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Databricks vs Redpanda comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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 Streaming Analytics
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
94
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (4th), Data Science Platforms (1st), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (5th)
Redpanda
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
14th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Databricks is 7.9%, down from 14.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Redpanda is 2.0%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Databricks7.9%
Redpanda2.0%
Other90.1%
Streaming Analytics
 

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.
ArpitShah - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Analyst at CLSA
Event streaming has simplified video data cleanup and now powers real-time analytics
One area for improvement is providing more examples. For instance, Redpanda could be more useful as a sink where you get the data and can directly push to S3. While this is possible through the API, there are better and faster ways to do it. You can make a million API calls and accomplish the task in one and a half hours, but the same thing can be done in ten minutes through other methods. These faster approaches are not documented in obvious places. You have to find information scattered across various blogs. Redpanda should collect all the good blogs and best practices and put them in their documentation. This is more about knowledge management and making it easy for users to understand the product for complex use cases. For simple use cases, it is straightforward. We all use the basic pipe functionality. However, providing more examples would be useful. For example, integration with AWS and the AWS ecosystem would be cool.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution's features are fantastic and include interactive clusters that perform at top speed when compared to other solutions."
"What I like about Databricks is that it's one of the most popular platforms that give access to folks who are trying not just to do exploratory work on the data but also go ahead and build advanced modeling and machine learning on top of that."
"Ability to work collaboratively without having to worry about the infrastructure."
"Databricks has helped us have a good presence in data."
"The solution is an impressive tool for data migration and integration."
"Databricks is a scalable solution. It is the largest advantage of the solution."
"I like cloud scalability and data access for any type of user."
"One of the features provides nice interactive clusters, or compute instances that you don't really need to manage often."
"What makes Redpanda superior is its performance since it's written in C++, which is pretty much the standard for high-performance applications."
"The cost savings have been significant."
"I would recommend Redpanda to others because it's easy to set up, consumes less resources, and is stable compared to other tools."
"Redpanda is developer-friendly, and we need to do much less configuration because Redpanda provides out-of-the-box configuration for us."
"Redpanda was simple and fast, so we went with Redpanda and it just works."
"I tested it with ten-plus nodes, and it's highly scalable."
"The performance is superb, and the value we are getting for the money we pay is great."
"Aside from its lightweight design, Redpanda is essentially a clone of Kafka with all the good features of Kafka, with the only difference being that Kafka needs too many resources while Redpanda is a very good, lightweight, and very fast database."
 

Cons

"If I want to create a Databricks account, I need to have a prior cloud account such as an AWS account or an Azure account. Only then can I create a Databricks account on the cloud. However, if they can make it so that I can still try Databricks even if I don't have a cloud account on AWS and Azure, it would be great. That is, it would be nice if it were possible to create a pseudo account and be provided with a free trial. It is very essential to creating a workforce on Databricks. For example, students or corporate staff can then explore and learn Databricks."
"However, the platform could become easier to use."
"A couple of times I faced an issue where a long-running process was consuming a lot of time and then stopped abruptly."
"The first deployment is difficult. It is not straightforward and you have to think about a lot of stuff."
"The solution is not exactly stable. We've faced a few bugs which have really affected it, especially when it comes to connecting with Spark."
"I would like to see the integration between Databricks and MLflow improved. It is quite hard to train multiple models in parallel in the distributed fashions. You hit rate limits on the clients very fast."
"The solution has some scalability and integration limitations when consolidating legacy systems."
"Databricks does not always have clear updates. Often we find an update in the tool but we are not really sure what has changed."
"Recently, for the documentation, they've built their own AI chatbot, which is focused on giving you answers based on their documentation. While using that, I did not find it to be very good."
"In Redpanda, the areas that have room for improvement are in the clustering part."
"One area for improvement is providing more examples."
"The command-line tools need to be improved. To quickly check the status of the topics and all."
"When it comes to self-hosting, their documentation could be improved."
"I think Redpanda is overall very good for us, and I am uncertain whether Redpanda can scale to very large companies as we are a medium-sized startup."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Databricks are not costly when compared with other solutions' prices."
"My smallest project is around a hundred euros, and my most expensive is just under a thousand euros a week. That is based on terabytes of data processed each month."
"We only pay for the Azure compute behind the solution."
"I do not exactly know the costs, but one of our clients pays between $100 USD and $200 USD monthly."
"Price-wise, I would rate Databricks a three out of five."
"I would rate Databricks' pricing seven out of ten."
"The cost is around $600,000 for 50 users."
"The solution requires a subscription."
"It's free. Everybody can use it, only support is paid."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise57
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise2
 

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Redpanda?
In terms of pricing, Redpanda is free. We do not have to pay anything. It is not open source, but it is free.
What needs improvement with Redpanda?
In Redpanda, the areas that have room for improvement are in the clustering part. Setting up clustering initially is very easy. However, if you are removing a node and attaching another node, signi...
What is your primary use case for Redpanda?
Redpanda serves two primary purposes for our organization. First, we use it as a drop-in replacement for Kafka. Second, we utilize it for streaming analytics. We do not use Redpanda for IoT data st...
 

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 Databricks vs. Redpanda and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.