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Apache Spark vs Zadara 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 Spark
Ranking in Compute Service
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (1st), Java Frameworks (2nd)
Zadara
Ranking in Compute Service
10th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (33rd), Software Defined Storage (SDS) (16th), Public Cloud Storage Services (15th), File and Object Storage (22nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Apache Spark is 11.3%, up from 10.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zadara is 0.8%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Compute Service
 

Featured Reviews

Ilya Afanasyev - PeerSpot reviewer
Reliable, able to expand, and handle large amounts of data well
We use batch processing. It works well with our formats and file versions. There's a lot of functionality. In our pipeline each hour, we make a copy of data from MongoDB, of the changes from MongoDB to some specific file. Each time pipeline copied all of the data, it would do it each time without changes to all of the tables. Tables have a lot of data, and in the last MongoDB version, there is a possibility to read only changed data. This reduced the cost and configuration of the cluster, and we saved about $150,000. The solution is scalable. It's a stable product.
Kirubel Behailu - PeerSpot reviewer
Enhancing storage management efficiency with user-friendly experience
Our customers are using Zadara for their research and development environments. We provide infrastructure for government projects, but we are often not fully aware of their specific usage.  I typically use it for our infrastructure and offer both Zadara and Microsoft Azure to our customers Zadara…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"There's a lot of functionality."
"We use it for ETL purposes as well as for implementing the full transformation pipelines."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its capacity for processing large amounts of data."
"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 most valuable feature of Apache Spark is its flexibility."
"The solution has been very stable."
"The processing time is very much improved over the data warehouse solution that we were using."
"We use Spark to process data from different data sources."
"One of the most useful features is that they provide iSCSI as a service."
"Zadara Storage Cloud having 24/7 management saves me support and engineering costs because the storage and computing are managed by a third-party. We are able to focus more attention on the customer, which is truly our core business. Even at 1:00 AM or 2:00 AM at night, someone will answer, which is important."
"It provides very satisfactory storage performance."
"The processing is much faster with this product."
"Zadara is a fully-fledged platform, and our customers are happy with its use."
"Being able to scale on demand, and being able to get out of our security operation center, and not having to purchase hardware upfront, has drastically reduced the overhead that was required to maintain our information. We have also gained additional capabilities in terms of speed of replicating that information."
"The most valuable feature of Zadara is its ease of use and safety. Overall the solution is a complete package, it has all the features needed."
"One of the most valuable features is its integration with other cloud solutions. We have a presence within Amazon EC2 and we leverage compute instances in there. Being able to integrate with compute, both locally within Zadara, as well as with other cloud vendors such as Amazon, is very helpful, while also being able to maintain extremely low latency between those connections."
 

Cons

"Apart from the restrictions that come with its in-memory implementation. It has been improved significantly up to version 3.0, which is currently in use."
"We use big data manager but we cannot use it as conditional data so whenever we're trying to fetch the data, it takes a bit of time."
"It should support more programming languages."
"When you are working with large, complex tasks, the garbage collection process is slow and affects performance."
"When using Spark, users may need to write their own parallelization logic, which requires additional effort and expertise."
"Apache Spark lacks geospatial data."
"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."
"I know there is always discussion about which language to write applications in and some people do love Scala. However, I don't like it."
"There is room for improvement in pricing as it is currently quite expensive."
"Having iSCSI over the internet using a VPN, the IPSec tunnel is really the only thing that I find missing from this product."
"Currently, when we do firmware upgrades, it sometimes causes issues and is not as nondisruptive as desired."
"The range of support of VMware could be better. It can support Windows, however, it cannot support other operating systems like IBM AIX. This needs to improve."
"There are still some storage features that they lack. For example, other vendors implemented the auto-tiering feature a long time ago, while Zadara Storage Cloud is just coming out with this feature today. So, they are a little bit late compared to the market."
"In the next release, there can be some improvements to the web console by adding more features because the console is simple. Additionally, the calculator could improve."
"Some of the features are a little bit slow to come to market."
"The initial setup of the solution is complex."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an open-source solution, it is free of charge."
"Spark is an open-source solution, so there are no licensing costs."
"It is quite expensive. In fact, it accounts for almost 50% of the cost of our entire project."
"Licensing costs can vary. For instance, when purchasing a virtual machine, you're asked if you want to take advantage of the hybrid benefit or if you prefer the license costs to be included upfront by the cloud service provider, such as Azure. If you choose the hybrid benefit, it indicates you already possess a license for the operating system and wish to avoid additional charges for that specific VM in Azure. This approach allows for a reduction in licensing costs, charging only for the service and associated resources."
"The solution is affordable and there are no additional licensing costs."
"Apache Spark is open-source. You have to pay only when you use any bundled product, such as Cloudera."
"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."
"I did not pay anything when using the tool on cloud services, but I had to pay on the compute side. The tool is not expensive compared with the benefits it offers. I rate the price as an eight out of ten."
"One of the factors that ruled out several providers was cost. They were way too expensive for the volume of data that we needed and the speed at which we needed to be able to manage it. There aren't a lot of providers that can do that."
"For our use, it's appropriately priced and overall, it's proved to be very cost-effective against other tier-one vendors."
"The price of Zadara is very good and it covers everything. There is no subscription needed."
"The pricing is very competitive and the fact that they have very compelling discounts for multi-year commitments is great."
"If you just take the street price of Zadara Storage Cloud and look up the price or cost per hour, then you could think that Zadara Storage Cloud is extremely expensive or a solution only for enterprise use. That is not true. You need to compare the entire system. This means that you don't stop looking at just the street price, but you need to consider all the features, requirements, and costs of support as well as the extra cost that other vendors have. Other players just play with hidden, additional costs. Everything is included in Zadara Storage Cloud's licensing cost; what you get is what you pay for."
"It is a nice licensing model and it makes it quite simple because we just pay for what we use, and the bill that comes shows us exactly what customers are using what resources."
"The pricing and licensing are very simple and the cost is predictable, although, like everything that you pay for as you use, you have to be mindful of what you're using."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Computer Software Company
23%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Retailer
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?
Compared to other solutions like Doc DB, Spark is more costly due to the need for extensive infrastructure. It requires significant investment in infrastructure, which can be expensive. While cloud...
What needs improvement with Apache Spark?
The Spark solution could improve in scheduling tasks and managing dependencies. Spark alone cannot handle sequential tasks, requiring environments like Airflow scheduler or scripts. For instance, o...
What needs improvement with Zadara?
The initial installation was difficult because many steps required the command line interface (CLI). Maintenance can also be complicated, especially when deeper troubleshooting requires navigating ...
What is your primary use case for Zadara?
I use this product as storage. Specifically, I use it as big storage. That's the main use case for Zadara ( /products/zadara-reviews ).
What advice do you have for others considering Zadara?
As for the pros and cons, the main concerns are the complexity of the initial installation and the complicated maintenance due to the CLI usage. Overall, I do not have other complaints. My overall ...
 

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
Time, Inc. A&E Network, The Washington Post, News UK, McGraw Hill, Gilt, Toshiba, Deloitte, VMware
Find out what your peers are saying about Apache Spark vs. Zadara and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,963 professionals have used our research since 2012.