Amazon DynamoDB vs. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon DynamoDB
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Amazon DynamoDB is a cloud-native, NoSQL, serverless database service.
$0
capacity unit per hour
Amazon S3
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Amazon S3 is a cloud-based object storage service from Amazon Web Services. It's key features are storage management and monitoring, access management and security, data querying, and data transfer.N/A
Pricing
Amazon DynamoDBAmazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Editions & Modules
Provisioned - Read Operation
$0.00013
capacity unit per hour
Provisioned - Write Operation
$0.00065
capacity unit per hour
Provisioned - Global Tables
$0.000975
per Read Capacity
On-Demand Streams
$0.02
per 100,000 read operations
Provisioned - Streams
$0.02
per 100,000 read operations
On-Demand Data Requests Outside AWS Regions
$0.09
per GB
Provisioned - Data Requests Outside AWS Regions
$0.09
per GB
On-Demand Snapshot
$0.10
per GB per month
Provisioned - Snapshot
$0.10
per GB per month
On-Demand Restoring a Backup
$0.15
per GB
Provisioned - Restoring a Backup
$0.15
per GB
On-Demand Point-in-Time Recovery
$0.20
per GB per month
Provisioned - Point-in-Time Recovery
$0.20
per GB per month
On-Demand Read Operation
$0.25
per million requests
On-Demand Data Stored
$0.25
per GB per month
Provisioned - Data Stored
$0.25
per GB per month
On-Demand - Write Operation
$1.25
per million requests
On-Demand Global Tables
$1.875
per million write operations replicated
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon DynamoDBAmazon S3
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon DynamoDBAmazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Considered Both Products
Amazon DynamoDB
Chose Amazon DynamoDB
Comparing RDS and Dynamo is not fully Apples to Apples comparison. RDS is a more flexible cloud-native solution that supports a wide range of engines that are relational. It is great for running older DB types like Oracle in the Cloud. Because it supports multiple engines, it …
Chose Amazon DynamoDB
Lesser flexibility but better performance, and more predictable development support are the key points where Amazon DynamoDB comes out on top, when compared to MongoDB.
Chose Amazon DynamoDB
DynamoDB provided an easy to use, schema-less, out of the box solution that can be used to spin up a full working implementation very easily. It doesn't require extra knowledge such as MongoDB query functions
Chose Amazon DynamoDB
Dynamo DB is definitely more efficient and able to be configured easier than both. I just would say you have to know what you are doing with SQL as well. Because if you don’t know anything about SQL, you could always use Dynamo DB to help store your big data.
Chose Amazon DynamoDB
Compared to running your own on-prem SQL infrastructure Amazon Dynamo is easier to set up, faster and more reliable as well as being cheaper in the long run.
Chose Amazon DynamoDB
We have been preferring DynamoDB over Redis for persistent data. It has a better encryption model and is operationally simpler. For materialized views we've been using Elasticsearch, but are starting to consider using DynamoDB there too.
Chose Amazon DynamoDB
We did not use or evaluated any. DynamoDB was our first choice for this particular use case and we were glad we made this choice.
Also, knowing the AWS infrastructure and having DynamoDB integrated into the AWS environment helped us greatly with learning DynamoDB and being able …
Chose Amazon DynamoDB
When you compare database systems it's easy to have an apples to apples comparison. However, when comparing two No-SQL systems it isn't as easy because they are built with different purposes in mind. DynamoDB has been easier to implement because it comes as a Service from …
Chose Amazon DynamoDB
I wish I could speak more towards this, but I did not take the time to evaluate any other options. As I've mentioned earlier in this review, our entire infrastructure is already inside of AWS - we use dozens of their services - so it was a no brainer for us to keep with that …
Chose Amazon DynamoDB
As a fully managed NoSQL service, DynamoDB provides a lot of functionality for relatively low cost. Scaling, sharding, throughput performance is managed for you, and you only pay for the bandwidth you provision.
Chose Amazon DynamoDB
9/10 times I would recommend using MongoDB over DynamoDB. The only real benefit of DynamoDB over MongoDB is that it's already deeply nested in the Amazon ecosystem with tight integration with other AWS tools. Working with Amazons sdks is clunky compared to Mongo, it lacks a …
Chose Amazon DynamoDB
We evaluated using MongoDB or Amazon DyanmoDB. For us, the biggest advantage is that there's no maintenance cost for Amazon DynamoDB. Mongo gets complicated when you setup sharding. With Amazon DynamoDB, it's literally a push of button to increase throughput. This saves time …
Chose Amazon DynamoDB
Main advantage of DynamoDB is Amazon's offering as SaaS. This removes the need for managing the database. DynamoDB is well suited for querying simple and flat JSON objects.

Compared to PostgresSQL, I would pick Postgres over Dynamo considering that Postgres is very mature and …
Chose Amazon DynamoDB
Sql is much more feature rich yet costly and harder to maintain. Requires physical servers while dynamo everything is in the cloud across multiple AZs. Redis is actually great to put on top of dynamo to use as a read cache which is much faster and cheaper, but the storage and …
Amazon S3
Chose Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is the only AWS offering for object storage. DynamoDB is fantastic for unstructured data but does not handle object storage. The relational database service (RDS) is excellent but only applies to use cases with structured table data, and does …
Chose Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
They're both great. I really don't know the differences, but both have the same basic set of features, in my opinion. But, S3 is widely know as a greater tool, safer, and much easier. Also, it's used by and compatible with a lot of applications around the world. That made us …
Chose Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Prior to using S3, we were hosting all of our assets from the assets pipeline in our Ruby on Rails application. For a small company, this approach was fine but as the assets doubled and tripled, this was no longer the way to go. S3 will help you scale regardless of company …
Chose Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
As most of our work loads and the under laying platforms are build on EMR, Spark and AWS Lambda, we did not find HDFS a suitable solution to have all of our data in. HDFS was very costly as we had to maintain data nodes only for the sole purpose of maintaining the extra storage …
Chose Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
I haven't been personally involved in the decision to use S3, but in comparison to Dropbox or Google Drive, this offers a less robust UI to modify things, while being a cheaper storage mechanism over the rest.
Chose Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Out of all the other products, I personally feel, S3 is the best! You don't need to worry about the size of the data you store, maintenance is very easy, write a simple lifecycle rule to clear the unwanted and un important data after a certain period of time. No need to have …
Chose Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Amazon S3 is where you want to default to if you want to store a large amount of data. Compared to formatted data that you can store in Amazon RDS or DynamoDB, you can store your data in any format you want on S3. And the data retention policy can be really useful if you use S3 …
Features
Amazon DynamoDBAmazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
NoSQL Databases
Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Product A and Product B
Amazon DynamoDB
9.2
69 Ratings
4% above category average
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
-
Ratings
Performance9.368 Ratings00 Ratings
Availability9.469 Ratings00 Ratings
Concurrency9.067 Ratings00 Ratings
Security9.269 Ratings00 Ratings
Scalability9.468 Ratings00 Ratings
Data model flexibility8.266 Ratings00 Ratings
Deployment model flexibility10.023 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Center Backup
Comparison of Data Center Backup features of Product A and Product B
Amazon DynamoDB
-
Ratings
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
8.8
11 Ratings
2% above category average
Universal recovery00 Ratings8.710 Ratings
Instant recovery00 Ratings8.210 Ratings
Recovery verification00 Ratings8.37 Ratings
Business application protection00 Ratings8.57 Ratings
Multiple backup destinations00 Ratings8.710 Ratings
Incremental backup identification00 Ratings9.24 Ratings
Backup to the cloud00 Ratings8.911 Ratings
Deduplication and file compression00 Ratings8.95 Ratings
Snapshots00 Ratings9.07 Ratings
Flexible deployment00 Ratings9.111 Ratings
Management dashboard00 Ratings7.910 Ratings
Platform support00 Ratings8.710 Ratings
Retention options00 Ratings9.57 Ratings
Encryption00 Ratings9.78 Ratings
Enterprise Backup
Comparison of Enterprise Backup features of Product A and Product B
Amazon DynamoDB
-
Ratings
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
8.7
11 Ratings
2% above category average
Continuous data protection00 Ratings9.410 Ratings
Replication00 Ratings8.810 Ratings
Operational reporting and analytics00 Ratings8.111 Ratings
Malware protection00 Ratings8.74 Ratings
Multi-location capabilities00 Ratings9.011 Ratings
Ransomware Recovery00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
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Amazon DynamoDBAmazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Small Businesses
IBM Cloudant
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Score 7.4 out of 10
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Cove Data Protection
Score 9.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Bacula Enterprise
Bacula Enterprise
Score 9.6 out of 10
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IBM Cloudant
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Score 7.4 out of 10
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Score 9.6 out of 10
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User Ratings
Amazon DynamoDBAmazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(79 ratings)
9.0
(77 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(34 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
9.1
(4 ratings)
8.4
(15 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(42 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
5.2
(4 ratings)
9.8
(21 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(42 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon DynamoDBAmazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
It’s great for server less and real-time applications. It would be great for gaming and mobile apps. However, if you need relational database and have fixed budget, do not use it. While budget can be managed, you need to be careful. Also this is not a tool for storing big data, there are other wide-column database types you could use for it ins the ad
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Amazon AWS
Amazon S3 is a great service to safely backup your data where redundancy is guaranteed and the cost is fair. We use Amazon S3 for data that we backup and hope we never need to access but in the case of a catastrophic or even small slip of the finger with the delete command we know our data and our client's data is safely backed up by Amazon S3. Transferring data into Amazon S3 is free but transferring data out has an associated, albeit low, cost per GB. This needs to be kept in mind if you plan on transferring out a lot of data frequently. There may be other cost effective options although Amazon S3 prices are really low per GB. Transferring 150TB would cost approximately $50 per month.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • To manage varying workloads, it enables users to increase capacity as necessary and decrease it as needed.
  • Users can take advantage of its auto-scaling, in-memory caching, and backup without paying for the services of a database administrator.
  • We can use it for low scale operations.
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Amazon AWS
  • Fantastic developer API, including AWS command line and library utilities.
  • Strong integration with the AWS ecosystem, especially with regards to access permissions.
  • It's astoundingly stable- you can trust it'll stay online and available for anywhere in the world.
  • Its static website hosting feature is a hidden gem-- it provides perhaps the cheapest, most stable, most high-performing static web hosting available in PaaS.
Read full review
Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Cost model may not be easy to control and may lead to higher costs if not carefully planned
  • Indexing may be a cost culprit when not planned, because it's not included on the data costs
  • The Query Language may not fulfill everybody's expectations, as it has less features than those of competitors.
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Amazon AWS
  • Web console can be very confusing and challenging to use, especially for new users
  • Bucket policies are very flexible, but the composability of the security rules can be very confusing to get right, often leading to security rules in use on buckets other than what you believe they are
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Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
It's core to our business, we couldn't survive without it. We use it to drive everything from FTP logins to processing stories and delivering them to clients. It's reliable and easy to query from all of our pipeline services. Integration with things like AWS Lambda makes it easy to trigger events and run code whenever something changes in the database.
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Amazon AWS
Due to princing, availability and scalability.
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Usability
Amazon AWS
Functionally, DynamoDB has the features needed to use it. The interface is not as easy to use, which impacts its usability. Being familiar with AWS in general is helpful in understanding the interface, however it would be better if the interface more closely aligned with traditional tools for managing datastores.
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Amazon AWS
It is tricky to get it all set up correctly with policies and getting the IAM settings right. There is also a lot of lifecycle config you can do in terms of moving data to cold/glacier storage. It is also not to be confused with being a OneDrive or SharePoint replacement, they each have their own place in our environment, and S3 is used more by the IT team and accessed by our PHP applications. It is not necessarily used by an average everyday user for storing their pictures or documents, etc.
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Performance
Amazon AWS
It works very well across all the regions and response time is also very quick due to AWS's internal data transfer. Plus if your product requires HIPPA or some other regulations needs to be followed, you can easily replicate the DB into multiple regions and they manage all by it's own.
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Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Amazon AWS
I have not had to contact support for this service, however I have had to contact AWS for other services and their support has been good.
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Amazon AWS
AWS has always been quick to resolve any support ticket raised. S3 is no exception. We have only ever used it once to get a clarification regarding the costs involved when data is transferred between S3 and other AWS services or the public internet. We got a response from AWS support team within a day.
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
The only thing that can be compared to DynamoDB from the selected services can be Aurora. It is just that we use Aurora for High-Performance requirements as it can be 6 times faster than normal RDS DB. Both of them have served as well in the required scenario and we are very happy with most of the AWS services.
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Amazon AWS
Overall, we found that Amazon S3 provided a lot of backend features Google Cloud Storage (GCS) simply couldn't compare to. GCS was way more expensive and really did not live up to it. In terms of setup, Google Cloud Storage may have Amazon S3 beat, however, as it is more of a pseudo advanced version of Google Drive, that was not a hard feat for it to achieve. Overall, evaluating GCS, in comparison to S3, was an utter disappointment.
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Scalability
Amazon AWS
I have taken one point away due to its size limits. In case the application requires queries, it becomes really complicated to read and write data. When it comes to extremely large data sets such as the case in my company, a third-party logistics company, where huge amount of data is generated on a daily basis, even though the scalability is good, it becomes difficult to manage all the data due to limits.
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Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • Some developers see DynamoDB and try to fit problems to it, instead of picking the best solution for a given problem. This is true of any newer tool that people are trying to adopt.
  • It has allowed us to add more scalability to some of our systems.
  • As with any new technology there was a ramp up/rework phase as we learned best practices.
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Amazon AWS
  • It practically eliminated some real heavy storage servers from our premises and reduced maintenance cost.
  • The excellent durability and reliability make sure the return of money you invested in.
  • If the objects which are not active or stale, one needs to remove them. Those objects keep adding cost to each billing cycle. If you are handling a really big infrastructure, sometimes this creates quite a huge bill for preserving un-necessary objects/documents.
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ScreenShots

Amazon DynamoDB Screenshots

Screenshot of Amazon DynamoDB in the AWS Console