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Amazon EMR vs Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.3
Companies using Amazon EMR often experience significant ROI, with savings up to 20% and substantial returns over on-premise systems.
Sentiment score
6.1
Assessing ROI from Cloudera for Hadoop varies, with significant value seen in 30 use cases across departments.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.6
Amazon EMR support is generally proactive and efficient, but experiences vary, especially during open-source product integration.
Sentiment score
6.7
Cloudera's customer support is praised for responsiveness and efficiency, despite occasional challenges with less experienced consultants.
They help with billing, cost determination, IAM properties, security compliance, and deployment and migration activities.
The technical support is quite good and better than IBM.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Amazon EMR effectively scales to enterprise needs, with auto-scaling and adaptability, despite occasional peak demand resource allocation delays.
Sentiment score
7.6
Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop is scalable, supporting large deployments and user bases despite challenges in cloud scalability and cost.
Scalability can be provisioned using the auto-scaling feature, EC2 instances, on-demand instances, and storage locations like block storage, S3, or file storage.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon EMR is generally stable and reliable, despite occasional data-related stability issues, with robust failover and monitoring features.
Sentiment score
7.5
Cloudera Distribution's stability is debated; some experience issues, while others find it reliable, rating it 8-10 out of 10.
Regular updates, patch installations, monitoring, logging, alerting, and disaster recovery activities are crucial for maintaining stability.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon EMR struggles with a steep learning curve, complex configurations, unpredictable costs, and needs enhancements in stability and support.
Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop struggles with performance, integration, security, and cost, needing enhancements in multiple facets and technologies.
There is room for improvement with respect to retries, handling the volume of data on S3 buckets, cluster provisioning, scaling, termination, security, and integration between services like S3, Glue, Lake Formation, and DynamoDB.
Integrating with Active Directory, managing security, and configuration are the main concerns.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EMR's costs vary by resources used, with potential high monthly expenses, requiring careful management to prevent surprises.
Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop is costly, complex, suitable for large enterprises, and offers a 60-day free trial.
Cost optimization can be achieved through instance usage, cluster sharing, and auto-scaling.
It can be deployed on-premises, unlike competitors' cloud-only solutions.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EMR is scalable, easy to use, cost-effective, integrates well with Hadoop, and supports diverse analytics applications.
Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop excels with robust features, security, scalability, AI support, and strong community, surpassing competitors.
Amazon EMR helps in scalability, real-time and batch processing of data, handling efficient data sources, and managing data lakes, data stores, and data marts on file systems and in S3 buckets.
This is the only solution that is possible to install on-premise.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EMR
Ranking in Hadoop
3rd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (12th)
Cloudera Distribution for H...
Ranking in Hadoop
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
NoSQL Databases (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Hadoop category, the mindshare of Amazon EMR is 13.3%, down from 17.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop is 25.0%, up from 23.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Hadoop
 

Featured Reviews

Prashant  Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamless data integration enhances reporting efficiency and an easy setup
Amazon EMR has multiple connectors that can connect to various data sources. The service charges are based on processing only, depending on the resources used, which can help save money. It is easy to integrate with other services for storage, allowing data to be shifted to cheaper storage based on usage.
Rok Dolinsek - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables on-premise implementation with powerful data processing capabilities
This is the only solution that is possible to install on-premise. Cloudera provides a hybrid solution that combines compute on cloud or on-premises. It includes all machine learning algorithms in the Spark machine learning library. All functionalities needed for a big data platform and ETL are on the platform, eliminating the need for other tools. It is scalable, ready for vertical scaling, and very powerful, offering numerous functionalities and configurations for generative AI.
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Hadoop solutions are best for your needs.
847,772 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
8%
Financial Services Firm
25%
Computer Software Company
15%
Educational Organization
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon EMR?
Amazon EMR is a good solution that can be used to manage big data.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EMR?
The cost of Amazon EMR is a little bit expensive, especially considering the support package, which includes a gold package.
What needs improvement with Amazon EMR?
Spark jobs take longer on Amazon EMR compared to previous experiences. This aspect could be improved to make them more efficient.
What do you like most about Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop?
The tool can be deployed using different container technologies, which makes it very scalable.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop?
The price for Cloudera is average, yet it is very good compared to other solutions. It can be deployed on-premises, unlike competitors' cloud-only solutions.
What needs improvement with Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop?
It is quite complicated to configure and install. Integrating the platform into an information system is always a challenge, especially when starting with on-premise implementation. Integrating wit...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic MapReduce
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Yelp
37signals, Adconion,adgooroo, Aggregate Knowledge, AMD, Apollo Group, Blackberry, Box, BT, CSC
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EMR vs. Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
847,772 professionals have used our research since 2012.