Amazon Athena
Hacker ApprovedRanked 7 of 9 cloud data warehouses by recommenders
People recommend Athena for querying data in S3 without running servers, with simple SQL and little setup. Critics say it lags other query engines on features and file formats.
People recommend Athena for querying data in S3 without running servers, with simple SQL and little setup. Critics say it lags other query engines on features and file formats.
19 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 13
- criticize it
- 6
- approval share
- 68%
Recommended in 8 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 13 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2.2 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 8 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
No servers to host or manage
“If we use this we get indefinite RAM indefinite CPU and do not need to host a server”
Comment from 17 Aug 2026 in “A Preview of DuckDB v2.0” “You use the cloud provider service provided (BigQuery or AWS Athena for example).”
Comment from 18 Jan 2026 in “Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)” Simple SQL over S3 data
“the pipeline you have to build is literally just Athena SQL statement”
Comment from 19 Jan 2026 in “Article by article, how Big Tech shaped the EU's roll-back of digital rights” “can dump to S3 (log archive) where you can use Athena/Trino”
Comment from 13 Nov 2025 in “OpenTelemetry: Escape Hatch from the Observability Cartel” “Athena + S3 is good enough.”
Comment from 22 Apr 2026 in “DuckDB 1.5.2 – SQL database that runs on laptop, server, in the browser”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Weaker than other query engines
“possibly the worst major query engine in terms of support for query features and file formats”
Comment from 29 Oct 2026 in “MiniLake Is a Local Databricks API Emulator with SQL, Delta Lake and Spark” “Amazon Athena is a joke compared to it.”
Comment from 26 Oct 2026 in “All you need is Wide Events, not "Metrics, Logs and Traces"”
Other cloud data warehouses people recommend
The four most recommended other cloud data warehouses, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Palantir | 86 | 613 | 12% | 12 | — | — |
| Snowflake | 26 | 24 | 52% | 12 | — | — |
| Google BigQuery | 26 | 9 | 74% | 10 | — | Approved |
| Palantir Foundry | 21 | 31 | 40% | 8 | — | — |
| Amazon AthenaThis page | 13 | 6 | 68% | 8 | — | Approved |
What people said
18 of the 21 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“possibly the worst major query engine in terms of support for query features and file formats”
“Amazon Athena is a joke compared to it.”
“AWS has been a bad player in the data space”
“With Athena we're trying to change that by capturing your tacit knowledge”
“Athena + Clickhouse has been an absolute game changer for us.”
“If we use this we get indefinite RAM indefinite CPU and do not need to host a server”
“which was good but not very useful”
“I spun my wheels for a week and barely made progress”
“I know first hand Athena and Qz are crufty when you get into the weeds.”
“provides a straightforward setup experience”
“let you deep query on a JSON field”
“Athena + S3 is good enough.”
“the pipeline you have to build is literally just Athena SQL statement”
“starting one of these expensive instances in AWS Athena”
“You use the cloud provider service provided (BigQuery or AWS Athena for example).”
“already showing strong profitability, both in earnings and free cash flow”
“It is just an amazing tool and you pay (RIP) pennies.”
“can dump to S3 (log archive) where you can use Athena/Trino”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.