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Apache Spark vs Spring Boot 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Apache Spark
Ranking in Java Frameworks
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (1st), Compute Service (4th)
Spring Boot
Ranking in Java Frameworks
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
38
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Java Frameworks category, the mindshare of Apache Spark is 8.1%, up from 8.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spring Boot is 39.9%, down from 42.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Java Frameworks
 

Q&A Highlights

MT
Aug 28, 2023
 

Featured Reviews

Omar Khaled - PeerSpot reviewer
Empowering data consolidation and fast decision-making with efficient big data processing
I can improve the organization's functions by taking less time to make decisions. To make the right decision, you need the right data, and a solution can provide this by hiring talent and employees who can consolidate data from different sources and organize it. Not all solutions can make this data fast enough to be used, except for solutions such as Apache Spark Structured Streaming. To make the right decision, you should have both accurate and fast data. Apache Spark itself is similar to the Python programming language. Python is a language with many libraries for mathematics and machine learning. Apache Spark is the solution, and within it, you have PySpark, which is the API for Apache Spark to write and run Python code. Within it, there are many APIs, including SQL APIs, allowing you to write SQL code within a Python function in Apache Spark. You can also use Apache Spark Structured Streaming and machine learning APIs.
RajuGottupalli - PeerSpot reviewer
Minimizes a lot of coding, improves the time to market, and is easily deployable and configurable
Spring Boot is a bounded framework. The services we develop are purely synchronous services, so there's a blocking and waiting state. This is a big problem in microservices. To avoid this problem, we have to make the service a reactive session. It has to be reactive to a particular load, particular condition, or based on the number of requests hitting the particular service. All these factors make the service a reactor. There's another module in which Spring Boot provides spring reflex. This module enables the reactiveness of the service, meaning that it eliminates the blocking and waiting state. For example, if you're sending a get operation or a post operation, there won't be any waiting for it to actually hit that particular network to get the data from another service. It continuously flows the request, and there is a zero waiting pack. Vert.x is another good framework where there are similar features or similar benefits with having a reactive session. Spring Boot is a license resource, so it's a framework where we can customize our solution or a particular requirement to build a good solution using Spring Boot. But it's an opinionated framework, meaning that it's completely bounded. You have only one direction to find a solution, whereas Vert.x is an unopinionated framework. Unopinionated is a kind of a toolkit where you can have more optimization and a more flexible solution, which is suitable to your requirements. In Spring Boot, the opportunities are limited. With Vert.x and other programming tools, we have multiple options to explore the solution in a different way and achieve a nonfunctional requirement of thousands transactions in a second. Spring Boot might not support this kind of non-functional requirement. Vert.X is a very good solution to solve critical NFRs for a particular application.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Spark helps us reduce startup time for our customers and gives a very high ROI in the medium term."
"The main feature that we find valuable is that it is very fast."
"The processing time is very much improved over the data warehouse solution that we were using."
"The scalability has been the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"The most crucial feature for us is the streaming capability. It serves as a fundamental aspect that allows us to exert control over our operations."
"The most valuable feature of Apache Spark is its flexibility."
"Its scalability and speed are very valuable. You can scale it a lot. It is a great technology for big data. It is definitely better than a lot of earlier warehouse or pipeline solutions, such as Informatica. Spark SQL is very compliant with normal SQL that we have been using over the years. This makes it easy to code in Spark. It is just like using normal SQL. You can use the APIs of Spark or you can directly write SQL code and run it. This is something that I feel is useful in Spark."
"One of the key features is that Apache Spark is a distributed computing framework. You can help multiple slaves and distribute the workload between them."
"The solution reduces our development time."
"It's very easy to get started. It's very quick. Most of the configurations are already available. So not much time is spent on setting up things. One can quickly set up and then get rolling."
"The Spring Cloud Gateway, Load Balancer are the valuable features. Apart from them, handling a sync call, then multiple service communication through field clients are also useful features."
"Spring Boot has a very lightweight framework, and you can develop projects within a short time. It's open-source and customizable. It's easy to control, has a very interesting deployment policy, and a very interesting testing policy. It's sophisticated."
"The cloud version is very scalable."
"The setup is straightforward."
"We like that the product is open-source."
"The API gateway and cloud configuration allows us to configure the properties outside of the service with respect to enrollment."
 

Cons

"They could improve the issues related to programming language for the platform."
"When you want to extract data from your HDFS and other sources then it is kind of tricky because you have to connect with those sources."
"The graphical user interface (UI) could be a bit more clear. It's very hard to figure out the execution logs and understand how long it takes to send everything. If an execution is lost, it's not so easy to understand why or where it went. I have to manually drill down on the data processes which takes a lot of time. Maybe there could be like a metrics monitor, or maybe the whole log analysis could be improved to make it easier to understand and navigate."
"The solution’s integration with other platforms should be improved."
"From my perspective, the only thing that needs improvement is the interface, as it was not easily understandable."
"The product could improve the user interface and make it easier for new users."
"I would like to see integration with data science platforms to optimize the processing capability for these tasks."
"At the initial stage, the product provides no container logs to check the activity."
"It's difficult to explain to junior developers what it does under the hood."
"Spring Boot can improve the dependency tree that we use for libraries. It would be helpful if it was less complex."
"The product could be improved by supporting and integrating Hadoop."
"We have specific algorithms for our Load Balancer or API gateway. So those things, if they could make it more precise, that would be beneficial. Sometimes when we are under pressure or any new person who looks into that stuff, we'll get confused or scared because of some difficulties in understanding Which algorithm needs to be used to implement a Load Balancer. When when we Yeah. Because when we say circuit breaker, we need to use it, and then the user gets a blank circuit breaker. This means we are saying the circuit breaker needs to be moved, and then that circuit breaker needs to be elaborated more. What type of algorithm should I do, and what exactly do I need to get done so that this circuit breaker can help me to resolve my issue? Because, you know, because if you go for the circuit breaker, it will ask to open the new tab, you know, since it will check. If the service is not responding, it will wait and go for another connection. So in similar words, if they can explain it a bit more, that will be helpful. Everyone could do their own Google stuff, and they will get it, but they need help understanding how this could help them to resolve the issue. It will be good if Spring Boot provides information about real-time use cases."
"We'd like them to develop more supporting testing."
"The security could be simplified."
"The cross framework compatibility has some shortcomings. With JUnit Test Runner and Spring Boot, it's really tedious to make them both work to write the test cases."
"Having to restart the application to reload properties."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is an open-source product. If you're using the open-source Apache Spark, no fees are involved at any time. Charges only come into play when using it with other services like Databricks."
"We are using the free version of the solution."
"The solution is affordable and there are no additional licensing costs."
"Spark is an open-source solution, so there are no licensing costs."
"Apache Spark is an open-source tool."
"It is quite expensive. In fact, it accounts for almost 50% of the cost of our entire project."
"They provide an open-source license for the on-premise version."
"Since we are using the Apache Spark version, not the data bricks version, it is an Apache license version, the support and resolution of the bug are actually late or delayed. The Apache license is free."
"Spring Boot is free; even the Spring Tools Suite for Eclipse is free."
"I am using a free version of Spring Boot."
"If you want support there is paid enterprise version with support available."
"It's an open-source solution."
"Spring Boot is open source."
"The solution is free."
"This is an open source solution."
"I use the free version of Spring Boot."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
30%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Apache Spark?
We use Spark to process data from different data sources.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Spark?
Apache Spark is open-source, so it doesn't incur any charges.
What needs improvement with Apache Spark?
There is complexity when it comes to understanding the whole ecosystem, especially for beginners. I find it quite complex to understand how a Spark job is initiated, the roles of driver nodes, work...
What do you like most about Spring Boot?
1. Open Source2. Excellent Community Support -- Widely used across different projects -- so your search for answers would be easy and almost certain.3. Extendable Stack with a wide array of availab...
Which is better - Spring Boot or Eclipse MicroProfile?
Springboot is a Java-based solution that is very popular and easy to use. You can use it to build applications quickly and confidently. Springboot has a very large, helpful learning community, whic...
Which is better - Spring Boot or Jakarta EE?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Spring Boot or Jakarta EE application creation software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Spring Boot. Spring Boot offe...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NASA JPL, UC Berkeley AMPLab, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, UC Santa Cruz, TripAdvisor, Taboola, Agile Lab, Art.com, Baidu, Alibaba Taobao, EURECOM, Hitachi Solutions
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Find out what your peers are saying about Apache Spark vs. Spring Boot and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.