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Apache Spark Streaming vs Databricks comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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 Spark Streaming
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
10th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Databricks
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
89
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (7th), Data Science Platforms (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Apache Spark Streaming is 2.6%, down from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Databricks is 14.6%, up from 10.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

AbhishekGupta - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy integration, beneficial auto-scaling, and good open-sourced support community
The service structure of Apache Spark Streaming can improve. There are a lot of issues with memory management and latency. There is no real-time analytics. We recommend it for the use cases where there is a five-second latency, but not for a millisecond, an IOT-based, or the detection anomaly-based. Flink as a service is much better. Apache Spark Streaming does not have auto-tuning. A customer needs to invest a lot, in terms of management and maintenance.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The platform’s most valuable feature for processing real-time data is its ability to handle continuous data streams."
"Apache Spark Streaming is versatile. You can use it for competitive intelligence, gathering data from competitors, or for internal tasks like monitoring workflows."
"Apache Spark Streaming has features like checkpointing and Streaming API that are useful."
"The solution is very stable and reliable."
"Spark Streaming is critical, quite stable, full-featured, and scalable."
"It's the fastest solution on the market with low latency data on data transformations."
"As an open-source solution, using it is basically free."
"Apache Spark's capabilities for machine learning are quite extensive and can be used in a low-code way."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is its notebook. It's quite convenient to use, both terms of the research and the development and also the final deployment, I can just declare the spark jobs by the load tables. It's quite convenient."
"I like cloud scalability and data access for any type of user."
"Databricks serves as a single platform that can handle numerous end-to-end machine learning tasks."
"I work in the data science field and I found Databricks to be very useful."
"This solution offers a lake house data concept that we have found exciting. We are able to have a large amount of data in a data lake and can manage all relational activities."
"Databricks serves as a single platform for conducting the entire end-to-end lifecycle of machine learning models or AI ops."
"One of the features provides nice interactive clusters, or compute instances that you don't really need to manage often."
"The fast data loading process and data storage capabilities are great."
 

Cons

"In terms of improvement, the UI could be better."
"There could be an improvement in the area of the user configuration section, it should be less developer-focused and more business user-focused."
"The cost and load-related optimizations are areas where the tool lacks and needs improvement."
"Integrating event-level streaming capabilities could be beneficial."
"The initial setup is quite complex."
"The debugging aspect could use some improvement."
"We would like to have the ability to do arbitrary stateful functions in Python."
"It was resource-intensive, even for small-scale applications."
"The integration of data could be a bit better."
"Databricks would have more collaborative features than it has. It should have some more customization for the jobs."
"I would love an integration in my desktop IDE. For now, I have to code on their webpage."
"The biggest problem associated with the product is that it is quite pricey."
"It should have more compatible and more advanced visualization and machine learning libraries."
"The connectivity with various BI tools could be improved, specifically the performance and real time integration."
"In the future, I would like to see Data Lake support. That is something that I'm looking forward to."
"CI/CD needs additional leverage and support."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I was using the open-source community version, which was self-hosted."
"Spark is an affordable solution, especially considering its open-source nature."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is expensive, or not cost-effective, and ten is cheap, I rate the price a seven."
"People pay for Apache Spark Streaming as a service."
"Databricks' cost could be improved."
"The licensing costs of Databricks depend on how many licenses we need, depending on which Databricks provides a lot of discounts."
"The licensing costs of Databricks is a tiered licensing regime, so it is flexible."
"The price of Databricks is reasonable compared to other solutions."
"Price-wise, I would rate Databricks a three out of five."
"The solution requires a subscription."
"I am based in South Africa, where it is expensive adapting to the cloud, and then there is the price for the tool itself."
"The cost is around $600,000 for 50 users."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
28%
Computer Software Company
20%
Manufacturing Company
6%
University
5%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Apache Spark Streaming?
Apache Spark Streaming is versatile. You can use it for competitive intelligence, gathering data from competitors, or for internal tasks like monitoring workflows.
What needs improvement with Apache Spark Streaming?
We don't have enough experience to be judgmental about its flaws, as we've only used stable features like batch micro-batch. Integration poses no problem; however, I don't use some features and can...
What is your primary use case for Apache Spark Streaming?
We use Spark Streaming in a micro-batch region. It's not a full real-time system, but it offers high performance and low latency.
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 ...
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...
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...
 

Also Known As

Spark Streaming
Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

UC Berkeley AMPLab, Amazon, Alibaba Taobao, Kenshoo, eBay Inc.
Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
Find out what your peers are saying about Apache Spark Streaming vs. Databricks and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.