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Amazon EMR vs Spark SQL comparison

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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EMR
Ranking in Hadoop
3rd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (13th)
Spark SQL
Ranking in Hadoop
4th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Hadoop category, the mindshare of Amazon EMR is 9.8%, down from 13.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spark SQL is 5.3%, down from 7.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Hadoop Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon EMR9.8%
Spark SQL5.3%
Other84.9%
Hadoop
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2043696 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Data pipelines have simplified complex transformations and provide faster insights for users
The features at Amazon EMR that I have found most valuable are fully customizable functions. I am using Amazon EMR for data transformation, where we load the data. The entire ETL process is encompassed within it. The first thing is the egress part, where we pull the data from various sources, which include our main core databases, the systems that include Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, and Postgres. We bring data from all these sources and use Amazon EMR specifically to combine all this data, clean the data, and combine it at a particular level. We bring everything to a particular level to make it more production-ready, and we simplify the data because every system has its own problems. We are using it to clean the data and transform the data in such a way that the end-user can get the insights faster.
Kemal Duman - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead, Data Engineering at Nesine.com
Data pipelines have run faster and support flexible batch and streaming transformations
We do not have any performance problems, but we do have some resource problems. Spark SQL consumes so many resources that we migrated our streaming job from Spark to Apache Flink. Resource management in Spark SQL should be better. It consumes more resources, which is normal. The main reason we switched from Spark is memory and CPU consumption. The major reason is the resource problem because the number of streaming jobs has been increasing in our company. That is why we considered resource management as a priority. Because of the resource consumption, I would say the development of Spark SQL is better. For development purposes, it is a top product and not difficult to work with, but resources are the major problem. We changed to Flink regardless of development time. Development time is less in Spark compared with Flink.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Amazon EMR is a good solution that can be used to manage big data."
"It's easier to have everything connected via Amazon."
"The security of the managed workflow and the managed services are the best features for us. Since we inherited their security model and it's all managed services, those are the key benefits for our clients."
"The project management is very streamlined."
"Overall a good cloud infrastructure and takes the burden of managing the distributed hardware and can easily scale up and scale down as per the requirement of the task at hand."
"Amazon EMR's most valuable features are processing speed and data storage capacity."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"In Amazon EMR it is easy to rebuild anything, easy to upgrade and has good fault tolerance."
"Overall the solution is excellent."
"Spark SQL gives us a handful of methods to design queries based on its own syntax and also incorporates the regular SQL syntax within tasks."
"This solution is a much more scalable and adventurous solution."
"The performance is one of the most important features, and it has an API to process the data in a functional manner."
"Data validation and ease of use are the most valuable features."
"This solution is useful to leverage within a distributed ecosystem."
"Speed is the major benefit of using Spark SQL."
"The solution is easy to understand if you have basic knowledge of SQL commands."
 

Cons

"The initial setup was time-consuming."
"The product's features for storing data in static clusters could be better."
"There were times where they would release new versions and it seemed to end up breaking old versions, which is very strange."
"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 cost of Amazon EMR is very high."
"The problem for us is it starts very slow; they need to improve the start time."
"As people are shifting from legacy solutions to other technologies, Amazon EMR needs to add more features that give more flexibility in managing user data."
"In Qubole, the interface was very good. I could see many details because in Amazon EMR console, very few details are available."
"The solution needs to include graphing capabilities. Including financial charts would help improve everything overall."
"In terms of improvement, the only thing that could be enhanced is the stability aspect of Spark SQL."
"This solution could be improved by adding monitoring and integration for the EMR."
"The initial setup is a bit complex."
"It would be beneficial for aggregate functions to include a code block or toolbox that explains its calculations or supported conditional statements."
"It takes a bit of time to get used to using this solution versus Pandas as it has a steep learning curve."
"It would be useful if Spark SQL integrated with some data visualization tools."
"I've experienced some incompatibilities when using the Delta Lake format."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of Amazon EMR is very high."
"The product is not cheap, but it is not expensive."
"There is a small fee for the EMR system, but major cost components are the underlying infrastructure resources which we actually use."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"There is no need to pay extra for third-party software."
"Amazon EMR's price is reasonable."
"Amazon EMR is not very expensive."
"I rate the tool's pricing a five out of ten. It can be expensive since it's a managed service, and if you are not careful, you can run into unexpected charges. You can make a mistake that costs you tens of thousands of dollars. That's happened to us twice, so I'm sensitive to it. We're still trying to work on that. Our smallest client probably spends a hundred thousand dollars yearly on licensing, while our largest is well over a million."
"The solution is open-sourced and free."
"There is no license or subscription for this solution."
"The solution is bundled with Palantir Foundry at no extra charge."
"The on-premise solution is quite expensive in terms of hardware, setting up the cluster, memory, hardware and resources. It depends on the use case, but in our case with a shared cluster which is quite large, it is quite expensive."
"We don't have to pay for licenses with this solution because we are working in a small market, and we rely on open-source because the budgets of projects are very small."
"We use the open-source version, so we do not have direct support from Apache."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
University
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EMR?
I would rate the price for Amazon EMR, where one is high and ten is low, as a good one.
What needs improvement with Amazon EMR?
I feel some lack of functionality in Amazon EMR. I have thoughts on what would be great to see in the product, such as AI/ML features or additional options.
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon EMR?
I find it easy to integrate Amazon EMR with other AWS services like S3 or EC2 for data processing needs. I would rate this review as eight out of ten.
What needs improvement with Spark SQL?
We do not have any performance problems, but we do have some resource problems. Spark SQL consumes so many resources that we migrated our streaming job from Spark to Apache Flink. Resource manageme...
What is your primary use case for Spark SQL?
Spark SQL has been in our stack for less than one year, though some of our colleagues are using it. It is a useful product for transformation jobs. We generally use Spark SQL for batch processing. ...
What advice do you have for others considering Spark SQL?
Regarding the Catalyst query optimizer, I think we are using it. We were using it in the past, but I am not certain if we use it now. We used it a long time ago. I rate my experience with Spark SQL...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic MapReduce
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Yelp
UC Berkeley AMPLab, Amazon, Alibaba Taobao, Kenshoo, Hitachi Solutions
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EMR vs. Spark SQL and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
921,338 professionals have used our research since 2012.