Amazon Athena vs Apache Hive
Amazon Athena
aws.amazon.com
Apache Hive
hive.apache.orgSide by side
| Figure | Amazon Athena | Apache Hive |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.30/mo | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 1 |
| Spec score · Query Engine Software | 7.8 (#13) | 9.0 (#1) |
| Integrations | Athena integrates with AWS Glue and offers built-in connectors to 30 data stores, including Amazon Redshift, Amazon DynamoDB, Google BigQuery, Azure Synapse, Snowflake, and SAP Hana. | The project site names Spark, Presto, and Impala as integrations; it also describes Apache Ranger for authorization and Apache Atlas for lineage and governance. |
| Purpose | Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service for analyzing data in Amazon S3 with standard SQL. | Apache Hive is a distributed, fault-tolerant data warehouse system for reading, writing, and managing large datasets with SQL. |
| Security | Access to data can be controlled with IAM policies, access control lists, and S3 bucket policies, and Athena supports querying encrypted S3 data and writing encrypted results. | The site describes Kerberos authentication, fine-grained access control, and audit logging; HiveServer2 documentation also lists LDAP, PAM, and custom authentication options. |
Plans
Amazon Athena
- SQL queries with Capacity Reservations$0.30 a month
- Apache Spark$0.35 a month
- SQL queries$5 a month
In their own words
Amazon Athena
Amazon Athena has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
Apache Hive
Apache Hive is a distributed data warehouse system for reading, writing, and managing large datasets with SQL. Its Metastore keeps shared metadata for tables and partitions and serves clients including Hive, Impala, and Spark; HiveServer2 supports concurrent clients through JDBC and ODBC. Hive provides full ACID transactions for ORC tables and insert-only transactions for other formats. Documented storage options include S3, Azure Data Lake, and Google Cloud Storage, and Hive supports Apache Iceberg tables through a StorageHandler. Named integrations include Spark, Presto, and Impala, with Apache Ranger for authorization and Apache Atlas for lineage and governance. Security options described by the project include Kerberos, fine-grained access control, and audit logging; HiveServer2 also lists LDAP, PAM, and custom authentication. The quickstart includes Docker instructions for the server and Metastore. Hive is free open-source software. The installation manual lists Java 8, Maven 3.6.3, Protobuf 2.5, Hadoop 3.3.6, and Tez among current prerequisites; Hive 4.2.x instead requires JDK 21 minimum and works with Hadoop 3.4.1 and Tez 0.10.5.