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Cloudera Data Science Workbench vs Databricks comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

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 Science Workb...
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
24th
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Databricks
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
94
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (4th), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (5th), Streaming Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Data Science Platforms category, the mindshare of Cloudera Data Science Workbench is 1.6%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Databricks is 7.6%, down from 16.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Science Platforms Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Databricks7.6%
Cloudera Data Science Workbench1.6%
Other90.8%
Data Science Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

Ismail Peer - PeerSpot reviewer
Program Management Lead Advisor at Unionbank Philippines
Useful for data science modeling but improvement is needed in MLOps and pricing
If you don't configure CDSW well, then it might be not useful for you. Deploying the tool can vary in complexity, but most of the time, it's relatively simple and straightforward. Triggering a job from data to production is easy, as the platform automates the deployment process. However, ensuring optimal resource allocation is essential for smooth operations.
SimonRobinson - PeerSpot reviewer
Governance And Engagement Lead
Improved data governance has enabled sensitive data tracking but cost management still needs work
I believe we could improve Databricks integration with cloud service providers. The impact of our current integration has not been particularly good, and it's becoming very expensive for us. The inefficiencies in our implementation, such as not shutting down warehouses when they're not in use or reserving the right number of credits, have led to increased costs. We made several beginner mistakes, such as not taking advantage of incremental loading and running overly complicated queries all the time. We should be using ETL tools to help us instead of doing it directly in Databricks. We need more experienced professionals to manage Databricks effectively, as it's not as forgiving as other platforms such as Snowflake. I think introducing customer repositories would facilitate easier implementation with Databricks.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The Cloudera Data Science Workbench is customizable and easy to use."
"I appreciate CDSW's ability to logically segregate environments, such as data, DR, and production, ensuring they don't interfere with each other. The deployment of machine learning is fast and easy to manage. Its API calls are also fast."
"Databricks offers various courses that I can use, whether it's PySpark, Scala, or R."
"It helps integrate data science and machine learning capabilities."
"The initial setup phase of Databricks was good."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is its notebook. It's quite convenient to use, both terms of the research and the development and also the final deployment, I can just declare the spark jobs by the load tables. It's quite convenient."
"I think Databricks is very good at facilitating AI and machine learning projects; they implement AI and machine learning models very well, and clients can run their models on Databricks."
"You can spin up an Azure Databricks clustered, and integrating with it is seamless."
"The ease of use and its accessibility are valuable."
"The Delta Lake data type has been the most useful part of this solution. Delta Lake is an opensource data type and it was implemented and invented by Databricks."
 

Cons

"We found this solution a little bit difficult to scale."
"The tool's MLOps is not good. It's pricing also needs to improve."
"Running this solution requires a minimum of 12GB to 16GB of RAM."
"In the next release, I would like to see more optimization features."
"Databricks is an analytics platform. It should offer more data science. It should have more features for data scientists to work with."
"The solution could be improved by adding a feature that would make it more user-friendly for our team. The feature is simple, but it would be useful. Currently, our team is more familiar with the language R, but Databricks requires the use of Jupyter Notebooks which primarily supports Python. We have tried using RStudio, but it is not a fully integrated solution. To fully utilize Databricks, we have to use the Jupyter interface. One feature that would make it easier for our team to adopt the Jupyter interface would be the ability to select a specific variable or line of code and execute it within a cell. This feature is available in other Jupyter Notebooks outside of Databricks and in our own IDE, but it is not currently available within Databricks. If this feature were added, it would make the transition to using Databricks much smoother for our team."
"Databricks may not be as easy to use as other tools, but if you simplify a tool too much, it won't have the flexibility to go in-depth. Databricks is completely in the programmer's hands. I prefer flexibility rather than simplicity."
"It would be great if Databricks could integrate all the cloud platforms."
"There could be more support for automated machine learning in the database. I would like to see more ways to do analysis so that the reporting is more understandable."
"I think the automatic categorization of variables needs to be improved; the current functionality is not always efficiently identifying the features of the data that is collected."
"There should be better integration with other platforms."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is expensive."
"The licensing costs of Databricks depend on how many licenses we need, depending on which Databricks provides a lot of discounts."
"It is an expensive tool. The licensing model is a pay-as-you-go one."
"I am based in South Africa, where it is expensive adapting to the cloud, and then there is the price for the tool itself."
"Databricks uses a price-per-use model, where you can use as much compute as you need."
"Licensing on site I would counsel against, as on-site hardware issues tend to really delay and slow down delivery."
"The product pricing is moderate."
"My smallest project is around a hundred euros, and my most expensive is just under a thousand euros a week. That is based on terabytes of data processed each month."
"We have only incurred the cost of our AWS cloud services. This is because during this period, Databricks provided us with an extended evaluation period, and we have not spent much money yet. We are just starting to incur costs this month, I will know more later on the full cost perspective."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
33%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise57
 

Questions from the Community

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Which do you prefer - Databricks or Azure Machine Learning Studio?
Databricks gives you the option of working with several different languages, such as SQL, R, Scala, Apache Spark, or Python. It offers many different cluster choices and excellent integration with ...
How would you compare Databricks vs Amazon SageMaker?
We researched AWS SageMaker, but in the end, we chose Databricks. Databricks is a Unified Analytics Platform designed to accelerate innovation projects. It is based on Spark so it is very fast. It...
Which would you choose - Databricks or Azure Stream Analytics?
Databricks is an easy-to-set-up and versatile tool for data management, analysis, and business analytics. For analytics teams that have to interpret data to further the business goals of their orga...
 

Also Known As

CDSW
Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IQVIA, Rush University Medical Center, Western Union
Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudera Data Science Workbench vs. Databricks and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,838 professionals have used our research since 2012.