Databricks vs ThoughtSpot comparison

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30,172 views|19,226 comparisons
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2,005 views|1,524 comparisons
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Databricks and ThoughtSpot based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Databricks, Microsoft, Alteryx and others in Data Science Platforms.
To learn more, read our detailed Data Science Platforms Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"There are good features for turning off clusters.""One of the features provides nice interactive clusters, or compute instances that you don't really need to manage often.""The initial setup phase of Databricks was good.""Imageflow is a visual tool that helps make it easier for business people to understand complex workflows.""Databricks has a scalable Spark cluster creation process. The creators of Databricks are also the creators of Spark, and they are the industry leaders in terms of performance.""We can scale the product.""Databricks is based on a Spark cluster and it is fast. Performance-wise, it is great.""When we have a huge volume of data that we want to process with speed, velocity, and volume, we go through Databricks."

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"I would say the return on investment is good. Whatever we invested, we got results. We have been finding it easy to use and onboard new use cases.""It is easy to set up the solution.""I like ThoughtSpot's search capabilities. You can also create custom analytics even if you aren't an experienced data analyst. We have users with no data analytics experience making some of the dashboards we've created, copying components, and customizing them to their specific use cases.""It's easy to drill down or expand data to get more details right out of the box.""The initial setup was very straightforward.""The ability to do ad hoc explorations of data has been most valuable.""The scalability is good.""ThoughtSpot takes the modifying of existing reports out of our hands."

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Cons
"I'm not the guy that I'm working with Databricks on a daily basis. I'm on the management team. However, my team tells me there are limitations with streaming events. The connectors work with a small set of platforms. For example, we can work with Kafka, but if we want to move to an event-driven solution from AWS, we cannot do it. We cannot connect to all the streaming analytics platforms, so we are limited in choosing the best one.""It would be nice to have more guidance on integrations with ETLs and other data quality tools.""The query plan is not easy with Databrick's job level. If I want to tune any of the code, it is not easily available in the blogs as well.""This solution only supports queries in SQL and Python, which is a bit limiting.""It would be great if Databricks could integrate all the cloud platforms.""I have seen better user interfaces, so that is something that can be improved.""A lot of people are required to manage this solution.""When I used the support, I had communication problems because of the language barrier with the agent. The accent was difficult to understand."

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"A customized visualization is lacking in this product.""The most difficult thing I found is that it only deals with the files and does not have direct connectivity to databases.""In terms of features, I'd like to be able to pivot data - for example, going from rows to columns. It's not easy to do.""If I want to order columns, this feature is not there.""The dashboards could give you more ability to fine tune the appearance. You get a great deal more control over how something looks in Power BI than you do in ThoughtSpot.""The one area of the solution that I do hear needs improvement is on the visualization front.""ThoughtSpot is a fairly new product, so some usability aspects aren't as mature as we'd like them to be. One example is their organizational methodology, like how objects are organized in their dashboards inside the product. They're all on a flat list, which works if you've got five or 10 dashboards. However, it's insufficient when you're a large enterprise with multiple groups looking at the same dashboards. It isn't organized well.""I would like to see more flexibility in adding the pins. Currently, we have four different sizes in which I can add pins, but I would like to be able to resize my pins."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Whenever we want to find the actual costing, we have to send an email to Databricks, so having the information available on the internet would be helpful."
  • "I do not exactly know the costs, but one of our clients pays between $100 USD and $200 USD monthly."
  • "Licensing on site I would counsel against, as on-site hardware issues tend to really delay and slow down delivery."
  • "We find Databricks to be very expensive, although this improved when we found out how to shut it down at night."
  • "The pricing depends on the usage itself."
  • "I am based in South Africa, where it is expensive adapting to the cloud, and then there is the price for the tool itself."
  • "The price is okay. It's competitive."
  • "Databricks uses a price-per-use model, where you can use as much compute as you need."
  • More Databricks Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "I give the pricing a six out of ten."
  • More ThoughtSpot Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer:It's easy to drill down or expand data to get more details right out of the box.
    Top Answer:I like the pricing structure. I get billed by how much data I put in, not how many people are looking at the data. It's better for me as I can control pricing a bit more easily.
    Top Answer:We'd like more flexibility with the calendar as our fiscal year does not align with the calendar year. We have to load or create our own custom calendar to actually need our fiscal year-end. With… more »
    Ranking
    1st
    Views
    30,172
    Comparisons
    19,226
    Reviews
    47
    Average Words per Review
    446
    Rating
    8.2
    Views
    2,005
    Comparisons
    1,524
    Reviews
    8
    Average Words per Review
    783
    Rating
    7.5
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
    Learn More
    Overview

    Databricks is an industry-leading data analytics platform which is a one-stop product for all data requirements. Databricks is made by the creators of Apache Spark, Delta Lake, ML Flow, and Koalas. It builds on these technologies to deliver a true lakehouse data architecture, making it a robust platform that is reliable, scalable, and fast. Databricks speeds up innovations by synthesizing storage, engineering, business operations, security, and data science.

    Databricks is integrated with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform. This enables users to easily manage a colossal amount of data and to continuously train and deploy machine learning models for AI applications. The platform handles all analytic deployments, ranging from ETL to models training and deployment.

    Databricks deciphers the complexities of processing data to empower data scientists, engineers, and analysts with a simple collaborative environment to run interactive and scheduled data analysis workloads. The program takes advantage of AI’s cost-effectivity, flexibility, and cloud storage.

    Databricks Key Features

    Some of Databricks key features include:

    • Cloud-native: Works well on any prominent cloud provider.
    • Data storage: Stores a broad range of data, including structured, unstructured, and streaming.
    • Self-governance: Built-in governance and security controls.
    • Flexibility: Flexible for small-scale jobs as well as running large-scale jobs like Big Data processing because it’s built from Spark and is specifically optimized for Cloud environments.
    • Data science tools: Production-ready data tooling, from engineering to BI, AI, and ML.
    • Familiar languages: While Databricks is Spark-based, it allows commonly used programming languages like R, SQL, Scala, and Python to be used.
    • Team sharing workspaces: Creates an environment that provides interactive workspaces for collaboration, which allow multiple members to collaborate for data model creation, machine learning, and data extraction.
    • Data source: Performs limitless Big Data analytics by connecting to Cloud providers AWS, Azure, and Google, as well as on-premises SQL servers, JSON and CSV.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Databricks stands out from its competitors for several reasons. Two striking features are its collaborative ability and its ability to streamline multiple programming languages.

    PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features. A Chief Research Officer in consumer goods writes, “We work with multiple people on notebooks and it enables us to work collaboratively in an easy way without having to worry about the infrastructure. I think the solution is very intuitive, very easy to use. And that's what you pay for.”

    A business intelligence coordinator in construction notes, “The capacity of use of the different types of coding is valuable. Databricks also has good performance because it is running in spark extra storage, meaning the performance and the capacity use different kinds of codes.”

    An Associate Manager who works in consultancy mentions, “The technology that allows us to write scripts within the solution is extremely beneficial. If I was, for example, able to script in SQL, R, Scala, Apache Spark, or Python, I would be able to use my knowledge to make a script in this solution. It is very user-friendly and you can also process the records and validation point of view. The ability to migrate from one environment to another is useful.”

    ThoughtSpot is a powerful business intelligence tool that allows easy searching and drilling into data. Its ad hoc exploration and query-based search features are highly valued, and it is easy to set up, stable, and scalable. 

    The solution is used for reporting purposes, self-service BI, and embedding into other applications for customers to do self-service analytics. It helps businesses with metrics, KPIs, and important insights by sourcing data from various sources into one golden source and visualizing it in an easy way for the business to consume. The pricing model is ideal, charging for data rather than the number of users.

    Sample Customers
    Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
    Primary Capital Mortgage, Sterling Backcheck, RichRelevance, Rambus, Batteries Plus Bulbs
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company25%
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Retailer9%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Healthcare Company6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm24%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Manufacturing Company11%
    Healthcare Company7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise59%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise71%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business13%
    Large Enterprise88%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business13%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise78%
    Buyer's Guide
    Data Science Platforms
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Databricks, Microsoft, Alteryx and others in Data Science Platforms. Updated: March 2024.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Databricks is ranked 1st in Data Science Platforms with 77 reviews while ThoughtSpot is ranked 15th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 8 reviews. Databricks is rated 8.2, while ThoughtSpot is rated 7.6. The top reviewer of Databricks writes "A nice interface with good features for turning off clusters to save on computing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of ThoughtSpot writes "You can drill down into any data right out of the box, with a straightforward deployment, and great support". Databricks is most compared with Amazon SageMaker, Informatica PowerCenter, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio, Dataiku Data Science Studio and Azure Stream Analytics, whereas ThoughtSpot is most compared with Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Looker, Amazon QuickSight and Dremio.

    We monitor all Data Science Platforms 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.