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Amazon EMR vs Cloudera Data Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 12, 2025

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
5.4
Amazon EMR delivers significant cost savings and efficiency, with some users achieving up to 20% savings and positive ROI.
Sentiment score
4.9
Some POC projects lack returns, but notable gains include a 300% ROI and improved cost efficiency with Cloudera.
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.
In terms of return on investment, I see great changes in operational effectiveness measured by RTO when comparing on-premises solutions with cloud solutions.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.7
Amazon EMR support is generally proactive and responsive, though user experiences vary, especially during open-source integrations.
Sentiment score
6.2
Cloudera Data Platform's customer service is generally positive, but technical support varies; community resources are beneficial.
We get all call support, screen sharing support, and immediate support, so there are no problems.
They help with billing, cost determination, IAM properties, security compliance, and deployment and migration activities.
Having a common chat channel between firms and service providers would make communication faster and more efficient.
Cloudera support is timely and responsive, adhering to the SLAs they provide.
I have communicated with technical support, and they are responsive and helpful.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
Amazon EMR is scalable and versatile, though some face resource speed issues and performance differences between environments.
Sentiment score
6.3
Cloudera Data Platform excels in scalability, automating processes, while Hortonworks requires extra servers for expansion and lacks efficiency.
Scalability can be provisioned using the auto-scaling feature, EC2 instances, on-demand instances, and storage locations like block storage, S3, or file storage.
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.
Integration with other tools works well for us and we successfully scaled the solution after two to three years without any issues.
For scalability, I rate Cloudera Data Platform at an eight out of ten as it is an on-premise solution.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Amazon EMR is stable and reliable, with high availability, but could improve slightly to address occasional concerns.
Sentiment score
6.5
Cloudera Data Platform is stable for production, though certain tools like HBase present occasional configuration and network challenges.
Regular updates, patch installations, monitoring, logging, alerting, and disaster recovery activities are crucial for maintaining stability.
Sometimes a node goes down, but it automatically returns to a healthy state.
Cloudera Data Platform is stable functionality-wise, but it needs some bug fixes for security.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon EMR requires improved user-friendliness, stability, monitoring, integration, and pricing adjustments to enhance performance, scalability, and compatibility.
Cloudera Data Platform needs improvements in governance, security, cloud integration, and support for AI, machine learning, and containers.
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.
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.
We aim to address these issues with a Kubernetes-based platform that will simplify the task of upgrading services.
Cloudera Data Platform should include additional capabilities and features similar to those offered by other data management solutions like Azure and Databricks.
Databricks, which are more flexible and in tune with current trends in AI and machine learning.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EMR pricing is usage-based, perceived higher, but optimizable through instance management and auto-scaling for Big Data tasks.
Cloudera Data Platform offers a complex pricing model per-node but is often cheaper than Oracle for large-scale analytics.
Costs are involved based on cluster resources, data volumes, EC2 instances, instance sizes, Kubernetes, Docker services, storage, and data transfers.
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.
We find Cloudera Data Platform to be cost-effective.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EMR offers scalable, cost-effective data processing with easy integration, advanced features, and robust management on a cloud-based infrastructure.
Cloudera Data Platform excels in scalability, security, cost-effective management, and efficient handling of massive data volumes with ease.
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.
Amazon EMR provides out-of-the-box functionality because we can deploy and get Spark functionality over Hadoop.
What stands out the most in Cloudera Manager are SDX, which provide centralized control for governance, security, and data lineage across multiple sources.
Cloudera Data Platform has positively impacted our organization by reducing overall manual intervention, requiring fewer efforts and resources to build a big data cluster compared to traditional methods.
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.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EMR
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (3rd), Cloud Data Warehouse (13th)
Cloudera Data Platform
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Master Data Management (MDM) (10th), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (4th)
 

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 12.8%, down 14.3% compared to last year.
Cloudera Data Platform, on the other hand, focuses on Data Management Platforms (DMP), holds 6.2% mindshare.
Hadoop Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon EMR12.8%
Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop21.9%
Apache Spark19.0%
Other46.3%
Hadoop
Data Management Platforms (DMP) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cloudera Data Platform6.2%
Palantir Foundry25.2%
Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC)14.1%
Other54.5%
Data Management Platforms (DMP)
 

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.
Miodrag-Stanic - PeerSpot reviewer
Distributed computing improves data processing while upgrade complexity needs addressing
There are challenges with upgrading or updating various services like Spark, Impala, and Hive on on-premise and bare metal solutions. We aim to address these issues with a Kubernetes-based platform that will simplify the task of upgrading services. We also wish to implement lakehouse capabilities with Iceberg or Delta Lake frameworks.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
12%
Educational Organization
12%
Healthcare Company
7%
Performing Arts
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Transportation Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise21
 

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?
Compared to others, Amazon seems efficient and is considered good for Big Data workloads. Costs are involved based on cluster resources, data volumes, EC2 ( /products/amazon-ec2-reviews ) instances...
What needs improvement with Amazon EMR?
There is room for improvement with respect to retries, handling the volume of data on S3 ( /products/amazon-s3-reviews ) buckets, cluster provisioning, scaling, termination, security, and integrati...
What do you like most about Hortonworks Data Platform?
Distributed computing, secure containerization, and governance capabilities are the most valuable features.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Hortonworks Data Platform?
The pricing model for Cloudera Data Platform is complex and has increased significantly compared to CDH. Initially, CDH had a straightforward pricing model based on nodes, but CDP includes factors ...
What needs improvement with Hortonworks Data Platform?
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...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic MapReduce
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Yelp
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudera, Apache, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in Hadoop. Updated: September 2025.
871,688 professionals have used our research since 2012.