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Amazon Redshift vs Sage 50

Amazon Redshift logo

Amazon Redshift

Software

Fast, scalable cloud data warehouse from AWS

From
Free
Rated
-
Full reviewWebsite
Sage 50 logo

Sage 50

Software

Powerful desktop accounting for small businesses

From
$29/month
Rated
-
Full reviewWebsite

The short version

  • Only Amazon Redshift has a free tier, so it costs nothing to try first.
  • Each has a real cost: Amazon Redshift on-demand pricing runs up to 75% higher than competitors like Snowflake and BigQuery; Sage 50 sage 50 tiers as captured in 2022: Pro Accounting $595/year for 1 user, Premium Accounting $970/year for 1-5 users with multi-company support, Quantum Accounting $1,610/year for larger teams
  • They diverge on capability: Amazon Redshift covers Columnar Storage, Sage 50 covers General ledger.

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which Amazon Redshift and Sage 50 actually diverge.

Attributes where Amazon Redshift and Sage 50 differ
AttributeAmazon RedshiftSage 50
Starting priceFree$29/month
Pricing modelusage-basedsubscription
Free tierYesNo
PlatformsWebWindows
Founded20121981

Identical on both: user rating (Not yet rated), category (Unknown).

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 Amazon Redshift

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

Only in Sage 50

  • General ledger
  • Invoicing
  • Inventory management
  • Job costing
  • Budgeting
  • Microsoft 365
  • Salesforce
  • Local encryption

What people use each for

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

Amazon Redshift

  • Business intelligencenot Sage 50
  • Data warehousingnot Sage 50
  • Real-time analyticsnot Sage 50
  • Reportingnot Sage 50
  • Machine learningnot Sage 50

Sage 50

  • Desktop accountingnot Amazon Redshift
  • Job costingnot Amazon Redshift
  • Inventory trackingnot Amazon Redshift

Where each one falls short

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

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

Sage 50

  • Sage 50 tiers as captured in 2022: Pro Accounting $595/year for 1 user, Premium Accounting $970/year for 1-5 users with multi-company support, Quantum Accounting $1,610/year for larger teams

Pricing, plan by plan

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

Sage 50

$29/month
  • Pro Accounting$50/month
    • Core accounting
    • 1 user
    • Basic reports
  • Premium Accounting$85/month
    • 5 users
    • Job costing
    • Inventory

Which should you pick?

Choose Amazon Redshift if

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

Choose Sage 50 if

  • You need general ledger.
  • You work on Windows.
  • You also want invoicing.
Sage 50 review

Questions people ask

Is Amazon Redshift or Sage 50 better?
Neither clearly leads. Amazon Redshift starts at Free and Sage 50 at $29/month, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, Amazon Redshift or Sage 50?
Amazon Redshift has a free tier; the other does not. Paid plans start at Free for Amazon Redshift and $29/month for Sage 50.
Does Amazon Redshift or Sage 50 run on more platforms?
Amazon Redshift runs on Web. Sage 50 runs on Windows.
Can I use Amazon Redshift for free?
Yes. Amazon Redshift has a free tier, so you can try it without paying. Sage 50 starts at $29/month.
What is Amazon Redshift best used for?
Amazon Redshift is most often used for business intelligence, data warehousing, real-time analytics, reporting. Of those, business intelligence and data warehousing are not what Sage 50 is typically brought in for.
What can Amazon Redshift do that Sage 50 cannot?
Amazon Redshift covers Columnar Storage, Massively Parallel, Machine Learning, AQUA Acceleration. Sage 50 covers General ledger, Invoicing, Inventory management, Job costing.

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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