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Databricks vs Firebolt 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

Databricks
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
93
Ranking in other categories
Data Science Platforms (1st), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (5th), Streaming Analytics (1st)
Firebolt
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
16th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Databricks is 10.4%, up from 7.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Firebolt is 1.7%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Databricks10.4%
Firebolt1.7%
Other87.9%
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Iqbal Hossain Raju - PeerSpot reviewer
Junior Software Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Can quickly query it to generate quick results
We have used Snowflake before. We support both. Firebolt has better performance, executing queries much quicker than Snowflake. However, Snowflake has more functionality. Depending on the client's needs, we can recommend the best option. Firebolt is a relatively new technology. Snowflake has many functionalities. Firebolt does not support unloading data to S3. There is no built-in way to do this in Firebolt. Alternatively, the data can be retrieved using API calls and loaded to S3 manually. Data can be unloaded to S3 directly using Snowflake. Firebolt significantly improves our performance over Snowflake because it takes less time to execute queries. This is especially important for our company because we use some KPIs that require fast loading times.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Databricks serves as a single platform that can handle numerous end-to-end machine learning tasks."
"The solution is very easy to use."
"Databricks is a truly essential platform for data engineering needs, and I recommend it to anyone looking to advance in the data engineering field."
"I like how easy it is to share your notebook with others. You can give people permission to read or edit. I think that's a great feature. You can also pull in code from GitHub pretty easily. I didn't use it that often, but I think that's a cool feature."
"I work in the data science field and I found Databricks to be very useful."
"Databricks is based on a Spark cluster and it is fast. Performance-wise, it is great."
"I haven't heard about any major stability issues. At this time I feel like it's stable."
"The initial setup phase of Databricks was good."
"Firebolt is fast for analytical purposes. For example, we have analytical data in our data warehouse, and Firebolt can quickly query it to generate quick results."
 

Cons

"I think setting up the whole account for one person and giving access are areas that can be difficult to manage and should be made a little easier."
"Would be helpful to have additional licensing options."
"It would be great if Databricks could integrate all the cloud platforms."
"Databricks is not geared towards the end-user, but rather it is for data engineers or data scientists."
"The integration and query capabilities can be improved."
"There has been a significant evolution in databases. One area of improvement is the Databricks File System (DBFS), where command-line challenges arise when accessing files."
"I have had some issues with some of the Spark clusters running on Databricks, where the Spark runtime and clusters go up and down, which is an area for improvement."
"Anyone who doesn't know SQL may find the product difficult to work with."
"Firebolt's engine takes a long time to start because it needs to make engine calls."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution uses a pay-per-use model with an annual subscription fee or package. Typically this solution is used on a cloud platform, such as Azure or AWS, but more people are choosing Azure because the price is more reasonable."
"Databricks is a very expensive solution. Pricing is an area that could definitely be improved. They could provide a lower end compute and probably reduce the price."
"The solution requires a subscription."
"Databricks are not costly when compared with other solutions' prices."
"The billing of Databricks can be difficult and should improve."
"We're charged on what the data throughput is and also what the compute time is."
"Price-wise, I would rate Databricks a three out of five."
"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."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise56
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
Ask a question
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Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Microsoft, Teradata and others in Cloud Data Warehouse. Updated: February 2026.
884,797 professionals have used our research since 2012.