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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
5th
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 October 2026, in the Hadoop category, the mindshare of Amazon EMR is 9.8%, down from 12.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spark SQL is 5.3%, down from 9.4% 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

"A highly scalable platform to run vast amounts of data processing with very high efficiency."
"One of the valuable features about this solution is that it's managed services, so it's pretty stable, and scalable as much as you wish. It has all the necessary distributions. With some additional work, it's also possible to change to a Spark version with the latest version of EMR. It also has Hudi, so we are leveraging Apache Hudi on EMR for change data capture, so then it comes out-of-the-box in EMR."
"The stability of the product has been great overall."
"The solution is pretty simple to set up."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"I rate Amazon EMR as ten out of ten."
"Less expensive than in-house hosting, much more scalable when needed to process larger volumes of data."
"We are using Amazon EMR to clean the data and transform the data in such a way that the end-user can get the insights faster."
"The speed of getting data."
"The performance is one of the most important features, and it has an API to process the data in a functional manner."
"We use it to gather all the transaction data."
"This solution is useful to leverage within a distributed ecosystem."
"The solution is easy to understand if you have basic knowledge of SQL commands."
"Certain data sets that are very large are very difficult to process with Pandas and Python libraries. Spark SQL has helped us a lot with that."
"One of Spark SQL's most beautiful features is running parallel queries to go through enormous data."
"The scalability of the solution is good."
 

Cons

"Amazon EMR is continuously improving, but maybe something like CI/CD out-of-the-box or integration with Prometheus Grafana."
"Better monitoring, debugging, and stability are all needed."
"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."
"The initial setup was time-consuming."
"The problem for us is it starts very slow; they need to improve the start time."
"The web interface for managing all your cloud services is a bit patchy and needs improvement."
"In general, I would rate the solution at a four out of ten."
"The dashboard management could be better. Right now, it's lacking a bit."
"This solution could be improved by adding monitoring and integration for the EMR."
"In terms of improvement, the only thing that could be enhanced is the stability aspect of Spark SQL."
"Being a new user, I am not able to find out how to partition it correctly. I probably need more information or knowledge. In other database solutions, you can easily optimize all partitions. I haven't found a quicker way to do that in Spark SQL. It would be good if you don't need a partition here, and the system automatically partitions in the best way. They can also provide more educational resources for new users."
"Anything to improve the GUI would be helpful."
"The initial setup is a bit complex."
"There are many inconsistencies in syntax for the different querying tasks like selecting columns and joining between two tables so I'd like to see a more consistent syntax."
"I've experienced some incompatibilities when using the Delta Lake format."
"Spark SQL consumes so many resources that we migrated our streaming job from Spark to Apache Flink."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is no need to pay extra for third-party software."
"You don't need to pay for licensing on a yearly or monthly basis, you only pay for what you use, in terms of underlying instances."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"The cost of Amazon EMR is very high."
"There is a small fee for the EMR system, but major cost components are the underlying infrastructure resources which we actually use."
"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."
"Amazon EMR's price is reasonable."
"We use the open-source version, so we do not have direct support from Apache."
"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."
"There is no license or subscription for this solution."
"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."
"The solution is open-sourced and free."
"The solution is bundled with Palantir Foundry at no extra charge."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic MapReduce
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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: September 2026.
916,056 professionals have used our research since 2012.