What users are saying about
Amazon EMR
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57 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow noopener'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>Score 8.5 out of 100
Based on 57 reviews and ratings
178 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow noopener'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>Score 8.7 out of 100
Based on 178 reviews and ratings
Attribute Ratings
- Amazon Redshift is rated higher in 3 areas: Likelihood to Recommend, Usability, Support Rating
Likelihood to Recommend

8.4
Amazon EMR
84%
20 Ratings
9.2
Amazon Redshift
92%
34 Ratings
Usability

8.3
Amazon EMR
83%
3 Ratings
10.0
Amazon Redshift
100%
9 Ratings
Support Rating

9.0
Amazon EMR
90%
3 Ratings
9.2
Amazon Redshift
92%
12 Ratings
Contract Terms and Pricing Model

Amazon EMR
N/A
0 Ratings
10.0
Amazon Redshift
100%
1 Rating
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon EMR
We are running it to perform preparation which takes a few hours on EC2 to be running on a spark-based EMR cluster to total the preparation inside minutes rather than a few hours. Ease of utilization and capacity to select from either Hadoop or spark. Processing time diminishes from 5-8 hours to 25-30 minutes compared with the Ec2 occurrence and more in a few cases.
Director Nacional. Desarrollo de red, procesos y servicio al cliente Posventa
DINISSANAutomotive, 1001-5000 employees
Amazon Redshift
If the number of connections is expected to be low, but the amounts of data are large or projected to grow it is a good solutions especially if there is previous exposure to PostgreSQL. Speaking of Postgres, Redshift is based on several versions old releases of PostgreSQL so the developers would not be able to take advantage of some of the newer SQL language features. The queries need some fine-tuning still, indexing is not provided, but playing with sorting keys becomes necessary. Lastly, there is no notion of the Primary Key in Redshift so the business must be prepared to explain why duplication occurred (must be vigilant for)
Senior Business Intelligence Consultant
SermoResearch, 201-500 employees
Pros
Amazon EMR
- Amazon Elastic MapReduce works well for managing analyses that use multiple tools, such as Hadoop and Spark. If it were not for the fact that we use multiple tools, there would be less need for MapReduce.
- MapReduce is always on. I've never had a problem getting data analyses to run on the system. It's simple to set up data mining projects.
- Amazon Elastic MapReduce has no problems dealing with very large data sets. It processes them just fine. With that said, the outputs don't come instantaneously. It takes time.
Owner, previous CEO
Econometric StudiosFinancial Services, 11-50 employees
Amazon Redshift
- [Amazon] Redshift has Distribution Keys. If you correctly define them on your tables, it improves Query performance. For instance, we can define Mapping/Meta-data tables with Distribution-All Key, so that it gets replicated across all the nodes, for fast joins and fast query results.
- [Amazon] Redshift has Sort Keys. If you correctly define them on your tables along with above Distribution Keys, it further improves your Query performance. It also has Composite Sort Keys and Interleaved Sort Keys, to support various use cases
- [Amazon] Redshift is forked out of PostgreSQL DB, and then AWS added "MPP" (Massively Parallel Processing) and "Column Oriented" concepts to it, to make it a powerful data store.
- [Amazon] Redshift has "Analyze" operation that could be performed on tables, which will update the stats of the table in leader node. This is sort of a ledger about which data is stored in which node and which partition with in a node. Up to date stats improves Query performance.
Staff Data Engineer
Hearst AutosMarketing & Advertising, 501-1000 employees
Cons
Amazon EMR
- Sometimes bootstrapping certain tools comes with debugging costs. The tools provided by some of the enterprise editions are great compared to EMR.
- Like some of the enterprise editions EMR does not provide on premises options.
- No UI client for saving the workbooks or code snippets. Everything has to go through submitting process. Not really convenient for tracking the job as well.

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Automotive Company, 1001-5000 employeesAmazon Redshift
- We've experienced some problems with hanging queries on Redshift Spectrum/external tables. We've had to roll back to and old version of Redshift while we wait for AWS to provide a patch.
- Redshift's dialect is most similar to that of PostgreSQL 8. It lacks many modern features and data types.
- Constraints are not enforced. We must rely on other means to verify the integrity of transformed tables.
Data Scientist
Wonder (AskWonder.com)Research, 11-50 employees
Pricing Details
Amazon EMR
General
Free Trial
—Free/Freemium Version
—Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—Entry-level set up fee?
No
Starting Price
—Amazon EMR Editions & Modules
—
Additional Pricing Details
—Amazon Redshift
General
Free Trial
—Free/Freemium Version
—Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—Entry-level set up fee?
No
Starting Price
$0 per hour
Amazon Redshift Editions & Modules
Edition
Current Generation | $0.25 - $13.041 |
---|---|
Previous Generation | $0.25 - $4.081 |
Redshift Spectrum | $5.002 |
Redshift Managed Storage | $0.243 |
- per hour
- per terabyte of data scanned
- per GB per month
Additional Pricing Details
—Usability
Amazon EMR
Amazon EMR 8.3
Based on 3 answers
I give Amazon EMR this rating because while it is great at simplifying running big data frameworks, providing the Amazon EMR highlights, product details, and pricing information, and analyzing vast amounts of data, it can be run slow, freeze and glitch sometimes. So overall Amazon EMR is pretty good to use other than some basic issues.

Verified User
Team Lead in Information Technology
Information Technology & Services Company, 11-50 employeesAmazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift 10.0
Based on 9 answers
Just very happy with the product, it fits our needs perfectly. Amazon pioneered the cloud and we have had a positive experience using RedShift. Really cool to be able to see your data housed and to be able to query and perform administrative tasks with ease.
Senior Developer
American Board of Internal MedicineNon-Profit Organization Management, 201-500 employees
Support Rating
Amazon EMR
Amazon EMR 9.0
Based on 3 answers
There's a vast group of trained and certified (by AWS) professionals ready to work for anyone that needs to implement, configure or fix EMR. There's also a great amount of documentation that is accessible to anyone who's trying to learn this. And there's also always the help of AWS itself. They have people ready to help you analyze your needs and then make a recommendation.
Director of Customer Operations & Account Management
KoombeaInternet, 51-200 employees
Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift 9.2
Based on 12 answers
The support was great and helped us in a timely fashion. We did use a lot of online forums as well, but the official documentation was an ongoing one, and it did take more time for us to look through it. We would have probably chosen a competitor product had it not been for the great support

Verified User
Engineer in Engineering
Financial Services Company, 5001-10,000 employeesAlternatives Considered
Amazon EMR
Snowflake is a lot easier to get started with than the other options. Snowflake's data lake building capabilities are far more powerful. Although Amazon EMR isn't our first pick, we've had an excellent experience with EC2 and S3. Because of our current API interfaces, it made more sense for us to continue with Hadoop rather than explore other options.

Verified User
Engineer in Engineering
Computer Software Company, 201-500 employeesAmazon Redshift
Than Vertica: Redshift is cheaper and AWS integrated (which was a plus because the whole company was on AWS).
Than BigQuery: Redshift has a standard SQL interface, though recently I heard good things about BigQuery and would try it out again.
Than Hive: Hive is great if you are in the PB+ range, but latencies tend to be much slower than Redshift and it is not suited for ad-hoc applications.
Than BigQuery: Redshift has a standard SQL interface, though recently I heard good things about BigQuery and would try it out again.
Than Hive: Hive is great if you are in the PB+ range, but latencies tend to be much slower than Redshift and it is not suited for ad-hoc applications.

Verified User
Director in Engineering
Computer Software Company, 1001-5000 employeesContract Terms and Pricing Model
Amazon EMR
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift 10.0
Based on 1 answer
Redshift is relatively cheaper tool but since the pricing is dynamic, there is always a risk of exceeding the cost. Since most of our team is using it as self serve and there is no continuous tracking by a dedicated team, it really needs time & effort on analyst's side to know how much it is going to cost.
Analytics Lead
Monotype Solutions IndiaInformation Technology & Services, 10,001+ employees
Return on Investment
Amazon EMR
- Positive: Helped process the jobs amazingly fast.
- Positive: Did not have to spend much time to learn the system, therefore, saving valuable research time.
- Negative: Not flexible for some scenarios, like when some plugins are required, or when the project has to be moved in-house.

Verified User
Analyst in Research & Development
Research Company, 1-10 employeesAmazon Redshift
- Our company is moving to the AWS infrastructure, and in this context moving the warehouse environments to Redshift sounds logical regardless of the cost.
- Development organizations have to operate in the Dev/Ops mode where they build and support their apps at the same time.
- Hard to estimate the overall ROI of moving to Redshift from my position. However, running Redshift seems to be inexpensive compared to all the licensing and hardware costs we had on our RDBMS platform before Redshift.
Principal Data Architect
IntuitComputer Software, 5001-10,000 employees