What should I use instead of Redshift for cheaper analytics?

If you want cheaper analytics than Amazon Redshift, the best alternative depends on your workload, but here are the most common options:

Best cheap alternatives

1. ClickHouse

• Great for fast analytics on large datasets
• Usually much cheaper than Redshift
• Can be self-hosted or used as a managed service
• Best if you need very fast aggregations and dashboards

2. BigQuery

• Not always cheaper for heavy ad hoc querying, but often cheaper operationally
• Serverless, no cluster management
• Good if your usage is bursty or you want pay-per-query
• Can become expensive if queries are unoptimized

3. Snowflake

• Often easier to manage than Redshift
• Can be cost-effective if you auto-suspend warehouses
• Usually not the absolute cheapest, but can be cheaper in practice for some teams due to less tuning overhead

4. PostgreSQL + columnar extensions / read replicas

• Good for smaller analytics workloads
• Much cheaper if your data volume is modest
• Not ideal for very large-scale BI

5. DuckDB

• Extremely cheap/free for local or embedded analytics
• Great for data science and small-to-medium analytical tasks
• Not a replacement for a shared warehouse in most production setups

If your goal is lowest cost

• For large-scale analytics: ClickHouse is often the strongest cheap alternative.
• For serverless simplicity: BigQuery.
• For small workloads: Postgres + analytics tooling or DuckDB.

Quick rule of thumb

• Dashboards + lots of aggregations: ClickHouse
• Bursty usage and minimal ops: BigQuery
• Already on AWS but want lower cost: consider Athena + S3 or ClickHouse on AWS
• Small team, smaller data: Postgres / DuckDB

If you want, I can also give you:

1. a cost comparison table, or
2. a recommendation based on your data size, query pattern, and cloud provider.