Amazon EMR vs Cloudera Data Platform comparison

The compared Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cloudera solutions aren't in the same category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #3 in H , with an average rating of 7.8, and holds a 10.8% mindshare in the category. Cloudera is ranked #4 in DMPD , with an average rating of 6.5, and holds a 7.6% mindshare. Additionally, 83% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 85% of Cloudera users who would recommend it.

Amazon EMR

Read 25 Amazon EMR reviews

1,599 Views
560 Comparison Views

83% willing to recommend

Cloudera Data Platform

Read 37 Cloudera Data Platform reviews

1,399 Views
350 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

Amazon EMR

Cloudera Data Platform

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 18, 2026

Amazon EMR and Cloudera Data Platform both compete in the realm of big data processing solutions. Amazon EMR has an advantage in scalability and integration, while Cloudera Data Platform stands out in governance and open-source tool integration.

Features: Amazon EMR utilizes EC2 and S3 for effective large data set processing and offers seamless integration with various cloud services. It is known for its auto-scaling feature and ease of data processing. Cloudera Data Platform excels with robust open-source tools like Ambari and Ranger, ensuring data governance and security. Its HDFS and YARN capabilities support efficient data storage and management.

Room for Improvement: Amazon EMR faces challenges in cluster configuration and job start times, with users seeking improved monitoring and cost management. Enhancements in support for newer technologies are also desired. Cloudera Data Platform users highlight the need for improved UI, security, and integration with AI and ML capabilities, along with more customization options.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon EMR is typically deployed on public clouds, offering robust support but with variable response times. Cloudera Data Platform supports public, private, and hybrid clouds, with customer service responsive in critical situations but inconsistent overall.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon EMR has a pay-as-you-go model that can become expensive if not monitored closely but offers significant scalability benefits. Cloudera Data Platform leverages open-source advantages with costs influenced by scale and service needs, making it often cost-effective for enterprises. Both platforms deliver considerable ROI, with notable savings compared to traditional systems.

To learn more, read our detailed Hadoop Report (Updated: January 2026).

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January 2026

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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:

ROI

Sentiment score

4.8

Amazon EMR offers cost savings and ROI benefits, with some users experiencing up to 20% cost reduction and high returns.

Sentiment score

4.8

Organizations see varied ROI from Cloudera Data Platform, with benefits in efficiency and costs, but experiences and expectations differ.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

There are licensing costs that have been saved when we moved some of the data platforms, decommissioned them, and moved on to this platform.

reviewer2776239

Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

In terms of return on investment, I see great changes in operational effectiveness measured by RTO when comparing on-premises solutions with cloud solutions.

reviewer2763942

Cloud Data Administrator at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

A specific example of the positive impact of Cloudera Data Platform is the clearly saved time and improved performance, which is the main result of it.

Ciro Porzio

Data Platform Specialist at Lutech

For more quotes and insights, download the Cloudera Data Platform report

Customer Service

Sentiment score

7.9

Amazon EMR customer service varies, with generally responsive support despite reported delays and occasional gaps in integration assistance.

Sentiment score

6.0

Cloudera Data Platform's customer service is praised for responsiveness but experiences vary; community resources aid those without paid service.

They help with billing, cost determination, IAM properties, security compliance, and deployment and migration activities.

Mirza Mujtaba Baig

Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs

We get all call support, screen sharing support, and immediate support, so there are no problems.

reviewer1343079

Senior Chief Engineer (Enterprise System Presales/Postsales) at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

I would rate the technical support from Amazon as ten out of ten.

reviewer2043696

Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

I would rate the customer support of Cloudera Data Platform ten out of ten.

Sajid Mehmood

Principal Consultant Data Analytics at a outsourcing company with 5,001-10,000 employees

I have communicated with technical support, and they are responsive and helpful.

Shan Hasan

Data Architect at ubl

Cloudera support is timely and responsive, adhering to the SLAs they provide.

reviewer2763942

Cloud Data Administrator at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Cloudera Data Platform report

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score

7.4

Amazon EMR efficiently scales for businesses, offering customizable cluster options to manage diverse data sizes and enterprise demands.

Sentiment score

6.4

Cloudera Data Platform is praised for its scalability and seamless cloud integration, though some face challenges during upgrades or on-premises.

Scalability can be provisioned using the auto-scaling feature, EC2 instances, on-demand instances, and storage locations like block storage, S3, or file storage.

Mirza Mujtaba Baig

Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

CDP allows for easy, mostly automated scalability where I can schedule job workflows, fine-tune system resource metrics, and add nodes with just a click.

reviewer2763942

Cloud Data Administrator at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

They have the cloud burst feature available where if the on-premises capacity is not sufficient at a point in time, you can run that Spark job on the cloud itself.

reviewer2776239

Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

The ability to scale processing capacity on demand for batch jobs without impacting other workloads, and support for a growing number of concurrent users and teams accessing the platform simultaneously are significant advantages.

reviewer2784462

Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Cloudera Data Platform report

Stability Issues

Sentiment score

7.7

Amazon EMR is praised for stability and reliability, with high ratings due to its configurability and robust features.

Sentiment score

6.5

Cloudera Data Platform offers reliable performance with minor issues, requiring careful configuration, especially in complex environments to prevent downtime.

Regular updates, patch installations, monitoring, logging, alerting, and disaster recovery activities are crucial for maintaining stability.

Mirza Mujtaba Baig

Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

Sometimes the end user is not experienced or does not have all the expertise related to Cloudera specifically, making it very difficult to manage properly

T Sarwar

Data architect at SentientAI, Karachi

Sometimes a node goes down, but it automatically returns to a healthy state.

reviewer2763942

Cloud Data Administrator at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Cloudera Data Platform is pretty stable in my experience; there are not any downtime or reliability issues.

reviewer2776239

Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Cloudera Data Platform report

Room For Improvement

Amazon EMR users face challenges with customization, stability, onboarding, cost optimization, task speed, and demand enhanced integration and security.

Cloudera Data Platform needs usability, stability, and security improvements, enhanced AI/ML features, and better multi-tenancy and cloud integration.

The cost factor differs significantly. When you run Spark application on EKS, you run at the pod level, so you can control the compute cost. But in Amazon EMR, when you have to run one application, you have to launch the entire EC2.

reviewer1343079

Senior Chief Engineer (Enterprise System Presales/Postsales) at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

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.

Mirza Mujtaba Baig

Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs

I have thoughts on what would be great to see in the product, such as AI/ML features or additional options.

reviewer2043696

Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

We aim to address these issues with a Kubernetes-based platform that will simplify the task of upgrading services.

Miodrag-Stanic

Senior Architect at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Cloudera Data Platform should include additional capabilities and features similar to those offered by other data management solutions like Azure and Databricks.

Shan Hasan

Data Architect at ubl

Cloudera Data Platform can be improved by addressing the feasibility of using it in the cloud; there are some complexities around the components used in cloud by Cloudera Data Platform that are not really convenient.

Dhananjay Koyani

ML Engineer - Director at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Cloudera Data Platform report

Setup Cost

Amazon EMR pricing is variable, potentially costly, but users can manage expenses with strategic resource and instance management.

Enterprise buyers find Cloudera cost-effective versus Oracle, though pricing complexity varies based on deployment size and negotiations.

Costs are involved based on cluster resources, data volumes, EC2 instances, instance sizes, Kubernetes, Docker services, storage, and data transfers.

Mirza Mujtaba Baig

Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs

I would rate the price for Amazon EMR, where one is high and ten is low, as a good one.

reviewer2043696

Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

Initially, CDH had a straightforward pricing model based on nodes, but CDP includes factors like processors, cores, terabytes, and drives, making it difficult to calculate costs.

Miodrag-Stanic

Senior Architect at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

We find Cloudera Data Platform to be cost-effective.

reviewer2763942

Cloud Data Administrator at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

So far, I would say that it is competitive pricing that we have received.

reviewer2776239

Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Cloudera Data Platform report

Valuable Features

Amazon EMR offers scalable, cost-effective big data management with integration, flexibility, security, and seamless Hadoop and Spark processing.

Cloudera Data Platform offers scalability, user-friendly interface, integration, cost-effective storage, security, and simplifies administration for hybrid environments.

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.

Mirza Mujtaba Baig

Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs

Amazon EMR provides out-of-the-box functionality because we can deploy and get Spark functionality over Hadoop.

reviewer1343079

Senior Chief Engineer (Enterprise System Presales/Postsales) at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

The features at Amazon EMR that I have found most valuable are fully customizable functions.

reviewer2043696

Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

By using the Hadoop File System for distributed storage, we have 1.5 petabytes of physical storage with 500 terabytes of effective storage due to a replication factor of three.

Miodrag-Stanic

Senior Architect at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

The Ranger integration makes it more flexible and reliable for me by allowing control over data access, specifying who can access at what level, such as table level, masking, or data layer level.

reviewer2763942

Cloud Data Administrator at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

What stands out the most in Cloudera Manager are SDX, which provide centralized control for governance, security, and data lineage across multiple sources.

Ciro Porzio

Data Platform Specialist at Lutech

For more quotes and insights, download the Cloudera Data Platform report

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EMR

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Hadoop (3rd), Cloud Data Warehouse (13th)

Cloudera Data Platform

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

5.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Master Data Management (MDM) (8th), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (4th), AI Data Analysis (12th)

Mindshare comparison

Amazon EMR and Cloudera Data Platform aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Amazon EMR is designed for Hadoop and holds a mindshare of 10.8%, down 14.2% compared to last year.
Cloudera Data Platform, on the other hand, focuses on Data Management Platforms (DMP), holds 7.6% mindshare, up 0.6% since last year.

Hadoop Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Amazon EMR	10.8%
Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop	15.1%
HPE Data Fabric	14.9%
Other	59.2%

Hadoop

Data Management Platforms (DMP) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Cloudera Data Platform	7.6%
Palantir Foundry	15.6%
Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC)	10.8%
Other	66.0%

Data Management Platforms (DMP)

Featured Reviews

reviewer1343079

Senior Chief Engineer (Enterprise System Presales/Postsales) at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Has simplified ETL workflows with on-demand processing but needs improved cost efficiency and visibility

I have used AWS Glue with S3 for making tables and databases, but regarding Amazon EMR, I do not remember much as we are currently using it very minimally. This is my observation: In EKS, we have had to deploy by ourselves because EKS does not provide the Hadoop framework, Spark, Hive, and everything, but we have completed all the deployment ourselves. Whereas Amazon EMR provides all these things. The cost factor differs significantly. When you run Spark application on EKS, you run at the pod level, so you can control the compute cost. But in Amazon EMR, when you have to run one application, you have to launch the entire EC2. In Qubole, the interface was very good. I could see many details because in Amazon EMR console, very few details are available. In Qubole, at one link, you can get all the details of what is happening, how the processes are running, and the cost decreased by using Qubole. I found Qubole more user-friendly and cost-effective. From the security point of view, we had to open some access rights to Qubole, which might be a drawback in comparison to Amazon EMR which is native to AWS.

Read full review

T Sarwar

Data architect at SentientAI, Karachi

Has enabled efficient big data processing and querying but remains complex to manage and configure

Cloudera Data Platform should use fewer tools and remove the complexity between them. It should make it easier for the end user to change the configuration and understand it better. The UI tool for jobs in Cloudera Data Platform can be improved to provide a proper image of ETL jobs and detailed consolidated graphs to monitor Spark-based Hue jobs.

Read full review

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Educational Organization

13%

Computer Software Company

Healthcare Company

Performing Arts

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Transportation Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	12

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	26

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EMR?

I would rate the price for Amazon EMR, where one is high and ten is low, as a good one.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon EMR?

I feel some lack of functionality in Amazon EMR. I have thoughts on what would be great to see in the product, such as AI/ML features or additional options.

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Amazon EMR?

I find it easy to integrate Amazon EMR with other AWS services like S3 or EC2 for data processing needs. I would rate this review as eight out of ten.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Hortonworks Data Platform?

The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is very good.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Hortonworks Data Platform?

Cloudera Data Platform can be improved in several areas. I recently attended their roadmap session. Whatever limitations they have identified involve moving data from on-premises to cloud as a sing...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Hortonworks Data Platform?

My main use case for Cloudera Data Platform is dealing with large volumes of data and primarily handling unstructured data by combining structured and unstructured data on this platform. I use Clou...

See all answers

Comparisons

Snowflake vs Amazon EMR

Compared 24% of the time

Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop vs Amazon EMR

Compared 12% of the time

Amazon Redshift vs Amazon EMR

Compared 8% of the time

Apache Spark vs Amazon EMR

Compared 8% of the time

HPE Data Fabric vs Amazon EMR

Compared 6% of the time

More Amazon EMR Competitors

HPE Data Fabric vs Cloudera Data Platform

Compared 17% of the time

Databricks vs Cloudera Data Platform

Compared 17% of the time

Palantir Foundry vs Cloudera Data Platform

Compared 14% of the time

Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) vs Cloudera Data Platform

Compared 11% of the time

IBM Spectrum Computing vs Cloudera Data Platform

Compared 9% of the time

More Cloudera Data Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EMR

January 2026

Download Amazon EMR product report

Buyer's Guide

Cloudera Data Platform

January 2026

Download Cloudera Data Platform product report

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic MapReduce

No data available

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.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Cloudera Data Platform offers a powerful fusion of Hadoop technology and user-centric tools, enabling seamless scalability and open-source flexibility. It supports large-scale data operations with tools like Ranger and Cloudera Data Science Workbench, offering efficient cluster management and containerization capabilities.

Designed to support extensive data needs, Cloudera Data Platform encompasses a comprehensive Hadoop stack, which includes HDFS, Hive, and Spark. Its integration with Ambari provides user-friendliness in management and configuration. Despite its strengths in scalability and security, Cloudera Data Platform requires enhancements in multi-tenant implementation, governance, and UI, while attribute-level encryption and better HDFS namenode support are also needed. Stability, especially regarding the Hue UI, financial costs, and disaster recovery are notable challenges. Additionally, integration with cloud storage and deployment methods could be more intuitive to enhance user experience, along with more effective support and community engagement.

What are the key features?

Comprehensive Hadoop Stack: Integrates HDFS, Hive, Spark for large-scale data operations.
User-Friendly Interface: Managed through Ambari, simplifying configuration.
Seamless Scalability: Efficiently handles growing data demands with ease.
Open-Source Flexibility: Offers a customizable platform for specific needs.
Security Tools: Includes Ranger for advanced data protection measures.
Data Science Workbench: Provides a robust platform for data modeling.
Cluster Management: Efficient deployment and governance capabilities.
Containerization Support: Facilitates modern data processing environments.

What benefits and ROI should users expect?

Data Storage Flexibility: Handles diverse data types, enhancing storage solutions.
Advanced Security: Features tailored for data protection and compliance.
Scalability: Cost-efficient management of expanding data requirements.
Operational Efficiency: Streamlined processes through effective tools.
Data Science Integration: Supports building and deploying models efficiently.
Industry Versatility: Applicable across finance, healthcare, and more.

Cloudera Data Platform is implemented extensively across industries like hospitality for data science activities, including managing historical data. Its adaptability extends to operational analytics for sectors like oil & gas, finance, and healthcare, often enhanced by Hortonworks Data Platform for data ingestion and analytics tasks.

Cloudera

Sample Customers

Yelp

Information Not Available

Find out what your peers are saying about Apache, Cloudera, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in Hadoop. Updated: January 2026.

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