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Cloudera Data Platform vs Spark SQL comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 18, 2026

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

Cloudera Data Platform
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Master Data Management (MDM) (6th), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (5th), AI Data Analysis (4th)
Spark SQL
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Cloudera Data Platform and Spark SQL aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Cloudera Data Platform is designed for Data Management Platforms (DMP) and holds a mindshare of 7.1%, up 5.9% compared to last year.
Spark SQL, on the other hand, focuses on Hadoop, holds 5.3% mindshare, down 7.9% since last year.
Data Management Platforms (DMP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudera Data Platform7.1%
Palantir Foundry13.3%
Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC)10.1%
Other69.5%
Data Management Platforms (DMP)
Hadoop Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Spark SQL5.3%
Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop14.6%
Apache Spark14.4%
Other65.7%
Hadoop
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2776239 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Uses handwritten notes and voice files to perform text analytics and gain real-time insights
Cloudera Data Platform can be improved in several areas. I recently attended their roadmap session. Whatever limitations they have identified involve moving data from on-premises to cloud as a single-pane view and better lineage. They have done some recent acquisitions as well to overcome their product limitations. They are on the right track by doing this analysis themselves, identifying what the weaknesses are, and then using mergers or acquisitions to overcome them. I would like to add that, beyond the platform itself, they should provide more training to systems integrators so that they can have a more ready workforce to use Cloudera Data Platform.
Kemal Duman - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead, Data Engineering at Nesine.com
Data pipelines have run faster and support flexible batch and streaming transformations
We do not have any performance problems, but we do have some resource problems. Spark SQL consumes so many resources that we migrated our streaming job from Spark to Apache Flink. Resource management in Spark SQL should be better. It consumes more resources, which is normal. The main reason we switched from Spark is memory and CPU consumption. The major reason is the resource problem because the number of streaming jobs has been increasing in our company. That is why we considered resource management as a priority. Because of the resource consumption, I would say the development of Spark SQL is better. For development purposes, it is a top product and not difficult to work with, but resources are the major problem. We changed to Flink regardless of development time. Development time is less in Spark compared with Flink.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Its flexibility is the most valuable feature because you can leverage any Hadoop component and take full advantage of its open source capabilities."
"Open-source Big community"
"The product offers a fairly easy setup process."
"Cloudera Data Platform proved to be a highly reliable and powerful solution capable of supporting complex enterprise use cases on AWS with strong governance and scalability."
"It has helped our organisation cater to clients who are using Big Data for data storage and analysis combined with our security product."
"In my experience, the best features Cloudera Data Platform offers are that all the services provided are excellent."
"Distributed computing, secure containerization, and governance capabilities are the most valuable features."
"The most valuable part of this product is what Cloudera Data Science Workbench can do as a whole for modeling and analysis."
"Certain data sets that are very large are very difficult to process with Pandas and Python libraries. Spark SQL has helped us a lot with that."
"The scalability of the solution is good."
"This solution is useful to leverage within a distributed ecosystem."
"Overall the solution is excellent."
"I find the Thrift connection valuable."
"The performance is one of the most important features, and it has an API to process the data in a functional manner."
"The speed of getting data."
"The speed of getting data, as our TBs are big and it's a lot of data."
 

Cons

"Since Cloudera acquired HDP, it's been bundled with CBH and HDP. However, the biggest challenge is cloud storage integration with Azure, GCP, and AWS."
"For on-premise use, I would not recommend Cloudera Data Platform as it is expensive and complicated to upgrade."
"Areas for improvement with Cloudera Data Platform could be the initial learning curve that can be a step for teams new to big data economy systems."
"Security and workload management need improvement."
"More information could be there to simplify the process of running the product."
"Initially, we went with Cloudera due to it being a popular choice in the market, etc, then realized it was bad choice."
"Scalability of Cloudera Data Platform is very good and scalable in public cloud. However, it is not as scalable on on-premises private cloud, which adds considerable cost."
"A major drawback that I see with Cloudera Data Platform is that it tends to be one or two years behind the latest open-source implementation of the Apache toolkits such as Spark, Hive, and everything else, which relates to the guardrails of following compliance as the main driving factor, so that is something that could be done better on Cloudera Data Platform's side."
"It would be beneficial for aggregate functions to include a code block or toolbox that explains its calculations or supported conditional statements."
"In the next update, we'd like to see better performance for small points of data. It is possible but there are better tools that are faster and cheaper."
"Anything to improve the GUI would be helpful."
"In terms of improvement, the only thing that could be enhanced is the stability aspect of Spark SQL."
"It takes a bit of time to get used to using this solution versus Pandas as it has a steep learning curve."
"I've experienced some incompatibilities when using the Delta Lake format."
"It would be useful if Spark SQL integrated with some data visualization tools."
"This solution could be improved by adding monitoring and integration for the EMR."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is priced well and it is affordable"
"Currently, we are using the product in a sandbox environment, and there is no licensing. We might choose a licensing option once we get the results."
"There is no license or subscription for this solution."
"We don't have to pay for licenses with this solution because we are working in a small market, and we rely on open-source because the budgets of projects are very small."
"The solution is open-sourced and free."
"We use the open-source version, so we do not have direct support from Apache."
"The on-premise solution is quite expensive in terms of hardware, setting up the cluster, memory, hardware and resources. It depends on the use case, but in our case with a shared cluster which is quite large, it is quite expensive."
"The solution is bundled with Palantir Foundry at no extra charge."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
University
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Hortonworks Data Platform?
The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is very good.
What needs improvement with Hortonworks Data Platform?
Areas for improvement with Cloudera Data Platform could be the initial learning curve that can be a step for teams new to big data economy systems. Platform setup and configuration require careful ...
What is your primary use case for Hortonworks Data Platform?
Cloudera Data Platform on AWS was adopted as the core enterprise data platform, covering the full data lifecycle from ingestion to analytics and advanced use cases. Cloudera Data Platform was used ...
What needs improvement with Spark SQL?
We do not have any performance problems, but we do have some resource problems. Spark SQL consumes so many resources that we migrated our streaming job from Spark to Apache Flink. Resource manageme...
What is your primary use case for Spark SQL?
Spark SQL has been in our stack for less than one year, though some of our colleagues are using it. It is a useful product for transformation jobs. We generally use Spark SQL for batch processing. ...
What advice do you have for others considering Spark SQL?
Regarding the Catalyst query optimizer, I think we are using it. We were using it in the past, but I am not certain if we use it now. We used it a long time ago. I rate my experience with Spark SQL...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
UC Berkeley AMPLab, Amazon, Alibaba Taobao, Kenshoo, Hitachi Solutions
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