenshot of insights derived from images, documents, and audio files, combined with structured data - Unstructured data represents a large portion of untapped enterprise data. However, it can be challenging to interpret, making it difficult to extract meaningful insights from it. Leveraging the power of BigLake, users can derive insights from images, documents, and audio files using a broad range of AI models including Vertex AI’s vision, document processing, and speech-to-text APIs, open-source TensorFlow Hub models, or custom models.Screenshot of event-driven analysis - Built-in streaming capabilities automatically ingest streaming data and make it immediately available to query. This allows users to make business decisions based on the freshest data. Or Dataflow can be used to enable simplified streaming data pipelines.Screenshot of predicting business outcomes AI/ML - Predictive analytics can be used to streamline operations, boost revenue, and mitigate risk. BigQuery ML democratizes the use of ML by empowering data analysts to build and run models using existing business intelligence tools and spreadsheets.