Amazon Athena vs Apache Impala
Amazon Athena
aws.amazon.comApache Impala
impala.apache.orgSide by side
| Figure | Amazon Athena | Apache Impala |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.30/mo | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 1 |
| Spec score · Query Engine Software | 7.8 (#13) | 8.2 (#8) |
| Spec score · OLAP Software | 7.9 (#17) | 8.2 (#10) |
| Data formats | Supported formats include CSV, JSON, ORC, Avro, and Parquet. | Supported formats include delimited text, Parquet, Avro, SequenceFile, and RCFile, with Snappy, GZIP, Deflate, and BZIP compression codecs. |
| 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. | Impala integrates Kerberos authentication with Apache Ranger fine-grained authorization and provides auditing capabilities. |
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 Impala
Apache Impala is a free, open-source native analytic database for SQL queries on open data and table formats. It targets low-latency, high-concurrency business intelligence and analytics in Hadoop environments and is described as scaling linearly, including for multitenant use. Impala works with HDFS, HBase and Amazon S3, plus Apache Kudu, Apache Iceberg and other listed sources. Supported formats include delimited text, Parquet, Avro, SequenceFile and RCFile, with Snappy, GZIP, Deflate and BZIP codecs. Clients can connect through impala-shell, Hue, JDBC or ODBC. The system reuses Hadoop file formats, metadata, security and resource-management frameworks, and shares metadata and an ODBC driver with Apache Hive. Kudu tables support queries and efficient updates or deletes; Iceberg tables can be registered with the Hive Metastore. Kerberos, Apache Ranger authorization, auditing and encrypted JDBC or ODBC connections are supported. Impala runs on Linux and macOS, supports API use and self-hosted deployment, and is licensed under Apache License 2.0.