Softwr

Scheduling & Booking · head to head

Airbnb vs Amazon Redshift

A

Airbnb

Scheduling & Booking

Book unique homes and experiences all over the world

From
On request
Rated
-
Amazon Redshift logo

Amazon Redshift

Database & Data Management

Fast, scalable cloud data warehouse from AWS

From
Free
Rated
-

The short version

  • Only Amazon Redshift has a free tier, so it costs nothing to try first.
  • Each has a real cost: Airbnb guests pay a service fee of 14.1% to 16.5% of the booking subtotal on top of the nightly rate; Amazon Redshift on-demand pricing runs up to 75% higher than competitors like Snowflake and BigQuery

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which Airbnb and Amazon Redshift actually diverge.

Attributes where Airbnb and Amazon Redshift differ
AttributeAirbnbAmazon Redshift
Starting priceOn requestFree
Pricing modeltransactionusage-based
Free tierNoYes
CategoryScheduling & BookingDatabase & Data Management
FoundedUnknown2012

Identical on both: platforms (Web), user rating (Not yet rated).

What each one covers

Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.

Only in Airbnb

Nothing recorded that Amazon Redshift does not also cover.

Only in Amazon Redshift

  • Columnar Storage
  • Massively Parallel
  • Machine Learning
  • AQUA Acceleration
  • Data Sharing
  • Federated Query
  • Concurrency Scaling
  • S3

What people use each for

The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.

Airbnb

No use cases recorded yet. See the Airbnb review.

Amazon Redshift

  • Business intelligencenot Airbnb
  • Data warehousingnot Airbnb
  • Real-time analyticsnot Airbnb
  • Reportingnot Airbnb
  • Machine learningnot Airbnb

Where each one falls short

Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.

Airbnb

  • Guests pay a service fee of 14.1% to 16.5% of the booking subtotal on top of the nightly rate
  • Hosts on the split-fee structure pay a further 3% fee, rising to 4% for listings in Brazil and Mexico, or up to 16% under the single-fee structure

Amazon Redshift

  • On-demand pricing runs up to 75% higher than competitors like Snowflake and BigQuery
  • Requires significant manual tuning including managing concurrency scaling costs and configuring Workload Management queues
  • Performance degrades without proper design of distribution keys and sort keys
  • Limited elastic resize options - can only halve or double current cluster size
  • AWS lock-in makes it unsuitable for multi-cloud architectures

Pricing, plan by plan

Airbnb

On request

No published plan breakdown. See the Airbnb review.

Amazon Redshift

Free
  • Free TrialFree
    • 750 DC2.Large hours
    • 2 months free
    • Full features
  • On-Demand$0.25/hour
    • Pay per node hour
    • All features
    • Standard support

Which should you pick?

Choose Airbnb if

Nothing in the data separates Airbnb from Amazon Redshift on the points above - pick on price and on how each one feels to use.

Choose Amazon Redshift if

  • You need columnar storage.
  • You want to start without paying.
  • You also want massively parallel.

Questions people ask

Is Airbnb or Amazon Redshift better?
Neither clearly leads. Airbnb starts at On request and Amazon Redshift at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, Airbnb or Amazon Redshift?
Amazon Redshift has a free tier; the other does not. Paid plans start at On request for Airbnb and Free for Amazon Redshift.
Does Airbnb or Amazon Redshift run on more platforms?
Both run on Web, so platform support will not decide this one for you.
Can I use Amazon Redshift for free?
Yes. Amazon Redshift has a free tier, so you can try it without paying. Airbnb starts at On request.
What can Airbnb do that Amazon Redshift cannot?
Amazon Redshift covers Columnar Storage, Massively Parallel, Machine Learning, AQUA Acceleration.

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

Amazon Redshift: What deployment options does Amazon Redshift offer?

Redshift offers Provisioned Cluster (with RA3 or DC2 nodes) and Serverless options to match varying workloads. The new Redshift RG instance family, powered by Graviton, delivers 2.4x faster performance than RA3 at 30% lower cost per vCPU.

Source
Amazon Redshift: What does Amazon Redshift cost?

Provisioned cluster pricing: RA3 on-demand starts at $1.086/hour for ra3.xlplus. Serverless costs approximately $0.375 per RPU-hour with 4-RPU minimum (roughly $1.50/hour active workload). Managed storage costs $0.024/GB-month.

Source
Amazon Redshift: Does Redshift work with data lakes?

Yes, Redshift's integrated data lake query engine processes workloads on Apache Iceberg tables and other supported formats in Amazon S3, allowing you to run SQL analytics across your data warehouse and data lake from the same engine.

Source
Amazon Redshift: Is there a free tier for Amazon Redshift?

AWS offers a free trial with $300 USD in Serverless credits valid for 90 days, but Redshift is not part of the permanent AWS Free Tier.

Source

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