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What's the Difference Between Amazon DataZone and AWS Lake Formation?

Compare Amazon DataZone and AWS Lake Formation side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.

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Comparisons
Amazon DataZone
AWS Lake Formation
Category

Analytics, Data Governance

Analytics, Data Lake
Description

Data management service to catalog, discover, share, and govern data across organizational boundaries.

Build, secure, and manage data lakes in days instead of months.
Best for
  • Data cataloging
  • Data sharing
  • Data governance
  • Self-service analytics
  • Data lake creation
  • Data governance
  • Fine-grained access control
  • Cross-account data sharing
Key features
  • Business data catalog
  • Data portal
  • Automated metadata
  • Access management
  • Data quality
  • Blueprints
  • Data Catalog integration
  • Row/column security
  • Tag-based access control
  • Cross-account sharing
Pricing model

Pay per active user + metadata stored

No additional charge; pay for underlying services
Free tier

No

Yes
Expert take

“DataZone is a data governance service for publishing, discovering, and sharing data across organizational boundaries with built-in access controls and business cataloging.”
— Oleksii Bebych, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

“Lake Formation simplifies data lake security by providing fine-grained access control at the column and row level across Athena, Redshift Spectrum, and EMR.”
— Gary McLean, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]
Product page

Learn more about Amazon DataZone »

Learn more about AWS Lake Formation »

When to use Amazon DataZone or AWS Lake Formation

Use Amazon DataZone when:

  • Data cataloging
  • Data sharing
  • Data governance
  • Self-service analytics

Learn more about Amazon DataZone »

Use AWS Lake Formation when:

  • Data lake creation
  • Data governance
  • Fine-grained access control
  • Cross-account data sharing

Learn more about AWS Lake Formation »

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