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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 (3rd)
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 September 2025, in the Java Frameworks category, the mindshare of Apache Spark is 8.3%, up from 7.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spring Boot is 39.2%, down from 42.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Java Frameworks Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Spring Boot39.2%
Apache Spark8.3%
Other52.5%
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

"It is useful for handling large amounts of data. It is very useful for scientific purposes."
"Spark is used for transformations from large volumes of data, and it is usefully distributed."
"Apache Spark provides a very high-quality implementation of distributed data processing."
"Apache Spark is known for its ease of use. Compared to other available data processing frameworks, it is user-friendly."
"Provides a lot of good documentation compared to other solutions."
"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."
"There's a lot of functionality."
"Now, when we're tackling sentiment analysis using NLP technologies, we deal with unstructured data—customer chats, feedback on promotions or demos, and even media like images, audio, and video files. For processing such data, we rely on PySpark. Beneath the surface, Spark functions as a compute engine with in-memory processing capabilities, enhancing performance through features like broadcasting and caching. It's become a crucial tool, widely adopted by 90% of companies for a decade or more."
"This is a stable solution that is being used in the HR space."
"This is a pretty light solution. It's not too heavy."
"Spring Boot is much easier when it comes to the configuration, setup, installation, and deployment of your applications, compared to any kind of MVC framework. It has everything within a single framework."
"Spring Boot's main feature is that it's great for DevOps because you can write your own application. You don't need to install Apache Tomcat. You can create your project easily with a few clicks."
"The community surrounding Spring Boot is really good. If you face any issue with Spring Boot, you will get the answer from the community."
"Spring Boot facilitates the use of Java which is open source. We use Github and other libraries that are available which assist in the building we need to do."
"The cloud version is very scalable."
"Spring Boot's configuration is easy, and it has an out-of-the-box deployment."
 

Cons

"For improvement, I think the tool could make things easier for people who aren't very technical. There's a significant learning curve, and I've seen organizations give up because of it. Making it quicker or easier for non-technical people would be beneficial."
"At the initial stage, the product provides no container logs to check the activity."
"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."
"Apache Spark can improve the use case scenarios from the website. There is not any information on how you can use the solution across the relational databases toward multiple databases."
"The logging for the observability platform could be better."
"Apache Spark should add some resource management improvements to the algorithms."
"It requires overcoming a significant learning curve due to its robust and feature-rich nature."
"I would like to see integration with data science platforms to optimize the processing capability for these tasks."
"The performance could be better."
"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."
"communicationbetween different services from the third party layers or with the legacy applications needs to improve."
"The database connectivity could be better in terms of dealing with multi-tenant systems."
"Nothing really comes to mind in terms of areas of improvement."
"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."
"The services we develop are purely synchronous services, so there's a blocking and waiting state. This is a big problem in microservices."
"Having to restart the application to reload properties."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Spark is an open-source solution, so there are no licensing costs."
"Apache Spark is an expensive solution."
"It is an open-source solution, it is free of charge."
"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."
"It is quite expensive. In fact, it accounts for almost 50% of the cost of our entire project."
"We are using the free version of the solution."
"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."
"The solution is an open-source tool."
"Spring Boot is an open-source solution."
"I am using a free version of Spring Boot."
"Spring Boot is open source. It's a free tool and free framework."
"I use the free version of Spring Boot."
"It's open-source software, so it's free. It's a community license."
"Spring Boot is open source."
"As Spring Boot is an open-source tool, it's free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
30%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise32
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise17
 

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?
Regarding Apache Spark, I have only used Apache Spark Structured Streaming, not the machine learning components. I am uncertain about specific improvements needed today. However, after five years, ...
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.
867,676 professionals have used our research since 2012.