No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop vs Spark SQL comparison

 

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 (9th)
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 August 2026, in the Hadoop category, the mindshare of Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop is 14.4%, down from 23.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spark SQL is 5.1%, down from 10.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Hadoop Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop14.4%
Spark SQL5.1%
Other80.5%
Hadoop
 

Featured Reviews

SA
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.
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

"The file system is a valuable feature."
"Cloudera really has no competition."
"We switched because Cloudera just works."
"Very solid. Excellent user experience. good documentation."
"I like the combination of all the tools that allow me to provide solutions and enable me to solve the use cases I'm working on."
"The solution is reliable and stable, it fits our requirements."
"The product is completely secure."
"The pricing is very competitive, it's not bad."
"The performance is one of the most important features, and it has an API to process the data in a functional manner."
"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."
"This solution is useful to leverage within a distributed ecosystem."
"Data validation and ease of use are the most valuable features."
"The scalability of the solution is good."
"The speed of getting data."
"The stability was fine. It behaved as expected."
"I find the Thrift connection valuable."
 

Cons

"The tool doesn't support reporting, and relational databases are still the major source of reporting data. Apache Iceberg will be launched soon within the Cloudera cluster for analytical purposes. The Cloudera Machine Learning aspect could be tuned and enhanced to enable us to host some predictive analytics machine learning and AI use cases."
"Flume seems unstable and has to be restarted quite often."
"Cloudera is not as easy, as it requires more DevOps resources than other solutions."
"Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop is not always completely stable in some cases, which can be a concern for big data solutions."
"I had a bad experience connecting the Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop cluster to my other resources in the company, like the active directory or firewall."
"On same ground I didn't see much training materials from Cloudera."
"The performance of some analytics engines provided by Cloudera is not that good."
"The solution is not fit for on-premise distributions."
"There should be better integration with other solutions."
"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."
"It would be beneficial for aggregate functions to include a code block or toolbox that explains its calculations or supported conditional statements."
"SparkUI could have more advanced versions of the performance and the queries and all."
"Spark SQL consumes so many resources that we migrated our streaming job from Spark to Apache Flink."
"In the next release, maybe the visualization of some command-line features could be added."
"The solution needs to include graphing capabilities. Including financial charts would help improve everything overall."
"I've experienced some incompatibilities when using the Delta Lake format."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop is expensive, with support costs involved."
"The solution is fairly expensive."
"The pricing must be improved."
"I believe we pay for a three-year license."
"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."
"It is an expensive product."
"The tool is not expensive."
"Cloudera requires a license to use."
"There is no license or subscription for this solution."
"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 open-sourced and free."
"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 bundled with Palantir Foundry at no extra charge."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Hadoop solutions are best for your needs.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
20%
University
11%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

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: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.