Amazon Athena vs PrestoDB
Amazon Athena
aws.amazon.comPrestoDB
prestodb.ioSide by side
| Figure | Amazon Athena | PrestoDB |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.30/mo | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 2 |
| Spec score · Query Engine Software | 7.8 (#13) | 8.4 (#6) |
| Purpose | Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service for analyzing data in Amazon S3 with standard SQL. | Presto is a distributed SQL query engine designed to query large data sets across heterogeneous data sources. |
| 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. | Presto documents Kerberos, LDAP, password-file and OAuth 2.0 authentication, along with access control and secure internal communication. |
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.
PrestoDB
PrestoDB is a free, open-source distributed SQL query engine for querying large data sets across different kinds of data systems. Connectors access sources through a standard API, with documented options including Hive, Iceberg, Kafka, Cassandra, MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Redshift, and SQL Server. Queries run across a coordinator and worker nodes. The project provides a server tarball, command line interface, JDBC driver, and Docker container, with deployment guidance for Docker, Helm, and Homebrew. Presto documents Kerberos, LDAP, password-file, and OAuth 2.0 authentication, plus access control and secure internal communication; SSL/TLS can protect communication between cluster nodes. It is self-hosted and governed as an independent open-source project under the Linux Foundation. The documentation cautions that SQL familiarity does not mean Presto includes the features of a standard database. The project directs users to its Slack community to connect with engineers and other users. The listed current release is version 0.299, dated August 31, 2026.