Amazon EMR vs Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cloudera are both solutions in the Hadoop category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.0, while Cloudera is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.3. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 14.2% mindshare in H, compared to Cloudera’s 27.8% mindshare. Additionally, 85% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Cloudera users who would recommend it.

Amazon EMR

Read 22 Amazon EMR reviews

1,295 Views
1,112 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

Cloudera Distribution for H...

Read 49 Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop reviews

1,945 Views
1,556 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Amazon EMR

Cloudera Distribution for H...

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon EMR and Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Hadoop solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon EMR vs. Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EMR vs. Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop

January 2025

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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

Amazon EMR

Ranking in Hadoop

3rd

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Data Warehouse (11th)

Cloudera Distribution for H...

Ranking in Hadoop

2nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

NoSQL Databases (8th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Hadoop category, the mindshare of Amazon EMR is 14.2%, down from 18.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop is 27.8%, up from 23.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Hadoop

Featured Reviews

Prashant Singh

Vice President -Product Management at Paytm

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.

Read full review

Miodrag-Stanic

Senior Architect at Yettel

You can manage all services from one place in an integrated manner

We switched to Airflow because Cloudera is outdated. It's not widely used. It would be good if we had the Spark 3.5. Spark is quite old. Cloudera is now offering an alternate solution as a replacement for AWS. AWS works badly with small files. The solution is not fit for on-premise distributions. It should be containerized so we can deploy it as containers within Kubernetes. We had one upgrade from CDH to CDP, which lasted for a long time. And I would expect with containerized deployment, it would be upgraded much more quickly than we had the experience.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Amazon EMR has multiple connectors that can connect to various data sources."

"In Amazon EMR it is easy to rebuild anything, easy to upgrade and has good fault tolerance."

"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."

"When we grade big jobs from on-prem to the cloud, we do it in EMR with Spark."

"The security of the managed workflow and the managed services are the best features for us. Since we inherited their security model and it's all managed services, those are the key benefits for our clients."

"The solution helps us manage huge volumes of data."

"This is the best tool for hosts and it's really flexible and scalable."

"It has a variety of options and support systems."

More Amazon EMR pros

"Customer service and support were able to fix whatever the issue was."

"It is helpful to gather and process data."

"Provides a viable open-source solution for enterprise implementations and reliable, intelligent data analysis."

"The solution is stable."

"With a cluster available, you can manage the security layer using the shared SDX - it provides flexibility."

"The most valuable feature is Impala, the querying engine, which is very fast."

"The search function is the most valuable aspect of the solution."

"Very good end-to-end security features."

More Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop pros

Cons

"The product's features for storing data in static clusters could be better."

"The problem for us is it starts very slow."

"As people are shifting from legacy solutions to other technologies, Amazon EMR needs to add more features that give more flexibility in managing user data."

"There is no need to pay extra for third-party software."

"The legacy versions of the solution are not supported in the new versions."

"We don't have much control. If we have multiple users, if they want to scale up, the cost will go and increase and we don't know how we can restrict that price part."

"Amazon EMR can improve by adding some features, such as megastore services and HiveServer2. Additionally, the user interface could be better, similar to what Apache service provides, cross-platform services."

"Modules and strategies should be better handled and notified early in advance."

More Amazon EMR cons

"The dashboard could be improved."

"There are better solutions out there that have more features than this one."

"The price of this solution could be lowered."

"It would be useful if Cloudera had more tools like SQL Engines that offer the traditional relational database. We have to do a lot of work preparing the data outside Cloudera before getting it into the platform."

"The solution is not fit for on-premise distributions."

"The solution does not support multiple languages very well and this means users need to create work-arounds to implement some solutions."

"The competitors provide better functionalities."

"There is a maximum of a one-gigabyte block size, which is an area of storage that can be improved upon."

More Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is no need to pay extra for third-party software."

"Amazon EMR is not very expensive."

"The cost of Amazon EMR is very high."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"There is a small fee for the EMR system, but major cost components are the underlying infrastructure resources which we actually use."

"Amazon EMR's price is reasonable."

"The product is not cheap, but it is not expensive."

"You don't need to pay for licensing on a yearly or monthly basis, you only pay for what you use, in terms of underlying instances."

More Amazon EMR pricing and cost advice

"The solution is expensive."

"The solution is fairly expensive."

"The price could be better for the product."

"Cloudera requires a license to use."

"The product’s price depends from project to project."

"Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop is expensive, with support costs involved."

"When comparing with Oracle Sybase and SQL, it's cheaper. It's not expensive."

"I believe we pay for a three-year license."

More Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

24%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

14%

Educational Organization

11%

Manufacturing Company

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What do you like most about Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop?

The tool can be deployed using different container technologies, which makes it very scalable.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop?

The tool is expensive. Overall, it's not a cheap software tool, and that is why only large enterprises who are mature enough and have an architecture that is complex enough opt for Cloudera, as its...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop?

The tool doesn't support reporting, and relational databases are still the major source of reporting data. Apache Iceberg will be launched soon within the Cloudera cluster for analytical purposes. ...

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EMR

January 2025

Download Amazon EMR product report

Buyer's Guide

Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop

January 2025

Download Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop product report

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic MapReduce

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Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Cloudera

Overview

Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) is a web service that makes it easy to quickly and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. Amazon EMR simplifies big data processing, providing a managed Hadoop framework that makes it easy, fast, and cost-effective for you to distribute and process vast amounts of your data across dynamically scalable Amazon EC2 instances.

Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop is the world's most complete, tested, and popular distribution of Apache Hadoop and related projects. CDH is 100% Apache-licensed open source and is the only Hadoop solution to offer unified batch processing, interactive SQL, and interactive search, and role-based access controls. More enterprises have downloaded CDH than all other such distributions combined.

Sample Customers

Yelp

37signals, Adconion,adgooroo, Aggregate Knowledge, AMD, Apollo Group, Blackberry, Box, BT, CSC

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EMR vs. Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop

January 2025

Free Report: Amazon EMR vs. Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EMR vs. Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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