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Apache Hadoop vs Dremio 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

Apache Hadoop
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (6th)
Dremio
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (6th), Data Science Platforms (10th)
 

Featured Reviews

Sushil Arya - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides ease of integration with the IT workflow of a business
When working with Kafka, I saw that the data came in an incremental order. The incremental data processing part is still not very effective in Apache Hadoop. If the data is already there, it can be processed very effectively, especially if the data is coming in every second. If you want to know the location of some data every second, then such data is not processed effectively in Apache Hadoop. I can say that one of the features where improvements are required revolves around the licensing cost of the tool. If the tool can build some licensing structures in a pay-per-use manner, organizations can get the look and feel of Apache Hadoop. Apache Hadoop can offer a licensing structure of the product that can be seen as similar to how AWS operates. Apache Hadoop can look into the capability of processing incremental data. The tool's setup process can be a scope of improvement. Also, it is not very simple because while doing the setup, we need to do all the server settings, including port listing and firewall configurations. If we look at other products on the market, then they can be made simpler. There are certain shortcomings when it comes to the product's technical support part, making it an area where improvements are required. The time frame for the resolution is an area that needs to be improved. The overall communication part of the technical support team also needs improvement.
KamleshPant - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution offers quick data connection with an edge in computation
It's almost similar, yet it's better than Starburst in spinning up or connecting to the new source since it's on SaaS. It is a similar experience between the based application and cloud-based application. You just get the source, connect the data, get visualization, get connected, and do whatever you want. They say data reflection is one way where they do the caching and all that. Starburst also does the caching. In Starburst, you have a data product. Here, the data product comes from a reflection perspective. The y are working on a columnar memory map, columnar computation. That will have some edge in computation.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Its flexibility in handling and storing large volumes of data is particularly beneficial, as is its resilience, which ensures data redundancy and fault tolerance."
"The most valuable feature is scalability and the possibility to work with major information and open source capability."
"The most valuable features are the ability to process the machine data at a high speed, and to add structure to our data so that we can generate relevant analytics."
"Initially, with RDBMS alone, we had a lot of work and few servers running on-premise and on cloud for the PoC and incubation. With the use of Hadoop and ecosystem components and tools, and managing it in Amazon EC2, we have created a Big Data "lab" which helps us to centralize all our work and solutions into a single repository. This has cut down the time in terms of maintenance, development and, especially, data processing challenges."
"Hadoop is designed to be scalable, so I don't think that it has limitations in regards to scalability."
"What comes with the standard setup is what we mostly use, but Ambari is the most important."
"I recommend it for the telecom sector. I know it well, and it's a good fit."
"Hadoop can store any kind of data—structured, unstructured, and semi-structured—and presents it using the relational model through Hive."
"Overall, you can rate it as eight out of ten."
"It's almost similar, yet it's better than Starburst in spinning up or connecting to the new source since it's on SaaS."
"We primarily use Dremio to create a data framework and a data queue."
"Dremio is very easy to use for building queries."
"Dremio gives you the ability to create services which do not require additional resources and sterilization."
"Dremio allows querying the files I have on my block storage or object storage."
"The most valuable feature of Dremio is it can sit on top of any other data storage, such as Amazon S3, Azure Data Factory, SGFS, or Hive. The memory competition is good. If you are running any kind of materialized view, you'd be running in memory."
"Dremio enables you to manage changes more effectively than any other data warehouse platform. There are two things that come into play. One is data lineage. If you are looking at data in Dremio, you may want to know the source and what happened to it along the way or how it may have been transformed in the data pipeline to get to the point where you're consuming it."
 

Cons

"It requires a great deal of learning curve to understand. The overall Hadoop ecosystem has a large number of sub-products. There is ZooKeeper, and there are a whole lot of other things that are connected. In many cases, their functionalities are overlapping, and for a newcomer or our clients, it is very difficult to decide which of them to buy and which of them they don't really need. They require a consulting organization for it, which is good for organizations such as ours because that's what we do, but it is not easy for the end customers to gain so much knowledge and optimally use it."
"From the Apache perspective or the open-source community, they need to add more capabilities to make life easier from a configuration and deployment perspective."
"It needs better user interface (UI) functionalities."
"What could be improved in Apache Hadoop is its user-friendliness. It's not that user-friendly, but maybe it's because I'm new to it. Sometimes it feels so tough to use, but it could be because of two aspects: one is my incompetency, for example, I don't know about all the features of Apache Hadoop, or maybe it's because of the limitations of the platform. For example, my team is maintaining the business glossary in Apache Atlas, but if you want to change any settings at the GUI level, an advanced level of coding or programming needs to be done in the back end, so it's not user-friendly."
"I mentioned it definitely, and this is probably the only feature we can improve a little bit because the terminal and coding screen on Hadoop is a little outdated, and it looks like the old C++ bio screen. If the UI and UX can be improved slightly, I believe it will go a long way toward increasing adoption and effectiveness."
"I think more of the solution needs to be focused around the panel processing and retrieval of data."
"It would be good to have more advanced analytics tools."
"Real-time data processing is weak. This solution is very difficult to run and implement."
"There are performance issues at times due to our limited experience with Dremio, and the fact that we are running it on single nodes using a community version."
"They need to have multiple connectors. Starburst is rich in connectors, however, they are lacking Salesforce connectivity as of today."
"Dremio doesn't support the Delta connector. Dremio writes the IT support for Delta, but the support isn't great. There is definitely room for improvement."
"Dremio takes a long time to execute large queries or the executing of correlated queries or nested queries. Additionally, the solution could improve if we could read data from the streaming pipelines or if it allowed us to create the ETL pipeline directly on top of it, similar to Snowflake."
"I cannot use the recursive common table expression (CTE) in Dremio because the support page says it's currently unsupported."
"We've faced a challenge with integrating Dremio and Databricks, specifically regarding authentication. It is not shaking hands very easily."
"They have an automated tool for building SQL queries, so you don't need to know SQL. That interface works, but it could be more efficient in terms of the SQL generated from those things. It's going through some growing pains. There is so much value in tools like these for people with no SQL experience. Over time, Dermio will make these capabilities more accessible to users who aren't database people."
"It shows errors sometimes."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is a low cost and powerful solution."
"​There are no licensing costs involved, hence money is saved on the software infrastructure​."
"Do take into consider that data storage and compute capacity scale differently and hence purchasing a "boxed" / 'all-in-one" solution (software and hardware) might not be the best idea."
"For any big enterprise the costs can be handled, and it is suitable for big enterprises because the scale of data is large. For medium and small enterprises, the tool is on the high-price side."
"It's reasonable, but there's room for improvement in cost-effectiveness."
"If my company can use the cloud version of Apache Hadoop, particularly the cloud storage feature, it would be easier and would cost less because an on-premises deployment has a higher cost during storage, for example, though I don't know exactly how much Apache Hadoop costs."
"We just use the free version."
"We don't directly pay for it. Our clients pay for it, and they usually don't complain about the price. So, it is probably acceptable."
"Dremio is less costly competitively to Snowflake or any other tool."
"Right now the cluster costs approximately $200,000 per month and is based on the volume of data we have."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
35%
Computer Software Company
10%
University
6%
Government
4%
Financial Services Firm
30%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Apache Hadoop?
It's primarily open source. You can handle huge data volumes and create your own views, workflows, and tables. I can also use it for real-time data streaming.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Hadoop?
The product is open-source, but some associated licensing fees depend on the subscription level. While it might be free for students, organizations typically need to pay for their subscriptions. Th...
What needs improvement with Apache Hadoop?
The problem with Apache Hadoop arose when the guys that originally set it up left the firm, and the group that later owned it didn't have enough technical resources to properly maintain it. This wa...
What do you like most about Dremio?
Dremio allows querying the files I have on my block storage or object storage.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dremio?
The licensing is very expensive. We need a license to scale as we are currently using the community version.
What needs improvement with Dremio?
They need to have multiple connectors. Starburst is rich in connectors, however, they are lacking Salesforce connectivity as of today. They don't have Salesforce connectivity. However, Starburst do...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Amazon, Adobe, eBay, Facebook, Google, Hulu, IBM, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Spotify, AOL, Twitter, University of Maryland, Yahoo!, Cornell University Web Lab
UBS, TransUnion, Quantium, Daimler, OVH
Find out what your peers are saying about Apache Hadoop vs. Dremio and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,787 professionals have used our research since 2012.