What users are saying about
17 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow noopener'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>Score 8 out of 100
Based on 17 reviews and ratings
Top Rated
137 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow noopener'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>Score 9.1 out of 100
Based on 137 reviews and ratings
Feature Set Ratings
- Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) ranks higher in 1 feature set: Database-as-a-Service
Database-as-a-Service
7.7
Amazon Athena
77%
8.7
Amazon RDS
87%
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) ranks higher in 4/6 features
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) ranks higher in 4/6 features
Automatic software patching
7.0
70%
1 Rating
9.1
91%
16 Ratings
Database scalability
7.0
70%
1 Rating
9.5
95%
16 Ratings
Automated backups
8.0
80%
1 Rating
9.3
93%
16 Ratings
Database security provisions
8.0
80%
1 Rating
8.6
86%
15 Ratings
Monitoring and metrics
8.0
80%
1 Rating
7.7
77%
16 Ratings
Automatic host deployment
8.0
80%
1 Rating
7.8
78%
12 Ratings
Attribute Ratings
- Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is rated higher in 1 area: Likelihood to Recommend
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
Amazon Athena
80%
1 Rating
9.3
Amazon RDS
93%
51 Ratings
Usability
Amazon Athena
N/A
0 Ratings
9.9
Amazon RDS
99%
4 Ratings
Support Rating
Amazon Athena
N/A
0 Ratings
9.3
Amazon RDS
93%
24 Ratings
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon Athena
If you are looking to take a lot of the traditional "database administration" work off someone's plate, going with Amazon Athena certainly has "no code" options to optimize lots of database tasks. I would say this option is less appropriate if you have other Microsoft things at play, such as Power BI.
Sr Director, BI
Franklin SportsSporting Goods, 201-500 employees
Amazon RDS
Whether your organization is [an] early startup or large company AWS RDS fits in most of the cases such as 1. Easy to start, setup, used by [a] few or large developers team. 2. You can easily scale DB [instances] when your business required scaling as a startup or pay only for [users] to optimize cost as [a] large organization. 3. If your application requires SQL Server, Oracle, or Maria DB then you should use AWS RDS instance. 4. Your application requires better availability and security of data you can use AWS RDS instance. When AWS RDS is not recommended: 1. You need automatic scaling or capacity flexibility as request load gradually increases, better to use Amazon Aurora DB in this case.

Verified User
Engineer in Engineering
Financial Services Company, 201-500 employeesPros
Amazon Athena
- The most obvious, is you can use SQL programming language, which a lot of people understand.
- You can scale up to meeting higher processing times.
- The data return speed (query speed) is great.
Sr Director, BI
Franklin SportsSporting Goods, 201-500 employees
Amazon RDS
- Setting up and managing a new RDS is just a matter of few clicks.
- Maintaining different version of backup is just like a matter of turning on and off.
- Automatic minor update of database.
- Best restore:- You can even restore to 1 second before time.
Software Engineer
AtlantisInternet, 11-50 employees
Cons
Amazon Athena
- 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.
Sr Director, BI
Franklin SportsSporting Goods, 201-500 employees
Amazon RDS
- You don't have os-level or hardware-level access to the system, so all your performance tuning needs to be done within your application or within the parameters of the database engine that amazon allows you to customize.
- Customizations/Extensions to the database engines are impossible, as you don't have OS-level access.
- Migrating in/out of RDS with zero down time can be relatively challenging from a configuration and execution perspective, depending on your infrastructure.

Verified User
Engineer in Engineering
Marketing and Advertising Company, 11-50 employeesPricing Details
Amazon Athena
General
Free Trial
—Free/Freemium Version
—Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—Entry-level set up fee?
No
Starting Price
$5 per TB of Data Scanned
Amazon Athena Editions & Modules
Edition
Price per Query | $5.001 |
---|
- per TB of Data Scanned
Additional Pricing Details
—Amazon RDS
General
Free Trial
—Free/Freemium Version
—Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—Entry-level set up fee?
Optional
Free to try. Pay only for what you use with no minimum fee.
Starting Price
$0 per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
Amazon RDS Editions & Modules
Edition
Amazon RDS for MySQL | $0.29 ($0.58)1 |
---|---|
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL | $0.24 ($0.48)1 |
Amazon RDS for MariaDB | $0.25 ($0.50)1 |
Amazon RDS for Oracle | $0.482 ($0.964)1 |
Amazon RDS for SQL Server | $1.02 ($1.52)1 |
- per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
Additional Pricing Details
—Usability
Amazon Athena
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
Amazon RDS
Amazon RDS 9.9
Based on 4 answers
I've been using AWS Relational Database Services in several projects in different environments and from the AWS products, maybe this one together to EC2 are my favourite. They deliver what they promise. Reliable, fast, easy and with a fair price (in comparison to commercial products which have obscure license agreements).
Senior Devops Engineer
SOTIComputer & Network Security, 1001-5000 employees
Support Rating
Amazon Athena
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
Amazon RDS
Amazon RDS 9.3
Based on 24 answers
I have only had good experiences in working with AWS support. I will admit that my experience comes from the benefit of having a premium tier of support but even working with free-tier accounts I have not had problems getting help with AWS products when needed. And most often, the docs do a pretty good job of explaining how to operate a service so a quick spin through the docs has been useful in solving problems.
Senior Systems Reliability Engineer
The Walt Disney CompanyEntertainment, 10,001+ employees
Alternatives Considered
Amazon Athena
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.
Sr Director, BI
Franklin SportsSporting Goods, 201-500 employees
Amazon RDS
[Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)] is much better to have everything in the cloud instead of having it on-premise once you can get all the benefits from Cloud. Of course, it can be a bit expensive if your company it's not growing anymore but if you check it in detail, you can see that the scalability of Cloud makes a lot of sense and also the reliability.

Verified User
Employee in Information Technology
Computer Software Company, 11-50 employeesReturn on Investment
Amazon Athena
- The query speeds help us make more decisions in a day (speed).
- If you need more horsepower for specific times in the day this option helps scale.
- The security of your environment is well protected too.
Sr Director, BI
Franklin SportsSporting Goods, 201-500 employees
Amazon RDS
- RDS has made sure that we don't spend a lot of time resolving issues that are not even remotely relevant to our business use-cases. It has thus made the life of DB administrators easy which allows them to explore other avenues as well.
- Using RDS for around 10 years now, we have never had an issue BECAUSE of RDS. It is a very reliable service.
Software Developer
ezDIHealth, Wellness and Fitness, 201-500 employees