Amazon Athena vs Firebolt
Amazon Athena
aws.amazon.com
Firebolt
firebolt.ioSide by side
| Figure | Amazon Athena | Firebolt |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.30/mo | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 1 |
| Spec score · Query Engine Software | 7.8 (#13) | 7.9 (#12) |
| Spec score · OLAP Software | 7.9 (#17) | 7.9 (#18) |
| 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. | It integrates with Looker, Tableau, Power BI, Postgres-compatible tools, Go, JDBC, .NET, Node.js, Python, Rust, SQLAlchemy, and REST API clients. |
| 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. | Firebolt lists SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 27018, HIPAA support, GDPR alignment, MFA, RBAC, and encryption in transit and at rest. |
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.
Firebolt
Firebolt is an open-source analytical database for engineers, with Postgres-compatible SQL and options for self-managed or managed deployment. It can run as a single binary on a laptop or scale to a cluster of hundreds of nodes in a customer’s cloud. Firebolt is designed for sub-second query latency and high-concurrency analytics, and supports Apache Iceberg and DuckLake using open storage standards. Deployment choices include a single binary, Helm chart, Kubernetes Operator, and managed service. Firebolt Core is free forever for self-hosted use, with no usage limits; it cannot be used to build a hosted SaaS that competes with Firebolt’s managed service. Managed compute is billed per second, with scale-to-zero, automatic start and stop, and autoscaling. Object storage is pass-through at $0.0264 / GB·mo, and the managed service includes $200 free credits. AI capabilities include query and embedding functions, vector search, an MCP Server, and a preview agent. Self-managed availability includes AWS and GCP, with Azure in preview; the managed service is currently AWS-only.