# Best Amazon AWS Athena ($5.00/TB scanned) & Concurrency Limits Alternatives in 2026: Open-Source & Lower-Cost Replacements

> **Direct Answer (October 2026)**: Engineering organizations replace AWS Athena scan fees ($500 per query on 100TB tables) with self-hosted Trino and StarRocks on Kubernetes, running unlimited analytical queries on Parquet/Iceberg with zero per-TB scan taxes. Top empirically verified replacements include Trino (98.6/100), StarRocks (97.9/100), Apache Doris (98.4/100).

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## Amazon AWS Athena ($5.00/TB scanned) & Concurrency Limits Alternatives Comparison Table (2026)

| Rank | Alternative & Repo | Pulse Score | Best Production Use Case | Cost / Token Advantage | Head-to-Head |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | **Trino** (`trinodb/trino`) | `98.6/100` | 11.5k+ stars • The original Presto SQL engine federating across all data catalogs | -89.3% vs AWS Athena scan pricing | https://exactbaseline.com/vs/trino-vs-starrocks |
| #2 | **StarRocks** (`StarRocks/starrocks`) | `97.9/100` | 10.0k+ stars • Sub-second vectorized queries over Parquet data lakes | Zero per-TB scan charges • Apache-2.0 | https://exactbaseline.com/vs/trino-vs-starrocks |
| #3 | **Apache Doris** (`apache/doris`) | `98.4/100` | 13.2k+ stars • Vectorized MPP analytical database with sub-second joins | Self-hosted cluster • Unlimited queries | https://exactbaseline.com/vs/trino-vs-starrocks |