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Azure Databricks vs Darwin 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

Azure Databricks
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
14th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
4.1
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Darwin
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
23rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

SK
Sr. Technical Specialist at Softcell Technologies Limited
Data pipelines have accelerated and support reliable analytics collaboration across teams
From our experience, Azure Databricks could be improved with simpler cluster management and more predictable cost visibility and enhanced native monitoring for large enterprise environments. We would also like richer governance features, better debugging for distributed Spark jobs, and more granular controls for workload optimization over and across multiple teams, which we have at multiple customer environments and within our organization. In day-to-day operations, troubleshooting failed Spark jobs can still be time-consuming, especially in complex distributed workloads. We would like clearer root cause diagnostics and more actionable performance recommendations within Azure Databricks. Better cost optimization insights at the job and cluster level would also help us manage large multiple team environments more efficiently.
AC
Founder at Helio Summit
Empowers SMEs to build solutions and interface them with the existing business systems, products and workflows.
There's always room for improvement in the UI and continuing to evolve it to do everything that the rest of AI can do. Because it's so much better than traditional methods, we don't get a ton of complaints of, "Oh, we wish we could do that." Most people are happy to see that they can build models that quickly, and that it can be done by the people who actually understand the problem, i.e. SMEs, rather than having to rely on data scientists. There's a small learning curve, but it's shorter for an SME in a given industry to learn Darwin than it takes for data scientists to learn industry-specific problems. The industry I work in deals with tons and tons of data and a lot of it lends itself to Darwin-created solutions. Initially, there were some limitations around the size of the datasets, the number of rows and number of columns. That was probably the biggest challenge. But we've seen the Darwin product, over time, slowly remove those limitations. We're happy with the progress they've made.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The concept of Azure Databricks is a very good one, especially for the data products concept and idea."
"Regarding the learning curve, it is a good technology; it is the first time I am working on a cloud platform, and before that, I have not worked on any data engineering tool that is on cloud, so it is good learning."
"My pipelines are now significantly faster compared to older ETL tools, as what used to take over 12 to 14 hours to process 2 GB of source data in Synapse Analytics now completes within 5 hours using the Azure Databricks framework for the transformation part, illustrating a substantial improvement in performance."
"Azure Databricks gives the capability to handle a lot of big data use cases and machine learning use cases, but machine learning use cases need quite a lot of compute power, and that is where the cost spikes up."
"The best features in Azure Databricks for me are that it's easy to use, flexible, and has fast processing, and you can use multiple data types."
"Azure Databricks has significantly improved our ability to process data and large data sets, and deliver analytics projects faster for our customers."
"Due to the predictions that we have been able to do because of the use of Darwin, we have decreased our delinquency index from almost nine percent to five percent and reduced our client loss index from 19 percent to 10 percent."
"I liked the data checking feature where it looks at your data and sees how viable it is for use. That's a really cool feature. Automatic assessment of the quality of datasets, to me, seems very valuable."
"The key feature is the automated model-building. It has a good UI that will let people who aren't data scientists get in there and upload datasets and actually start building models, with very little training. They don't need to have any understanding of data science."
"Darwin has increased efficiency and productivity for our company. With our risk management team, there were models that took them more than three days to process each, only to see the outcome. Now, it takes minutes for Darwin to process the current model. So, we can have it in minutes. We don't have to wait three days for all the models to be tested, then make a decision."
"Our main goal is to transform data into knowledge and Darwin is definitely helping us to do that faster."
"When we have a clean dataset, within two to three hours we have a really nice model, one that is better than we could generate in a week."
"The thing that I find most valuable is the ability to clean the data."
"Darwin is the perfect tool to solve this issue; what the machine-learning industry needs at this point to expand exponentially in the oil and gas market."
 

Cons

"Lower pricing is currently my only focus and I'm still exploring Azure Databricks, so it's too early to say something, but overall, I'm saying that it is the future."
"The biggest friction point I have experienced with Azure Databricks is its cost-effectiveness; for projects with less data volume, it is advisable to use Azure Fabric services instead, as Azure Databricks may not be suitable for low volume processing."
"I have given the product a rating of six out of ten just because I do not use all of the functionalities, and I see some direction for improvement as well; also, every product has something to improve, and I have not used many features in this product."
"From our experience, Azure Databricks could be improved with simpler cluster management and more predictable cost visibility and enhanced native monitoring for large enterprise environments."
"The only concern is perhaps related to the pricing and cost that Azure Databricks incurs."
"At this point, I cannot comment on the cost being ideal; it is on the higher side, but in the cloud-based environment, compared to on-premise, it could be far lesser in cost."
"There are issues around the ethics of artificial intelligence and machine learning. You need to have a lot of transparency regarding what is going on under the hood in order to trust it. Because so much is done under the hood of Darwin, it is hard to trust how it gets the answers it gets."
"Something they are working on, which is great, is to have an API that can access data directly from the source. Currently, we have to create a specific dataset for each model."
"The challenge is very big toward making models operational or to industrialize them. E.g., what we want to do is to make unique credit models for each customer. So, we are preparing the types of customers who we can try new credit models on Darwin. But, I see this still very challenging to be able to get the data sets so Darwin can work. At this point, we are working it to get the data sets ready for Darwin."
"If you give a lot of data to Darwin, sometimes it can hang."
"Darwin is stable, but it just doesn't provide the functionality that an analyst would need."
"We have used Darwin as a complement to other tools like R and SPSS to get the accuracy we want."
"The license cost is not cheap, especially not for markets like Mexico."
"There's always room for improvement in the UI and continuing to evolve it to do everything that the rest of AI can do."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"In just six months, we calculated six million pesos that we have prevented in revenue from going away with another customer because of this solution. Thanks to Darwin, we didn't lose those six million pesos."
"As far as I understand, my company is not paying anything to use the product."
"I believe our cost is $1,000 per month."
"The license cost is not cheap, especially not for markets like Mexico. But sometimes, you do have to make these leap of faith for some tools to see if they can get you the disruption that you are aiming for. The investment has paid off for us very well."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Construction Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise2
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Databricks?
Regarding the licensing cost of Azure Databricks, it has evolved quite a lot. The compute is the biggest cost, as with any other big data solutions. The storage cost is almost minimal or negligible...
What needs improvement with Azure Databricks?
From our experience, Azure Databricks could be improved with simpler cluster management and more predictable cost visibility and enhanced native monitoring for large enterprise environments. We wou...
What is your primary use case for Azure Databricks?
Azure Databricks is our primary platform for building scalable data engineering and analytics pipelines for enterprise customers. We use it to inject, transform, and process large volumes of struct...
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Hunt Oil, Hitachi High-Tech Solutions
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Databricks vs. Darwin and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.