Athena vs. Firebolt

Many Athena users struggle with query performance and unpredictable costs, especially as data volumes grow. Firebolt was built to efficiently power latency-sensitive data apps and dashboards with sub-second response times, while easily scaling to any data volume and concurrency. Deploy on S3 to magnify performance on your most challenging workloads. 

Redshift vs Firebolt

With Firebolt we saw results of milliseconds for the same dashboard that took Athena minutes. Firebolt is doing some magic behind the scenes.

Alexandra Sudilovski
Data Engineering Team Lead

Firebolt

Athena

Performance
Efficient sub-second performance
  • Specialized indexes provide order of magnitude performance improvement
  • Optimized granular data access and JOINs
  • Fast semi-structured performance
Good performance is hard to achieve
  • Designed to query data where it is, at the expense of performance
  • Secondary pipelines are required to achieve acceptable query performance
  • No way to add compute resources for faster queries
  • Supports partitions, but lacks indexes to support fine-grained pruning
Scalability
Dynamic, fine-tuned scaling
  • Instantly scale storage and compute independently
  • Granular scale-up and scale-out options
  • Concurrency easily expandable by adding engines
  • Write scalability (no partition rewrites for each write)
Doesn't scale reliably
  • Shared multi-tenant with separated storage and compute
  • Can scale to large volumes, but may suffer from long run times and frequent timeouts
  • Max 20 concurrent queries
Cost
Consistently best price/performance
  • Pay per use
  • Granular configuration options eliminate over-provisioning
  • Simple transparent pricing
  • Strong provisioning administration keeps costs in check
  • No costs for hidden background tasks
Hard-to-control costs
  • Pay for amount of data scanned per query
  • Unpredictable costs as data grows
  • Additional costs for processing and preparing data
Flexibility & Ease of Use
High flexibility and control
  • Best workload isolation and segmentation
  • Can provision different cluster types on same data
  • No need to refactor schema because of JOIN efficiency
Requires a lot of staff resources
  • Complex ingest pipeline
Use cases
Latency-sensitive dashboards and data apps
Internal ad-hoc analytics
Performance

Firebolt

Efficient sub-second performance
  • Specialized indexes provide order of magnitude performance improvement
  • Optimized granular data access and JOINs
  • Fast semi-structured performance

Athena

Good performance is hard to achieve
  • Designed to query data where it is, at the expense of performance
  • Secondary pipelines are required to achieve acceptable query performance
  • No way to add compute resources for faster queries
  • Supports partitions, but lacks indexes to support fine-grained pruning
Scalability

Firebolt

Dynamic, fine-tuned scaling
  • Instantly scale storage and compute independently
  • Granular scale-up and scale-out options
  • Concurrency easily expandable by adding engines
  • Write scalability (no partition rewrites for each write)

Athena

Doesn't scale reliably
  • Shared multi-tenant with separated storage and compute
  • Can scale to large volumes, but may suffer from long run times and frequent timeouts
  • Max 20 concurrent queries
Cost

Firebolt

Consistently best price/performance
  • Pay per use
  • Granular configuration options eliminate over-provisioning
  • Simple transparent pricing
  • Strong provisioning administration keeps costs in check
  • No costs for hidden background tasks

Athena

Hard-to-control costs
  • Pay for amount of data scanned per query
  • Unpredictable costs as data grows
  • Additional costs for processing and preparing data
Flexibility & Ease of Use

Firebolt

High flexibility and control
  • Best workload isolation and segmentation
  • Can provision different cluster types on same data
  • No need to refactor schema because of JOIN efficiency

Athena

Requires a lot of staff resources
  • Complex ingest pipeline
Use cases

Firebolt

Latency-sensitive dashboards and data apps

Athena

Internal ad-hoc analytics

Firebolt Performance Advantage

Appsflyer couldn’t get the performance they needed from Athena. They switched to Firebolt and got on average 70X faster query performance at 5X lower cost.

Single left Join, last 3 months

Filter by time, last year

Filter by media source

Filter by time, last 3 months

Queries

Athena

Firebolt

Performance boost

Boost

120 sec

36 sec

11 sec

104 sec

1.8 sec

1.1 sec

0.3 sec

1.4 sec

x67

x33

x37

x74

Filter by App_id and media

26 sec

0.5 sec

x52

Filter just by App_id

Count distinct on all data

73 sec

0.4 sec

x183

117 sec

2.1 sec

x56

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