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Amazon SageMaker vs Azure Databricks 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon SageMaker
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
3rd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
AI Development Platforms (4th)
Azure Databricks
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
14th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
4.1
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

NeerajPokala - PeerSpot reviewer
Machine Learning Engineer at Macquarie Group
Automation has transformed document review and reduces manual effort in financial workflows
There will be many features in Amazon SageMaker itself, but we don't know whether the feature is there or not, particularly the documentation part. Whatever the new releases will be, they will not post very fast. It is very easy to deploy Amazon SageMaker. The documentation is also very good. It is good because we are able to collaborate with our notebooks. At a time we can develop simultaneously and work on different use cases in the same notebook itself.
SK
Sr. Technical Specialist at Softcell Technologies Limited
Data pipelines have accelerated and support reliable analytics collaboration across teams
From our experience, Azure Databricks could be improved with simpler cluster management and more predictable cost visibility and enhanced native monitoring for large enterprise environments. We would also like richer governance features, better debugging for distributed Spark jobs, and more granular controls for workload optimization over and across multiple teams, which we have at multiple customer environments and within our organization. In day-to-day operations, troubleshooting failed Spark jobs can still be time-consuming, especially in complex distributed workloads. We would like clearer root cause diagnostics and more actionable performance recommendations within Azure Databricks. Better cost optimization insights at the job and cluster level would also help us manage large multiple team environments more efficiently.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The various integration options available in Amazon SageMaker, such as Firehose for connecting to data pipelines, are simple to use."
"The solution is easy to scale...The documentation and online community support have been sufficient for us so far."
"The evolution from SageMaker Classic to SageMaker Studio, particularly the UI part of Studio, is commendable."
"We've had no problems with SageMaker's stability."
"The most valuable features in Amazon SageMaker are its AutoML, feature store, and automated hyperparameter tuning capabilities."
"SageMaker supports building, training, and deploying AI models from scratch, which is crucial for my ML project."
"The intuitive interface and streamlined user experience make it easy to navigate and set up various tools like Visual Studio Code or Jupyter Notebook."
"There is no cessation from what I can see; whatever they have in the industry, they can solve 98% of the use cases."
"My pipelines are now significantly faster compared to older ETL tools, as what used to take over 12 to 14 hours to process 2 GB of source data in Synapse Analytics now completes within 5 hours using the Azure Databricks framework for the transformation part, illustrating a substantial improvement in performance."
"Azure Databricks gives the capability to handle a lot of big data use cases and machine learning use cases, but machine learning use cases need quite a lot of compute power, and that is where the cost spikes up."
"The concept of Azure Databricks is a very good one, especially for the data products concept and idea."
"Regarding the learning curve, it is a good technology; it is the first time I am working on a cloud platform, and before that, I have not worked on any data engineering tool that is on cloud, so it is good learning."
"Azure Databricks has significantly improved our ability to process data and large data sets, and deliver analytics projects faster for our customers."
"The best features in Azure Databricks for me are that it's easy to use, flexible, and has fast processing, and you can use multiple data types."
 

Cons

"The platform could be more accessible to users with basic coding skills, making it more intuitive and easier for beginners to use comfortably."
"The solution is complex to use."
"One area for improvement is the pricing, which can be quite high."
"In my opinion, one improvement for Amazon SageMaker would be to offer serverless GPUs. Currently, we incur costs on an hourly basis. It would be beneficial if the tool could provide pay-as-you-go pricing based on endpoints."
"They could add features such as managing environments, experiment management across those environments, and the integration with training datasets as you go through those experiments."
"Amazon SageMaker could improve in the area of hyperparameter tuning by offering more automated suggestions and tips during the tuning process."
"There are other better solutions for large data, such as Databricks."
"The dashboard could be improved by including more features and providing more information about deployed models, their drift, performance, scaling, and customization options."
"I have given the product a rating of six out of ten just because I do not use all of the functionalities, and I see some direction for improvement as well; also, every product has something to improve, and I have not used many features in this product."
"The biggest friction point I have experienced with Azure Databricks is its cost-effectiveness; for projects with less data volume, it is advisable to use Azure Fabric services instead, as Azure Databricks may not be suitable for low volume processing."
"At this point, I cannot comment on the cost being ideal; it is on the higher side, but in the cloud-based environment, compared to on-premise, it could be far lesser in cost."
"From our experience, Azure Databricks could be improved with simpler cluster management and more predictable cost visibility and enhanced native monitoring for large enterprise environments."
"Lower pricing is currently my only focus and I'm still exploring Azure Databricks, so it's too early to say something, but overall, I'm saying that it is the future."
"The only concern is perhaps related to the pricing and cost that Azure Databricks incurs."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"On average, customers pay about $300,000 USD per month."
"The pricing is comparable."
"The cost offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model. It depends on the instance that you do."
"Databricks solution is less costly than Amazon SageMaker."
"There is no license required for the solution since you can use it on demand."
"You don't pay for Sagemaker. You only pay for the compute instances in your storage."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten."
"The product is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise18
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise2
 

Questions from the Community

How would you compare Databricks vs Amazon SageMaker?
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon SageMaker?
If you manage it effectively, their pricing is reasonable. It's similar to anything in the cloud; if you don't manage it properly, it can be expensive, but if you do, it's fine.
What needs improvement with Amazon SageMaker?
It takes some work. We need to refer to the documentation. The documentation is good regarding what other providers we are able to connect with. Out of five, I can say 3.5.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Databricks?
Regarding the licensing cost of Azure Databricks, it has evolved quite a lot. The compute is the biggest cost, as with any other big data solutions. The storage cost is almost minimal or negligible...
What needs improvement with Azure Databricks?
From our experience, Azure Databricks could be improved with simpler cluster management and more predictable cost visibility and enhanced native monitoring for large enterprise environments. We wou...
What is your primary use case for Azure Databricks?
Azure Databricks is our primary platform for building scalable data engineering and analytics pipelines for enterprise customers. We use it to inject, transform, and process large volumes of struct...
 

Also Known As

AWS SageMaker, SageMaker
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

DigitalGlobe, Thomson Reuters Center for AI and Cognitive Computing, Hotels.com, GE Healthcare, Tinder, Intuit
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Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon SageMaker vs. Azure Databricks and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.