Cloudera Data Science Workbench vs Databricks vs KNIME comparison

Cloudera Data Science Workbench (CDSW) makes secure, collaborative data science at scale a reality for the enterprise and accelerates the delivery of new data products. With CDSW, organizations can research and experiment faster, deploy models easily and with confidence, as well as rely on the wider Cloudera platform to reduce the risks and costs of data science projects. Access any data anywhere – from cloud object storage to data warehouses, CDSW provides connectivity not only to CDH but the systems your data science teams rely on for analysis.

Databricks is utilized for advanced analytics, big data processing, machine learning models, ETL operations, data engineering, streaming analytics, and integrating multiple data sources.

Organizations leverage Databricks for predictive analysis, data pipelines, data science, and unifying data architectures. It is also used for consulting projects, financial reporting, and creating APIs. Industries like insurance, retail, manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals use Databricks for data management and analytics due to its user-friendly interface, built-in machine learning libraries, support for multiple programming languages, scalability, and fast processing.

What are the key features of Databricks?

• User-friendly interface: Simplifies operations and usability.
• Built-in machine learning libraries: Facilitates machine learning tasks.
• Support for multiple programming languages: Enhances flexibility.
• Scalability: Efficiently handles growing data needs.
• Fast processing: Improves performance and speed.
• Automated optimization: Reduces manual efforts.
• Data visualization: Provides insightful visuals.
• Collaborative features: Enhances teamwork.
• Delta Lake performance: Boosts data management.
• Seamless cluster management: Simplifies system operations.

What are the benefits or ROI to look for in Databricks reviews?

• Efficiency in handling large datasets: Ensures smooth processing.
• Interactive workspace environment: Improves user collaboration.
• Integration with platforms: Provides connectivity benefits.
• Performance optimization: Enhances overall system performance.
• Support for data governance and security: Ensures data integrity and protection.

Databricks is implemented in insurance for risk analysis and claims processing; in retail for customer analytics and inventory management; in manufacturing for predictive maintenance and supply chain optimization; and in pharmaceuticals for drug discovery and patient data analysis. Users value its scalability, machine learning support, collaboration tools, and Delta Lake performance but seek improvements in visualization, pricing, and integration with BI tools.

KNIME is an open-source analytics software used for creating data science that is built on a GUI based workflow, eliminating the need to know code. The solution has an inherent modular workflow approach that documents and stores the analysis process in the same order it was conceived and implemented, while ensuring that intermediate results are always available. 

KNIME supports Windows, Linux, and Mac operating systems and is suitable for enterprises of all different sizes. With KNIME, you can perform functions ranging from basic I/O to data manipulations, transformations and data mining. It consolidates all the functions of the entire process into a single workflow. The solution covers all main data wrangling and machine learning techniques, and is based on visual programming.

KNIME Features

KNIME has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

• Scalability through data handling (intelligent automatic caching of data in the background while maximizing throughput performance)
• High extensibility via a well-defined API for plugin extensions
• Intuitive user interface
• Import/export of workflows
• Parallel execution on multi-core systems
• Command line version for "headless" batch executions
• Activity dashboard
• Reporting & statistics
• Third-party integrations
• Workflow management
• Local automation
• Metanode linking
• Tool blending
• Big Data extensions

KNIME Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing KNIME. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

• Integrated Deployment: KNIME’s integrated deployment moves both the selected model, and the entire data model preparation process into production simply and automatically, allowing for continuous optimization in production and also saving time because it eliminates error.

• Elastic and Hybrid Execution: KNIME’s elastic and hybrid executions helps you reduce costs while covering periods of high demand, dynamically.

• Metadata Mapping: KNIME enables complete metadata mapping of all aspects of your workflow. In addition, KNIME offers blueprint workflows for documenting the nodes, data sources, and libraries used, as well as runtime information.

• Guided Analytics: KNIME’s guided analytics applications can be customized based on reusable components.

• Powerful analytics, local automation, and workflow difference: KNIME uses advanced predictive and machine learning algorithms to provide you with the analytics you need. In combination with powerful analytics, KNIME’s automation capabilities and workflow difference prepare your organization with the tools you need to make better business decisions.

• Supports enterprise-wide data science practices: The deployment and management functionalities of KNIME make it easy to productionize data science applications and services, and deliver usable, reliable, and reproducible insights for the business.

• Helps you leverage insights gained from your data: Using KNIME ensures the data science process immediately reflects changing requirements or new insights.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the KNIME solution.

An Emeritus Professor at a university says, “It can read many different file formats. It can very easily tidy up your data, deleting blank rows, and deleting rows where certain columns are missing. It allows you to make lots of changes internally, which you do using JavaScript to put in the conditional. It also has very good fundamental machine learning. It has decision trees, linear regression, and neural nets. It has a lot of text mining facilities as well. It's fairly fully-featured.”

Benedikt S., CEO at SMH - Schwaiger Management Holding GmbH, explains, “All of the features related to the ETL are fantastic. That includes the connectors to other programs, databases, and the meta node function. Technical support has been extremely responsive so far. The solution has a very strong and supportive community that shares information and helps each other troubleshoot. The solution is very stable. The initial setup is pretty simple and straightforward.”

Piotr Ś., Test Engineer at ProData Consult, says, “What I like the most is that it works almost out of the box with Random Forest and other Forest nodes.”