Databricks vs VAST Data comparison

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Databricks Logo
28,975 views|18,474 comparisons
96% willing to recommend
VAST Data Logo
1,391 views|976 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jan 25, 2024

We compared Databricks and VAST Data based on our users reviews in five parameters. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:

  • Ease of Deployment: Databricks' initial setup can be complex, involving tasks that require skilled programmers and the creation of VLANs and VPNs. Deployment time can range from minutes to a week. On the other hand, VAST Data's setup is described as simple and efficient, taking less than a day to set up a single rack.
  • Features: VAST Data excels in failover capability, resiliency, seamless file system access, encryption and snapshots. Databricks excels in scalability, cloud integration, collaboration, and data security.
  • Room for Improvement: The feedback for Databricks suggests that they can enhance their functionality by better integration with Git tools, providing better support for Python scripts and libraries, and offering free trials without requiring a pre-existing cloud account. Conversely, VAST Data could benefit from improvements in the read/write ratio.
  • Pricing and ROI: Users have varying opinions on the setup cost of Databricks. Some users find it costly and in need of improvement, while others find it reasonably priced compared to competitors. VAST Data's pricing and setup costs can vary widely based on specific needs and the scale of the company's storage infrastructure. VAST Data typically offers customized pricing based on factors like capacity, performance requirements, and additional features. The feedback suggests that Databricks has shown a favorable return on investment. 
  • Service and Support: Customers have generally expressed satisfaction with Databricks' customer service, despite occasional issues with communication and language barriers. Conversely, VAST Data's customer service has received high praise for its prompt and efficient support.

Comparison Results: Databricks is known for its complexity during initial setup, especially regarding database and third-party components. VAST Data stands out for its simple and efficient setup, which can be completed in less than a day. Regarding features, Databricks offers a comprehensive range of functionalities such as stream events, automated cluster creation, and universal data access. It is also commendable in managing large datasets and provides language flexibility. On the other hand, VAST Data excels in failover capability, resiliency, and encryption. Opinions on pricing for Databricks vary, with some considering it expensive while others find it reasonably priced. VAST Data falls in the middle category in terms of pricing, setup cost, and licensing. Customer service and support for both platforms have generally positive feedback. Databricks provides good technical support, and VAST Data is highly regarded for its prompt and efficient assistance with quick response times. To summarize, Databricks offers a wide range of functionalities and flexibility, while VAST Data is valued for its simplicity, efficiency, and failover capability.

To learn more, read our detailed Data Science Platforms Report (Updated: April 2024).
768,924 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
"The technical support is good.""Databricks covers end-to-end data analytics workflow in one platform, this is the best feature of the solution.""I like that Databricks is a unified platform that lets you do streaming and batch processing in the same place. You can do analytics, too. They have added something called Databricks SQL Analytics, allowing users to connect to the data lake to perform analytics. Databricks also will enable you to share your data securely. It integrates with your reporting system as well.""The most valuable aspect of the solution is its notebook. It's quite convenient to use, both terms of the research and the development and also the final deployment, I can just declare the spark jobs by the load tables. It's quite convenient.""Databricks makes it really easy to use a number of technologies to do data analysis. In terms of languages, we can use Scala, Python, and SQL. Databricks enables you to run very large queries, at a massive scale, within really good timeframes.""Automation with Databricks is very easy when using the API.""It's great technology.""The solution offers a free community version."

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"This has been one of the most reliable storage systems that I have ever used.""The solution is useful for machine learning and scientific applications, including computer simulations."

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Cons
"It should have more compatible and more advanced visualization and machine learning libraries.""There is room for improvement in visualization.""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.""There could be more support for automated machine learning in the database. I would like to see more ways to do analysis so that the reporting is more understandable.""There would also be benefits if more options were available for workers, or the clusters of the two points.""Databricks' performance when serving the data to an analytics tool isn't as good as Snowflake's.""Anyone who doesn't know SQL may find the product difficult to work with.""In the next release, I would like to see more optimization features."

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"The write performance could be improved because it is less than half of the read performance.""The read/write ratio is an area in the solution with some flaws and needs improvement."

More VAST Data Cons →

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 →

  • "We acquired VAST Data as a one-time, capital purchase."
  • "Price-wise, VAST Data is not the cheapest, not the most expensive one."
  • More VAST Data 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:The solution is useful for machine learning and scientific applications, including computer simulations.
    Top Answer:Price-wise, VAST Data is not the cheapest, not the most expensive one.
    Top Answer:The read/write ratio is an area in the solution with some flaws and needs improvement.
    Ranking
    1st
    Views
    28,975
    Comparisons
    18,474
    Reviews
    47
    Average Words per Review
    441
    Rating
    8.3
    Views
    1,391
    Comparisons
    976
    Reviews
    1
    Average Words per Review
    509
    Rating
    10.0
    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.”

    Innovation to break decades of data storage trade-offs.

    Sample Customers
    Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
    Norwest Venture Partners, General Dynamics Information Technology, Ginkgo Bioworks
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company25%
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Retailer9%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Healthcare Company6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company19%
    Manufacturing Company13%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    University6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise59%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise71%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise63%
    Buyer's Guide
    Data Science Platforms
    April 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Databricks, Microsoft, Alteryx and others in Data Science Platforms. Updated: April 2024.
    768,924 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Databricks is ranked 1st in Data Science Platforms with 78 reviews while VAST Data is ranked 8th in NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays with 2 reviews. Databricks is rated 8.2, while VAST Data is rated 10.0. 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 VAST Data writes "Stability-wise, a device that has been up and running for years". Databricks is most compared with Amazon SageMaker, Informatica PowerCenter, Dataiku Data Science Studio, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio and Dremio, whereas VAST Data is most compared with Pure Storage FlashBlade, NetApp AFF, Pure Storage FlashArray, Qumulo and NetApp FAS Series.

    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.