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

Databricks pros and cons

Vendor: Databricks

4.1 out of 5

95 reviews
96% willing to recommend

Leave a review Why PeerSpot?

Pros & Cons summary

Databricks enables users to build a lakehouse architecture with robust support for both streaming and batch processing. It integrates with popular tools and languages, enhancing versatility and efficiency in big data processing. While its scalability and support are praised, Databricks is costly and faces integration, stability, setup, and visualization challenges. It requires improvements in data visualization to better compete with dedicated analytics tools.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Databricks enables users to build a lakehouse architecture, seamlessly integrating data lake and warehouse functionalities.

Databricks offers robust support for both streaming and batch processing, crucial for handling a wide range of data science tasks.

Databricks provides integration with popular open-source tools and supports languages such as Python and SQL, enhancing versatility.

Databricks' scalability is praised, allowing efficient big data processing and machine learning model deployment.

Databricks delivers strong technical support and fosters smooth collaboration among data teams.

CONS

Databricks is expensive, with costs quickly adding up, especially for large scaling requirements.

There are limitations and difficulties in integrating Databricks with other platforms, including AWS and popular IDEs.

Databricks experiences stability issues, such as cluster failures and unreliable Spark runtime environments.

Setting up Databricks can be complex and code-heavy, impacting new users' adoption and integration efforts.

Databricks needs improvement in its data visualization and analytics capabilities, particularly compared to specialized tools like Power BI.

Databricks Pros review quotes

Governance And Engagement Lead

Jan 12, 2026

The most significant benefit Databricks has brought to my company is the Unity Catalog.

Read full review

Consultant at Nice Software Solutions

Feb 3, 2026

Databricks is a truly essential platform for data engineering needs, and I recommend it to anyone looking to advance in the data engineering field.

Read full review

Analista de Dados at Conta Azul

Oct 24, 2026

Pipeline automation in my day-to-day makes things easier by scheduling and running data tasks, like collecting information, transforming datasets, and updating tables, which greatly reduces manual work.

Read full review

Free Report: Databricks Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Databricks. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: October 2026.

920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Data Engineer at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jan 3, 2025

Databricks offers various courses that I can use, whether it's PySpark, Scala, or R.

Read full review

BP

Prabhakar Bonam

Data Platform Architect at KELLANOVA

Apr 28, 2025

Databricks has a Unified Catalog that assists with secured access and governance.

Read full review

Senior Data Engineer at a logistics company with 51-200 employees

Jan 8, 2025

Having one solution for everything, from data engineering to machine learning, is beneficial since everything comes under one hood.

Read full review

Rama Subba Reddy Thavva

Solution Architect at Mercedes-Benz AG

Jan 8, 2025

The notebooks and the ability to share them with collaborators are valuable, as multiple developers can use a single cluster.

Read full review

Head CEO at bizmetric

Jan 10, 2025

Databricks serves as a single platform for conducting the entire end-to-end lifecycle of machine learning models or AI ops.

Read full review

reviewer2846955

Analista

May 28, 2026

The features of Databricks have impacted my organization positively, as it has done so very efficiently since we switched from several platforms to using this one.

Read full review

LK

Data Engineer at CRAFT Tech

May 15, 2025

I think Databricks is very good at facilitating AI and machine learning projects; they implement AI and machine learning models very well, and clients can run their models on Databricks.

Read full review

Show 10 more reviews (out of 94)

Databricks Cons review quotes

Governance And Engagement Lead

Jan 12, 2026

So far, we're not measuring any return on investment, such as saving time, money, or resources with Databricks.

Read full review

Consultant at Nice Software Solutions

Feb 3, 2026

However, the platform could become easier to use.

Read full review

Analista de Dados at Conta Azul

Oct 24, 2026

Databricks could be improved with a more intuitive interface, clearer error messages, and practical guidance that also helps a lot when configuring pipelines.

Read full review

Free Report: Databricks Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Databricks. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: October 2026.

920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Data Engineer at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jan 3, 2025

As a data engineer, I see cluster failure in our Databricks user databases as a major issue.

Read full review

BP

Prabhakar Bonam

Data Platform Architect at KELLANOVA

Apr 28, 2025

The initial setup of Databricks could be complex.

Read full review

Senior Data Engineer at a logistics company with 51-200 employees

Jan 8, 2025

We often use a single cluster to ingest Databricks, which Databricks doesn't recommend. They suggest using a no-cluster solution like job clusters. This can be overwhelming for us because we started smaller.

Read full review

Rama Subba Reddy Thavva

Solution Architect at Mercedes-Benz AG

Jan 8, 2025

The API deployment and model deployment are not easy on the Databricks side.

Read full review

Head CEO at bizmetric

Jan 10, 2025

One area of improvement is the Databricks File System (DBFS), where command-line challenges arise when accessing files. Standardization of file paths on the system could help, as engineers sometimes struggle.

Read full review

reviewer2846955

Analista

May 28, 2026

I think the aspects of Databricks that should be improved are that it could be faster and that I would like to be able to run direct queries from the server.

Read full review

LK

Data Engineer at CRAFT Tech

May 15, 2025

In my opinion, areas of Databricks that have room for improvement involve the dashboards. Until recently, everyone used third-party systems such as Power BI to connect to Databricks for dashboards and reports, but they're now coming up with their IBI dashboard, and I think they're on the right track to improve that even further.

Read full review

Show 10 more reviews (out of 94)

Related questions

210

Which do you prefer - Databricks or Azure Machine Learning Studio?

230

How would you compare Databricks vs Amazon SageMaker?

227

Which would you choose - Databricks or Azure Stream Analytics?

174

Which product would you choose for a data science team: Databricks vs Dataiku?

272

Which ETL or Data Integration tool goes the best with Amazon Redshift?

397

What are the main differences between Data Lake and Data Warehouse?

247

What are the benefits of having separate layers or a dedicated schema for each layer in ETL?

300

What are the key reasons for choosing Snowflake as a data lake over other data lake solutions?

227

Are there any general guidelines to allocate table space quota to different layers in ETL?

217

What cloud data warehouse solution do you recommend?