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Amazon SageMaker vs Databricks comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 2, 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
6.6
Organizations benefit from Databricks' cost-effectiveness and efficiency, though some find evaluating immediate gains challenging due to specific contexts.
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.
Senior Solutions Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
For a lot of different tasks, including machine learning, it is a nice solution.
Senior Data Engineer at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
When it comes to big data processing, I prefer Databricks over other solutions.
Head CEO at bizmetric
 

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
7.1
Databricks customer service is praised for responsiveness and expertise, despite occasional delays and communication issues via Microsoft.
The technical support from AWS is excellent.
Lead Consultant at Saama
The support is very good with well-trained engineers.
Senior Solutions Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The response time is generally swift, usually within seven to eight hours.
Python AWS & AI Expert at a tech consulting company
Whenever we reach out, they respond promptly.
Senior Data Engineer at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
As of now, we are raising issues and they are providing solutions without any problems.
Data Platform Architect at KELLANOVA
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.
Data Engineer at CRAFT Tech
 

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 provides excellent scalability, supporting diverse data sizes and sectors with high-performance cloud infrastructure and cost-effective management.
The availability of GPU instances can be a challenge, requiring proper planning.
Senior Solutions Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It works very well with large data sets from one terabyte to fifty terabytes.
Python AWS & AI Expert at a tech consulting company
Amazon SageMaker is scalable and works well from an infrastructure perspective.
Lead Consultant at Saama
The patches have sometimes caused issues leading to our jobs being paused for about six hours.
Senior Data Engineer at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
Databricks is an easily scalable platform.
Data Platform Architect at KELLANOVA
I would rate the scalability of this solution as very high, about nine out of ten.
Data Engineer at CRAFT Tech
 

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 reliable, with high performance and robustness, despite occasional minor issues resolved quickly.
There are issues, but they are easily detectable and fixable, with smooth error handling.
Python AWS & AI Expert at a tech consulting company
The product has been stable and scalable.
Data Lake and MLOps Lead at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
I rate the stability of Amazon SageMaker between seven and eight.
Lead Consultant at Saama
They release patches that sometimes break our code.
Senior Data Engineer at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
Although it is too early to definitively state the platform's stability, we have not encountered any issues so far.
Data Platform Architect at KELLANOVA
Databricks is definitely a very stable product and reliable.
Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon SageMaker users desire improved pricing, interface, documentation, integration, and features for scalability, automation, security, and usability.
Databricks users desire advanced visualization, better integration, enhanced documentation, predictive analytics features, and improved user experience and tools.
Having all documentation easily accessible on the front page of SageMaker would be a great improvement.
AWS & Azure Engineer at a media company with 11-50 employees
This would empower citizen data scientists to utilize the tool more effectively since many data scientists do not have a core development background.
Lead Consultant at Saama
Integration of the latest machine learning models like the new Amazon LLM models could enhance its capabilities.
Senior Solutions Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Adjusting features like worker nodes and node utilization during cluster creation could mitigate these failures.
Data Engineer at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
Senior Data Engineer at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
We use MLflow for managing MLOps, however, further improvement would be beneficial, especially for large language models and related tools.
Solution Architect at Mercedes-Benz AG
 

Setup Cost

Amazon SageMaker is costly but flexible, offering pay-as-you-go pricing and discounts, with charges only for compute resources.
Databricks' pricing is seen as high for large data volumes but competitive for batch processing on cloud platforms.
The cost for small to medium instances is not very high.
AWS & Azure Engineer at a media company with 11-50 employees
For a single user, prices might be high yet could be cheaper for user-managed services compared to AWS-managed services.
Lead Consultant at Saama
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.
Senior Solutions Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It is not a cheap solution.
Data Platform Architect at KELLANOVA
 

Valuable Features

Amazon SageMaker offers seamless AWS integration, intuitive tools, and scalability, supporting both beginner and expert machine learning projects.
Databricks simplifies large-scale analytics with user-friendly UI, powerful integrations, and scalable features for enhanced performance and collaboration.
SageMaker supports building, training, and deploying AI models from scratch, which is crucial for my ML project.
AWS & Azure Engineer at a media company with 11-50 employees
They offer insights into everyone making calls in my organization.
President & CEO at Y12
The most valuable features include the ML operations that allow for designing, deploying, testing, and evaluating models.
Senior Solutions Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed.
Data Engineer at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The platform allows us to leverage cloud advantages effectively, enhancing our AI and ML projects.
Data Platform Architect at KELLANOVA
The Unity Catalog is for data governance, and the Delta Lake is to build the lakehouse.
Data Engineer at CRAFT Tech
 

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 (4th)
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), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (5th), Streaming Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2025, in the Data Science Platforms category, the mindshare of Amazon SageMaker is 5.0%, down from 7.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Databricks is 10.7%, down from 19.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Science Platforms Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Databricks10.7%
Amazon SageMaker5.0%
Other84.3%
Data Science Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

Saurabh Jaiswal - PeerSpot reviewer
Python AWS & AI Expert at a tech consulting company
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
Data Engineer at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees
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
18%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
9%
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.
 

Comparisons

 

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: December 2025.
879,310 professionals have used our research since 2012.