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Amazon EMR vs Apache Hadoop comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.3
Companies using Amazon EMR often experience significant ROI, with savings up to 20% and substantial returns over on-premise systems.
Sentiment score
6.5
Apache Hadoop provides cost-effective data storage and processing, though ROI varies based on analytics use and sophistication.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.6
Amazon EMR support is generally proactive and efficient, but experiences vary, especially during open-source product integration.
Sentiment score
6.4
Customer service varies by Hadoop distributor, with Hortonworks rated highly; support depends on vendor, community resources, or external vendors.
They help with billing, cost determination, IAM properties, security compliance, and deployment and migration activities.
It's not structured support, which is why we don't use purely open-source projects without additional structured support.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Amazon EMR effectively scales to enterprise needs, with auto-scaling and adaptability, despite occasional peak demand resource allocation delays.
Sentiment score
7.6
Apache Hadoop excels in scalability, allowing easy cluster expansion and efficient data handling, ideal for varied organizational needs.
Scalability can be provisioned using the auto-scaling feature, EC2 instances, on-demand instances, and storage locations like block storage, S3, or file storage.
It is a distributed file system and scales reasonably well as long as it is given sufficient resources.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon EMR is generally stable and reliable, despite occasional data-related stability issues, with robust failover and monitoring features.
Sentiment score
7.3
Apache Hadoop's stability, rated 8/10, improves with newer versions, though minor issues exist with memory and data processing.
Regular updates, patch installations, monitoring, logging, alerting, and disaster recovery activities are crucial for maintaining stability.
Continuous management in the way of upgrades and technical management is necessary to ensure that it remains effective.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon EMR struggles with a steep learning curve, complex configurations, unpredictable costs, and needs enhancements in stability and support.
Apache Hadoop needs improved usability, integration, security, support, and performance for efficient high-volume data processing and better community resources.
There is room for improvement with respect to retries, handling the volume of data on S3 buckets, cluster provisioning, scaling, termination, security, and integration between services like S3, Glue, Lake Formation, and DynamoDB.
The problem with Apache Hadoop arose when the guys that originally set it up left the firm, and the group that later owned it didn't have enough technical resources to properly maintain it.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EMR's costs vary by resources used, with potential high monthly expenses, requiring careful management to prevent surprises.
Enterprise Hadoop offers cost benefits but varies with deployment type and distribution, impacting smaller organizations more heavily.
Cost optimization can be achieved through instance usage, cluster sharing, and auto-scaling.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EMR is scalable, easy to use, cost-effective, integrates well with Hadoop, and supports diverse analytics applications.
Apache Hadoop excels with a scalable, cost-effective system handling diverse data types, integrating with tools, and supporting big data analytics.
Amazon EMR helps in scalability, real-time and batch processing of data, handling efficient data sources, and managing data lakes, data stores, and data marts on file systems and in S3 buckets.
Hadoop is a distributed file system, and it scales reasonably well provided you give it sufficient resources.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EMR
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (3rd), Cloud Data Warehouse (12th)
Apache Hadoop
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (7th)
 

Featured Reviews

Prashant  Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamless data integration enhances reporting efficiency and an easy setup
Amazon EMR has multiple connectors that can connect to various data sources. The service charges are based on processing only, depending on the resources used, which can help save money. It is easy to integrate with other services for storage, allowing data to be shifted to cheaper storage based on usage.
Sushil Arya - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides ease of integration with the IT workflow of a business
When working with Kafka, I saw that the data came in an incremental order. The incremental data processing part is still not very effective in Apache Hadoop. If the data is already there, it can be processed very effectively, especially if the data is coming in every second. If you want to know the location of some data every second, then such data is not processed effectively in Apache Hadoop. I can say that one of the features where improvements are required revolves around the licensing cost of the tool. If the tool can build some licensing structures in a pay-per-use manner, organizations can get the look and feel of Apache Hadoop. Apache Hadoop can offer a licensing structure of the product that can be seen as similar to how AWS operates. Apache Hadoop can look into the capability of processing incremental data. The tool's setup process can be a scope of improvement. Also, it is not very simple because while doing the setup, we need to do all the server settings, including port listing and firewall configurations. If we look at other products on the market, then they can be made simpler. There are certain shortcomings when it comes to the product's technical support part, making it an area where improvements are required. The time frame for the resolution is an area that needs to be improved. The overall communication part of the technical support team also needs improvement.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
14%
Educational Organization
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
33%
Computer Software Company
11%
University
6%
Energy/Utilities Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon EMR?
Amazon EMR is a good solution that can be used to manage big data.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EMR?
Compared to others, Amazon seems efficient and is considered good for Big Data workloads. Costs are involved based on cluster resources, data volumes, EC2 ( /products/amazon-ec2-reviews ) instances...
What needs improvement with Amazon EMR?
There is room for improvement with respect to retries, handling the volume of data on S3 ( /products/amazon-s3-reviews ) buckets, cluster provisioning, scaling, termination, security, and integrati...
What do you like most about Apache Hadoop?
It's primarily open source. You can handle huge data volumes and create your own views, workflows, and tables. I can also use it for real-time data streaming.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Hadoop?
The product is open-source, but some associated licensing fees depend on the subscription level. While it might be free for students, organizations typically need to pay for their subscriptions. Th...
What needs improvement with Apache Hadoop?
The problem with Apache Hadoop arose when the guys that originally set it up left the firm, and the group that later owned it didn't have enough technical resources to properly maintain it. This wa...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic MapReduce
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Yelp
Amazon, Adobe, eBay, Facebook, Google, Hulu, IBM, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Spotify, AOL, Twitter, University of Maryland, Yahoo!, Cornell University Web Lab
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EMR vs. Apache Hadoop and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.