Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop vs IBM InfoSphere BigInsights [EOL] comparison

Cloudera and IBM are both solutions in the Hadoop category. Additionally, 92% of Cloudera users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 83% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Cloudera Distribution for H...

Read 51 Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop reviews

2,315 Views
1,320 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

IBM InfoSphere BigInsights ...

Read 7 IBM InfoSphere BigInsights [EOL] reviews

83% willing to recommend

Cloudera Distribution for H...

IBM InfoSphere BigInsights ...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop and IBM InfoSphere BigInsights [EOL] based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Apache, Cloudera, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in Hadoop.

To learn more, read our detailed Hadoop Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Hadoop

March 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 885,837 peers since 2012

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 Distribution for H...

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Hadoop (2nd), NoSQL Databases (8th)

IBM InfoSphere BigInsights ...

Average Rating

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Featured Reviews

Sami Al-Yazidi

Head of Advaced Analytics & Intelligence; AGM at Alinma Bank

Integration of multiple features supports data analytics and processing

Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop provides numerous features and capabilities combined into one platform.The solution offers power processing and supports different file systems and query engines. It provides parallel processing for handling many requests. The platform includes role-based access control in Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop. It secures the data itself and provides users with different roles and privileges.

Read full review

it_user743022

BigData Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Served our customers better by giving real-time suggestions and proactive maintenance, however the UI was not interactive

* The UI was not interactive: Responses used to be very slow and hang up at times. * The UI was not really helping to track the real-time jobs and its logs. * You can bring in a better UI for job management and health checks. * Developer API documentation needs improvement.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is that I can use CDH for almost all use cases across all industries, including the financial sector, public sector, private retailers, and so on."

"The tool can be deployed using different container technologies, which makes it very scalable."

"The product as a whole is good."

"Cloudera won as it had more functionality with HUE, Sqoop, and Solr as built-in functions."

"We had a data warehouse before all the data. We can process a lot more data structures."

"The most valuable feature is that I can use CDH for almost all use cases across all industries, including the financial sector, public sector, private retailers, and so on."

"Cloudera is doing a great job in the field offering an enterprise ready data platform."

"Cloudera provides a hybrid solution that combines compute on cloud or on-premises."

More Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop pros

"Definitely a product worth evaluating, esp if you are an IBM shop and if done on Bluemix, it gives a jump start on protoypes/POCs."

"This helped us to serve our customers better by giving real-time suggestions and proactive maintenance."

"This is a very helpful product, with continuous improvements by IBM and a great customer service which enables easy access to valuable information for both Hadoop developers and system administrators."

"It gives us the option of extending our analytics system."

"The thing that I have found most valuable in this solution is the BIQSQL implementation which is fully SQL ANSI compliant."

"Watson is the perfect engine for text analysis for us, but in 2014 it doesn’t support the Russian language."

"InfoSphere Streams was the one core product from the platform in which we were using. We were building a real-time response system and we built it on InfoSphere Streams."

"It integrates with JSqsh, enabling us to submit long-running exports from the shell."

Cons

"The security of this solution could be improved."

"The governance aspect of the solution should be improved."

"It is quite complicated to configure and install."

"On same ground I didn't see much training materials from Cloudera."

"The dashboard could be improved."

"We experienced many issues when we started working with Hadoop 3.0 in the Cloudera 6.0 version, so there are a lot of things that need to improve."

"The stability is problematic. We did encounter quite a lot of issues with the cluster going down quite frequently."

"The competitors provide better functionalities."

More Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop cons

"The UI was not interactive: Responses used to be very slow and hang up at times."

"For our business customer pricing is very important motivation, so I can advise change licensing policy from “by volume in the cluster” to “number of machines in the cluster”."

"The UI was not interactive: Responses used to be very slow and hang up at times."

"I have found a lot of issues in Fluid Query and BigInsights Applications to move data in the enterprise version."

"I encountered issues with having the appropriate documentation resources, as well as getting the right stability when explored virtualized environments based on Virtualbox and HyperV software."

"I'd like to see faster execution time, especially for simple queries that don't touch on many rows and don't involve many operations (Joins, Unions, Groupbys)."

"Initial setup is rather complex in comparison with Cloudera."

"Unfortunately the stability of the platform was an issue."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price could be better for the product."

"The price is very high. The solution is expensive."

"The tool is not expensive."

"I believe we pay for a three-year license."

"The solution is expensive."

"I haven't bought a license for this solution. I'm only using the Apache license version."

"The pricing must be improved."

"When comparing with Oracle Sybase and SQL, it's cheaper. It's not expensive."

More Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop pricing and cost advice

Information not available

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Hadoop solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

885,837 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Marketing Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Construction Company

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	9
Large Enterprise	31

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Large Enterprise	4

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop?

The tool can be deployed using different container technologies, which makes it very scalable.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop?

The price for Cloudera is average, yet it is very good compared to other solutions. It can be deployed on-premises, unlike competitors' cloud-only solutions.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop?

If they could support modifying the data more easily than the current implementation, it would be beneficial.

See all answers

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

Comparisons

HPE Data Fabric vs Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop

Compared 9% of the time

MongoDB Enterprise Advanced vs Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop

Compared 8% of the time

Apache Spark vs Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop

Compared 7% of the time

Couchbase Enterprise vs Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop

Compared 6% of the time

Amazon EMR vs Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop

Compared 6% of the time

More Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop Competitors

No data available

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop

April 2026

Download Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop product report

Buyer's Guide

Hadoop

March 2026

Download IBM InfoSphere BigInsights [EOL] product report

Also Known As

No data available

InfoSphere BigInsights

Overview

Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop is the world's most complete, tested, and popular distribution of Apache Hadoop and related projects. CDH is 100% Apache-licensed open source and is the only Hadoop solution to offer unified batch processing, interactive SQL, and interactive search, and role-based access controls. More enterprises have downloaded CDH than all other such distributions combined.

Cloudera

IBM BigInsights delivers a rich set of advanced analytics capabilities that allows enterprises to analyze massive volumes of structured and unstructured data in its native format. The software combines open source Apache Hadoop with IBM innovations including sophisticated text analytics, IBM BigSheets for data exploration, IBM Big SQL for SQL access to data in Hadoop, and a range of performance, security and administrative features. The result is a cost-effective and user-friendly solution for complex, big data analytics.

IBM

Sample Customers

37signals, Adconion,adgooroo, Aggregate Knowledge, AMD, Apollo Group, Blackberry, Box, BT, CSC

Coherent Path Inc., Optibus, Delhaize America, Diyotta Inc., Ernst & Young, Teikoku Databank Ltd., NCSU, Vestas

Find out what your peers are saying about Apache, Cloudera, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in Hadoop. Updated: March 2026.

DOWNLOAD NOW

885,837 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our list of best Hadoop vendors.

We monitor all Hadoop reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.