Amazon Redshiftvs
Snowflake
Snowflake: Cloud data warehouse with better elasticity, multi-cloud support, and lower query performance tuning requirements than Redshift.
Amazon Redshift
Fast, scalable cloud data warehouse from AWS
As of 30 August 2026, Amazon Redshift is free to use. Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed cloud data warehouse that makes it simple and cost-effective to analyze all your data using standard SQL. Softwr lists it under Databases. Amazon Redshift is made by Amazon Web Services, launched in 2006, available on Web.
Overview
What Amazon Redshift does
Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed cloud data warehouse that makes it simple and cost-effective to analyze all your data using standard SQL. It delivers ten times faster performance than other data warehouses by using machine learning, massively parallel query execution, and columnar storage.
What people use it for
- Business intelligence
- Data warehousing
- Real-time analytics
- Reporting
- Machine learning
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about 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
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Amazon Redshift
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- Amazon RedshiftvsBigQuery
BigQuery: Google's serverless data warehouse with simpler scaling, no manual tuning, and competitive pricing for analytics workloads.
- Amazon RedshiftvsFirebolt
Firebolt: Cloud data warehouse optimized for analytics with better price-performance and easier scaling than Redshift.
Pricing
What Amazon Redshift costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Free Trial
Free
- 750 DC2.Large hours
- 2 months free
- Full features
On-Demand
$0.25 /hour
- Pay per node hour
- All features
- Standard support
Capabilities
Features
Columnar Storage
Massively Parallel
Machine Learning
AQUA Acceleration
Data Sharing
Federated Query
Concurrency Scaling
S3
Integration with S3
Glue
Integration with Glue
QuickSight
Integration with QuickSight
SageMaker
Integration with SageMaker
Kinesis
Integration with Kinesis
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
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.
SourceWhat 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.
SourceDoes 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.
SourceIs 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.
SourceBehind it
Who makes Amazon Redshift
- Company
- Amazon Web Services
- Based in
- Seattle, Washington
Timeline
Amazon Redshift over time
- Launch2022-07-12
Amazon Redshift Serverless becomes generally available
Source - Launch2017-04-19
Amazon Redshift Spectrum launches for data lake query capabilities
Source - Launch2013-02-15
Amazon Redshift achieves general availability
Source - Launch2012-11-28
Amazon Web Services announces limited preview of Amazon Redshift
Source
Keep looking
Where to go from Amazon Redshift
- Amazon Redshift alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Amazon Redshift pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Amazon Redshift badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Databases softwareThe full category
- Best Databases softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Databases software for
Compare Amazon Redshift with
- BigQuery
- Firebolt
- ClickHouse
- MotherDuck
- Azure SQL
- TiDB
- Apache Druid
- TimescaleDB
- QuestDB
- TIBCO Enterprise Message Service
- Timeplus
- turbopuffer
- VerneMQ
- Vespa
- Xata
- Google Cloud SQL
- CosmosDB
- Apache Pinot
Other Databases software
Google Cloud's serverless analytical warehouse, billed either by bytes scanned per query or by reserved compute slots.
Free plan13 researched notesFast open-source column-oriented database for real-time analytics
Free plan12 researched notesApache 2.0 distributed SQL database with MySQL wire compatibility and a separate columnar replica for analytical queries.
Free plan12 researched notesTime-series database built on PostgreSQL for real-time analytics
Free plan12 researched notesFast open source time-series database for high throughput ingestion
Free plan10 researched notesJMS message broker underpinning bank and telecom estates, now maintained rather than expanded
Pricing on request12 researched notesStreaming SQL engine built on ClickHouse internals, shipping as one small binary
Free, then $199/mo12 researched notesClosed-source vector and full-text search service built directly on object storage, with cold queries measured in seconds rather than milliseconds.
From $16/mo14 researched notesErlang MQTT broker whose source is Apache 2.0 but whose official binaries need a paid subscription
Free plan12 researched notesDistributed AI search platform for retrieval, ranking, and inference
Free plan11 researched notesApache 2.0 platform for running many Postgres instances on Kubernetes, with copy-on-write branching and scale-to-zero.
Free plan14 researched notesFully managed relational database service for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server
Free plan9 researched notes
Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Amazon Redshift, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift alternatives
What people switch to, and what they give up
Amazon Redshift pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare Amazon Redshift
Put it head to head with anything we hold
Amazon Redshift badge
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
Best Databases software alternatives
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quote
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Centralised data access governance from the creators of Apache Ranger, now rebranding as Trust3 AI
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The Meta-lineage distributed SQL query engine, distinct from the Trino fork
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