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Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop vs Spark SQL comparison

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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

Cloudera Distribution for H...
Ranking in Hadoop
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
NoSQL Databases (10th)
Spark SQL
Ranking in Hadoop
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Hadoop category, the mindshare of Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop is 14.7%, down from 21.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spark SQL is 5.3%, down from 9.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Hadoop Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop14.7%
Spark SQL5.3%
Other80.0%
Hadoop
 

Featured Reviews

Rok Dolinsek - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Bussines Development & Co Owner at Troia d.o.o.
Enables on-premise implementation with powerful data processing capabilities
This is the only solution that is possible to install on-premise. Cloudera provides a hybrid solution that combines compute on cloud or on-premises. It includes all machine learning algorithms in the Spark machine learning library. All functionalities needed for a big data platform and ETL are on the platform, eliminating the need for other tools. It is scalable, ready for vertical scaling, and very powerful, offering numerous functionalities and configurations for generative AI.
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

"Implementing a Hadoop cluster has become relatively straight-forward using CDH."
"The data science aspect of the solution is valuable."
"The tool can be deployed using different container technologies, which makes it very scalable."
"Cloudera won as it had more functionality with HUE, Sqoop, and Solr as built-in functions."
"In terms of scalability, if you have enough hardware you can scale out. Scalability doesn't have any issues."
"The solution is reliable and stable, it fits our requirements."
"Cloudera provides a hybrid solution that combines compute on cloud or on-premises."
"The product as a whole is good."
"Overall the solution is excellent."
"I find the Thrift connection valuable."
"We use it to gather all the transaction data."
"Data validation and ease of use are the most valuable features."
"The performance is one of the most important features, and it has an API to process the data in a functional manner."
"One of Spark SQL's most beautiful features is running parallel queries to go through enormous data."
"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 speed of getting data, as our TBs are big and it's a lot of data."
 

Cons

"I subscribe to Cloudera to get an enterprise version but I have found that I can get some of its features from other vendors that would be at a lower cost than Cloudera."
"They should focus on upgrading their technical capabilities in the market."
"The one thing that we struggled with predominately was support. Because it was relatively new, support was always a big issue and I think it's still a bit of an ongoing concern with the team currently managing it."
"We found some difficulties when importing Hive tables from another cluster."
"The competitors provide better functionalities."
"It is quite complicated to configure and install. Integrating the platform into an information system is always a challenge, especially when starting with on-premise implementation."
"This is a very expensive solution."
"The initial setup of Cloudera is difficult."
"This solution could be improved by adding monitoring and integration for the EMR."
"I've experienced some incompatibilities when using the Delta Lake format."
"The solution needs to include graphing capabilities. Including financial charts would help improve everything overall."
"It takes a bit of time to get used to using this solution versus Pandas as it has a steep learning curve."
"There should be better integration with other solutions."
"In the next release, maybe the visualization of some command-line features could be added."
"Anything to improve the GUI would be helpful."
"Being a new user, I am not able to find out how to partition it correctly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price could be better for the product."
"The tool is expensive...For the SMB market or customers whose environments are not that complex and do not have multiple systems running, Cloudera might not be a good option."
"The pricing must be improved."
"I believe we pay for a three-year license."
"I haven't bought a license for this solution. I'm only using the Apache license version."
"When comparing with Oracle Sybase and SQL, it's cheaper. It's not expensive."
"The product’s price depends from project to project."
"It is an expensive product."
"The solution is bundled with Palantir Foundry at no extra charge."
"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."
"There is no license or subscription for this solution."
"We use the open-source version, so we do not have direct support from Apache."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise32
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

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.
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.
What is your primary use case for Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop?
We use Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop for many use cases including analytics, storing huge data sets, and various data processing tasks.
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

37signals, Adconion,adgooroo, Aggregate Knowledge, AMD, Apollo Group, Blackberry, Box, BT, CSC
UC Berkeley AMPLab, Amazon, Alibaba Taobao, Kenshoo, Hitachi Solutions
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop vs. Spark SQL and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
915,287 professionals have used our research since 2012.