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Amazon SageMaker vs Databricks comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

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
6.8
Organizations using Amazon SageMaker achieve ROI through cost reductions and increased revenue, especially in fraud detection and advertising.
Sentiment score
6.6
Databricks enabled significant cost reductions and efficiency improvements, leading to high user satisfaction and impressive ROI compared to other platforms.
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
Amazon SageMaker definitely provides ROI.
Machine Learning Engineer at Macquarie Group
This reduction in both time and money resulted in real-time impact and significant cost savings.
Consultant at Nice Software Solutions
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
6.8
AWS documentation helps users, but support experiences vary, with premium users usually receiving better assistance and quicker responses.
Sentiment score
7.0
Databricks support is generally responsive and proactive, though issues like language barriers and indirect support occasionally occur.
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 would give Databricks customer support a rating of ten.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
Amazon SageMaker offers scalable solutions for businesses of all sizes, though resource allocation and costs require careful management.
Sentiment score
7.4
Databricks is praised for easy scalability and handling large data volumes, despite some cost and technical setup concerns.
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 sky's the limit with Databricks.
Governance And Engagement Lead
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
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Amazon SageMaker offers high stability with minimal glitches; proper configuration ensures consistent performance, despite occasional manageable challenges.
Sentiment score
7.7
Databricks is stable and reliable, successfully handling large data volumes, with minor issues mostly self-resolving.
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 seek better integration, clearer documentation, improved scalability, enhanced features, and reduced deployment costs for greater accessibility.
Databricks requires improved visualization, integration, interface, documentation, pricing, connector capabilities, community resources, support, and automated features.
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

Enterprise users find Amazon SageMaker pricing reasonable but costly, competitive with Azure and Google Cloud, with expensive querying.
Databricks provides a flexible, cost-effective cloud solution integrating with Azure and AWS, though premium features can raise costs.
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
I believe that in terms of credits for Databricks, we're spending between £15,000 and £20,000 a month.
Governance And Engagement Lead
My experience with pricing, implementation costs, and licensing is that it is very efficient and very fast.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon SageMaker offers key features like AutoML, seamless AWS integration, hyperparameter tuning, and easy model deployment for accessible machine learning.
Databricks excels in user-friendly, scalable data management, supporting diverse languages, with strong analytics and governance features in the cloud.
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
4th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
39
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
94
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (4th), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (5th), Streaming Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Data Science Platforms category, the mindshare of Amazon SageMaker is 3.4%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Databricks is 7.6%, down from 16.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Science Platforms Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Databricks7.6%
Amazon SageMaker3.4%
Other89.0%
Data Science Platforms
 

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.
SimonRobinson - PeerSpot reviewer
Governance And Engagement Lead
Improved data governance has enabled sensitive data tracking but cost management still needs work
I believe we could improve Databricks integration with cloud service providers. The impact of our current integration has not been particularly good, and it's becoming very expensive for us. The inefficiencies in our implementation, such as not shutting down warehouses when they're not in use or reserving the right number of credits, have led to increased costs. We made several beginner mistakes, such as not taking advantage of incremental loading and running overly complicated queries all the time. We should be using ETL tools to help us instead of doing it directly in Databricks. We need more experienced professionals to manage Databricks effectively, as it's not as forgiving as other platforms such as Snowflake. I think introducing customer repositories would facilitate easier implementation with Databricks.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
University
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

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 Business27
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise57
 

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.
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Databricks?
My experience with pricing, implementation costs, and licensing is that it is very efficient and very fast.
 

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: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.