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Apache Spark vs Spring Boot comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 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
7.4
Number of Reviews
66
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 June 2025, in the Java Frameworks category, the mindshare of Apache Spark is 7.9%, down from 8.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spring Boot is 40.5%, down from 43.0% 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

Dunstan Matekenya - PeerSpot reviewer
Open-source solution for data processing with portability
Apache Spark is known for its ease of use. Compared to other available data processing frameworks, it is user-friendly. While many choices now exist, Spark remains easy to use, particularly with Python. You can utilize familiar programming styles similar to Pandas in Python, including object-oriented programming. Another advantage is its portability. I can prototype and perform some initial tasks on my laptop using Spark without needing to be on Databricks or any cloud platform. I can transfer it to Databricks or other platforms, such as AWS. This flexibility allows me to improve processing even on my laptop. For instance, if I'm processing large amounts of data and find my laptop becoming slow, I can quickly switch to Spark. It handles small and large datasets efficiently, making it a versatile tool for various data processing needs.
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

"I like Apache Spark's flexibility the most. Before, we had one server that would choke up. With the solution, we can easily add more nodes when needed. The machine learning models are also really helpful. We use them to predict energy theft and find infrastructure problems."
"The memory processing engine is the solution's most valuable aspect. It processes everything extremely fast, and it's in the cluster itself. It acts as a memory engine and is very effective in processing data correctly."
"The scalability has been the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"We use it for ETL purposes as well as for implementing the full transformation pipelines."
"It's easy to prepare parallelism in Spark, run the solution with specific parameters, and get good performance."
"Spark is used for transformations from large volumes of data, and it is usefully distributed."
"The product’s most valuable feature is the SQL tool. It enables us to create a database and publish it."
"Apache Spark can do large volume interactive data analysis."
"The most valuable features of Spring Boot include being able to check all the logs and doing health checks for applications. We can also do monitoring more quickly, and use Spring Boot for production support, so when production goes up or down, we can bring up the application very quickly through Spring Boot."
"It is stable."
"This is a stable solution that is being used in the HR space."
"The solution is easy to use; I primarily employ integrated templates such as the REST template."
"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 most valuable feature of Spring Boot is it reduces the configuration needed. The configuration is handled by the solution. For example, if you're going to develop a web service, we needed to have a Tomcat web server and had to deploy the services and do tests. However, with Spring Boot, the default server comes with Spring Boot which reduces the task of doing all the configuration."
"Features that help with monitoring and tracking network calls between several micro services."
"It is a stable solution."
 

Cons

"It should support more programming languages."
"Its UI can be better. Maintaining the history server is a little cumbersome, and it should be improved. I had issues while looking at the historical tags, which sometimes created problems. You have to separately create a history server and run it. Such things can be made easier. Instead of separately installing the history server, it can be made a part of the whole setup so that whenever you set it up, it becomes available."
"The product could improve the user interface and make it easier for new users."
"It requires overcoming a significant learning curve due to its robust and feature-rich nature."
"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."
"Include more machine learning algorithms and the ability to handle streaming of data versus micro batch processing."
"Spark could be improved by adding support for other open-source storage layers than Delta Lake."
"I would like to see integration with data science platforms to optimize the processing capability for these tasks."
"Building a new product in Spring Boot can take a long time since the solution uses reflection. This is one area the solution could be improved."
"This solution could be improved if there were more libraries available. We would also like more mobile platform functionality using low levels of code."
"The security could be simplified."
"Spring Boot's cost could be cheaper."
"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."
"If you want to create large microservices applications, you need to connect several applications and services to each other. It is very complicated, and Spring Boot does not have an integrated solution for it."
"The services we develop are purely synchronous services, so there's a blocking and waiting state. This is a big problem in microservices."
"It needs more applicable control for large-scale application development."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Apache Spark is an open-source solution, and there is no cost involved in deploying the solution on-premises."
"Apache Spark is not too cheap. You have to pay for hardware and Cloudera licenses. Of course, there is a solution with open source without Cloudera."
"Spark is an open-source solution, so there are no licensing costs."
"The product is expensive, considering the setup."
"They provide an open-source license for the on-premise version."
"Apache Spark is an expensive solution."
"Considering the product version used in my company, I feel that the tool is not costly since the product is available for free."
"The solution is affordable and there are no additional licensing costs."
"This is an open-source product."
"Spring Boot is free; even the Spring Tools Suite for Eclipse is free."
"If you want support there is paid enterprise version with support available."
"As Spring Boot is an open-source tool, it's free."
"The solution is free."
"It's open-source software, so it's free. It's a community license."
"Spring Boot 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
27%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
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: June 2025.
859,579 professionals have used our research since 2012.