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Amazon SageMaker vs Databricks comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 27, 2025

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
6.6
Amazon SageMaker offers varied ROI, improving efficiency and reducing costs with real-time fraud detection, despite long-term expense concerns.
Sentiment score
6.5
Databricks efficiently lowers costs with cloud services, though ROI varies by sector and integration, particularly with Azure.
The return on investment varies by use case and offers significant value in revenue increases and cost saving capabilities, especially in real time fraud detection and targeted advertisements.
For a lot of different tasks, including machine learning, it is a nice solution.
When it comes to big data processing, I prefer Databricks over other solutions.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.9
Amazon SageMaker support is praised for expertise, though some note slow responses and challenges for new users. Responses vary.
Sentiment score
7.2
Databricks support is praised for prompt, professional service, comprehensive resources, and effective communication, enhancing overall user satisfaction.
The technical support from AWS is excellent.
The support is very good with well-trained engineers.
The response time is generally swift, usually within seven to eight hours.
Whenever we reach out, they respond promptly.
As of now, we are raising issues and they are providing solutions without any problems.
I rate the technical support as fine because they have levels of technical support available, especially partners who get really good support from Databricks on new features.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Amazon SageMaker is highly scalable and flexible, but may need skilled personnel and resource adjustments for optimal performance.
Sentiment score
7.4
Databricks is praised for its scalability, enabling easy adaptation to large data and user loads with efficient resource management.
The availability of GPU instances can be a challenge, requiring proper planning.
It works very well with large data sets from one terabyte to fifty terabytes.
Amazon SageMaker is scalable and works well from an infrastructure perspective.
The patches have sometimes caused issues leading to our jobs being paused for about six hours.
Databricks is an easily scalable platform.
I would rate the scalability of this solution as very high, about nine out of ten.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Amazon SageMaker is praised for stability and reliability, though users face a learning curve and occasional UI changes.
Sentiment score
7.7
Databricks is stable and robust, with minor issues, handling large data volumes and earning high stability ratings.
There are issues, but they are easily detectable and fixable, with smooth error handling.
The product has been stable and scalable.
I rate the stability of Amazon SageMaker between seven and eight.
They release patches that sometimes break our code.
Although it is too early to definitively state the platform's stability, we have not encountered any issues so far.
Databricks is definitely a very stable product and reliable.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon SageMaker users desire improved pricing, interface, documentation, integration, and features for scalability, automation, security, and usability.
Databricks requires visualization improvements, pricing clarity, user-friendliness, expanded integrations, and simplification for non-technical users to enhance usability.
Having all documentation easily accessible on the front page of SageMaker would be a great improvement.
This would empower citizen data scientists to utilize the tool more effectively since many data scientists do not have a core development background.
Integration of the latest machine learning models like the new Amazon LLM models could enhance its capabilities.
Adjusting features like worker nodes and node utilization during cluster creation could mitigate these failures.
We prefer using a small to mid-sized cluster for many jobs to keep costs low, but this sometimes doesn't support our operations properly.
We use MLflow for managing MLOps, however, further improvement would be beneficial, especially for large language models and related tools.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon SageMaker is costly but flexible, offering pay-as-you-go pricing and discounts, with charges only for compute resources.
Enterprise buyers view Databricks as moderately pricey, with high setup costs, though discounts and licensing flexibility are available.
The cost for small to medium instances is not very high.
For a single user, prices might be high yet could be cheaper for user-managed services compared to AWS-managed services.
The pricing can be up to eight or nine out of ten, making it more expensive than some cloud alternatives yet more economical than on-premises setups.
It is not a cheap solution.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon SageMaker offers seamless AWS integration, intuitive tools, and scalability, supporting both beginner and expert machine learning projects.
Databricks excels in scalability, integration, and user-friendly features, making it ideal for data processing and AI across industries.
SageMaker supports building, training, and deploying AI models from scratch, which is crucial for my ML project.
They offer insights into everyone making calls in my organization.
The most valuable features include the ML operations that allow for designing, deploying, testing, and evaluating models.
Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed.
The platform allows us to leverage cloud advantages effectively, enhancing our AI and ML projects.
The Unity Catalog is for data governance, and the Delta Lake is to build the lakehouse.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon SageMaker
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
2nd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
38
Ranking in other categories
AI Development Platforms (5th)
Databricks
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
91
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (9th), Streaming Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Data Science Platforms category, the mindshare of Amazon SageMaker is 6.0%, down from 8.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Databricks is 14.5%, down from 19.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Science Platforms Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Databricks14.5%
Amazon SageMaker6.0%
Other79.5%
Data Science Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

Saurabh Jaiswal - PeerSpot reviewer
Create innovative assistants with seamless data integration for large-scale projects
The various integration options available in Amazon SageMaker, such as Firehose for connecting to data pipelines, are simple to use. Tools like AWS Glue integrate well for data transformations. The Databricks integration aids data scientists and engineers. SageMaker is fully managed, offers high availability, flexibility with TensorFlow, PyTorch, and MXNet, and comes with pre-trained algorithms for forecasting, anomaly detection, and more.
ShubhamSharma7 - PeerSpot reviewer
Capability to integrate diverse coding languages in a single notebook greatly enhances workflow
Databricks offers various courses that I can use, whether it's PySpark, Scala, or R. I can leverage all these courses in a single notebook, which is beneficial for clients as they can access various tools in one place whenever needed. This is quite significant. I usually work with PySpark based on client requirements. After coding, I feed the Databricks notebooks into the ADF pipeline for updates. Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed. Furthermore, I can connect our Databricks notebook directly with Power BI and other visualization tools like Qlik. Once we develop code, it allows us to transform raw data into visualizations for clients using analysis diagrams, which is very helpful.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
6%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise16
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise56
 

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 do you like most about Amazon SageMaker?
We've had experience with unique ML projects using SageMaker. For example, we're developing a platform similar to ChatGPT that requires models. We utilize Amazon SageMaker to create endpoints for t...
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.
Which do you prefer - Databricks or Azure Machine Learning Studio?
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 ...
Which would you choose - Databricks or Azure Stream Analytics?
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 orga...
What do you like most about Databricks?
Databricks is hosted on the cloud. It is very easy to collaborate with other team members who are working on it. It is production-ready code, and scheduling the jobs is easy.
 

Also Known As

AWS SageMaker, SageMaker
Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

DigitalGlobe, Thomson Reuters Center for AI and Cognitive Computing, Hotels.com, GE Healthcare, Tinder, Intuit
Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon SageMaker vs. Databricks and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
866,561 professionals have used our research since 2012.