Amazon MSK vs Databricks comparison

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) Logo
7,940 views|6,237 comparisons
83% willing to recommend
Databricks Logo
9,483 views|6,060 comparisons
96% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon MSK and Databricks based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Streaming Analytics solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Amazon MSK vs. Databricks Report (Updated: March 2024).
768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"MSK has a private network that's an out-of-box feature.""Overall, it is very cost-effective based on the workflow.""Amazon MSK has significantly improved our organization by building seamless integration between systems.""It offers good stability.""The most valuable feature of Amazon MSK is the integration.""It is a stable product."

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"Databricks' Lakehouse architecture has been most useful for us. The data governance has been absolutely efficient in between other kinds of solutions.""Databricks gives us the ability to build a lakehouse framework and do everything implicit to this type of database structure. We also like the ability to stream events. Databricks covers a broad spectrum, from reporting and machine learning to streaming events. It's important for us to have all these features in one platform.""We like that this solution can handle a wide variety and velocity of data engineering, either in batch mode or real-time.""Databricks gives you the flexibility of using several programming languages independently or in combination to build models.""I work in the data science field and I found Databricks to be very useful.""It's very simple to use Databricks Apache Spark.""Can cut across the entire ecosystem of open source technology to give an extra level of getting the transformatory process of the data.""I like the ability to use workspaces with other colleagues because you can work together even without seeing the other team's job."

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Cons
"Amazon MSK could improve on the features they offer. They are still lagging behind Confluence.""The configuration seems a little complex and the documentation on the product is not available.""The product's schema support needs enhancement. It will help enhance integration with many kinds of languages of programming languages, especially for environments using languages like .NET.""It does not autoscale. Because if you do keep it manually when you add a note to the cluster and then you register it, then it is scalable, but the fact that you have to go and do it, I think, makes it, again, a bit of some operational overhead when managing the cluster.""It would be really helpful if Amazon MSK could provide a single installation that covers all the servers.""It should be more flexible, integration-wise."

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"A lot of people are required to manage this solution.""It should have more compatible and more advanced visualization and machine learning libraries.""There should be better integration with other platforms.""When I used the support, I had communication problems because of the language barrier with the agent. The accent was difficult to understand.""Generative AI is catching up in areas like data governance and enterprise flavor. Hence, these are places where Databricks has to be faster.""Databricks can improve by making the documentation better.""The query plan is not easy with Databrick's job level. If I want to tune any of the code, it is not easily available in the blogs as well.""There is room for improvement in visualization."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The price of Amazon MSK is less than some competitor solutions, such as Confluence."
  • "The platform has better pricing than one of its competitors."
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  • "Whenever we want to find the actual costing, we have to send an email to Databricks, so having the information available on the internet would be helpful."
  • "I do not exactly know the costs, but one of our clients pays between $100 USD and $200 USD monthly."
  • "Licensing on site I would counsel against, as on-site hardware issues tend to really delay and slow down delivery."
  • "We find Databricks to be very expensive, although this improved when we found out how to shut it down at night."
  • "The pricing depends on the usage itself."
  • "I am based in South Africa, where it is expensive adapting to the cloud, and then there is the price for the tool itself."
  • "The price is okay. It's competitive."
  • "Databricks uses a price-per-use model, where you can use as much compute as you need."
  • More Databricks Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Amazon MSK has significantly improved our organization by building seamless integration between systems.
    Top Answer:The product's schema support needs enhancement. It will help enhance integration with many kinds of languages of programming languages, especially for environments using languages like .NET. They… more »
    Top Answer:We use the software to facilitate building integrations between systems.
    Top Answer:Databricks gives you the option of working with several different languages, such as SQL, R, Scala, Apache Spark, or Python. It offers many different cluster choices and excellent integration with… more »
    Top Answer:We researched AWS SageMaker, but in the end, we chose Databricks Databricks is a Unified Analytics Platform designed to accelerate innovation projects. It is based on Spark so it is very fast. It… more »
    Top Answer:Databricks is an easy-to-set-up and versatile tool for data management, analysis, and business analytics. For analytics teams that have to interpret data to further the business goals of their… more »
    Ranking
    6th
    out of 38 in Streaming Analytics
    Views
    7,940
    Comparisons
    6,237
    Reviews
    5
    Average Words per Review
    427
    Rating
    7.0
    1st
    out of 38 in Streaming Analytics
    Views
    9,483
    Comparisons
    6,060
    Reviews
    47
    Average Words per Review
    441
    Rating
    8.3
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka
    Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
    Learn More
    Overview

    Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) is a fully managed service that enables you to build and run applications that use Apache Kafka to process streaming data. Amazon MSK provides the control-plane operations, such as those for creating, updating, and deleting clusters.

    Databricks is an industry-leading data analytics platform which is a one-stop product for all data requirements. Databricks is made by the creators of Apache Spark, Delta Lake, ML Flow, and Koalas. It builds on these technologies to deliver a true lakehouse data architecture, making it a robust platform that is reliable, scalable, and fast. Databricks speeds up innovations by synthesizing storage, engineering, business operations, security, and data science.

    Databricks is integrated with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform. This enables users to easily manage a colossal amount of data and to continuously train and deploy machine learning models for AI applications. The platform handles all analytic deployments, ranging from ETL to models training and deployment.

    Databricks deciphers the complexities of processing data to empower data scientists, engineers, and analysts with a simple collaborative environment to run interactive and scheduled data analysis workloads. The program takes advantage of AI’s cost-effectivity, flexibility, and cloud storage.

    Databricks Key Features

    Some of Databricks key features include:

    • Cloud-native: Works well on any prominent cloud provider.
    • Data storage: Stores a broad range of data, including structured, unstructured, and streaming.
    • Self-governance: Built-in governance and security controls.
    • Flexibility: Flexible for small-scale jobs as well as running large-scale jobs like Big Data processing because it’s built from Spark and is specifically optimized for Cloud environments.
    • Data science tools: Production-ready data tooling, from engineering to BI, AI, and ML.
    • Familiar languages: While Databricks is Spark-based, it allows commonly used programming languages like R, SQL, Scala, and Python to be used.
    • Team sharing workspaces: Creates an environment that provides interactive workspaces for collaboration, which allow multiple members to collaborate for data model creation, machine learning, and data extraction.
    • Data source: Performs limitless Big Data analytics by connecting to Cloud providers AWS, Azure, and Google, as well as on-premises SQL servers, JSON and CSV.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Databricks stands out from its competitors for several reasons. Two striking features are its collaborative ability and its ability to streamline multiple programming languages.

    PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features. A Chief Research Officer in consumer goods writes, “We work with multiple people on notebooks and it enables us to work collaboratively in an easy way without having to worry about the infrastructure. I think the solution is very intuitive, very easy to use. And that's what you pay for.”

    A business intelligence coordinator in construction notes, “The capacity of use of the different types of coding is valuable. Databricks also has good performance because it is running in spark extra storage, meaning the performance and the capacity use different kinds of codes.”

    An Associate Manager who works in consultancy mentions, “The technology that allows us to write scripts within the solution is extremely beneficial. If I was, for example, able to script in SQL, R, Scala, Apache Spark, or Python, I would be able to use my knowledge to make a script in this solution. It is very user-friendly and you can also process the records and validation point of view. The ability to migrate from one environment to another is useful.”

    Sample Customers
    Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
    Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm20%
    Computer Software Company17%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Retailer5%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company25%
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Retailer9%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Healthcare Company6%
    Company Size
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise69%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise59%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise71%
    Buyer's Guide
    Amazon MSK vs. Databricks
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon MSK vs. Databricks and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Amazon MSK is ranked 6th in Streaming Analytics with 6 reviews while Databricks is ranked 1st in Streaming Analytics with 78 reviews. Amazon MSK is rated 7.2, while Databricks is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Amazon MSK writes "Efficient real-time transaction tracking but time-consuming installation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Databricks writes "A nice interface with good features for turning off clusters to save on computing". Amazon MSK is most compared with Confluent, Amazon Kinesis, Azure Stream Analytics, Google Cloud Dataflow and IBM Streams, whereas Databricks is most compared with Amazon SageMaker, Informatica PowerCenter, Dataiku Data Science Studio, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio and Dremio. See our Amazon MSK vs. Databricks report.

    See our list of best Streaming Analytics vendors.

    We monitor all Streaming Analytics reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.