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Amazon SageMaker vs Databricks comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 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
7.3
Amazon SageMaker offers significant ROI with cost reductions, time savings, and notable financial benefits, especially in fraud detection and targeted ads.
Sentiment score
6.5
Users reported financial savings and enhanced performance by shifting workloads to Databricks, spending less than on Hadoop.
The return on investment varies by use case and offers significant value in revenue increases and cost saving capabilities, especially in real time fraud detection and targeted advertisements.
For a lot of different tasks, including machine learning, it is a nice solution.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.2
Amazon SageMaker customer service has mixed reviews, with satisfaction varying based on user experience, support promptness, and service tier.
Sentiment score
7.1
Databricks customer service is praised for proactive support and quick responses, with comprehensive documentation reducing direct assistance needs.
The technical support from AWS is excellent.
The support is very good with well-trained engineers.
Whenever we reach out, they respond promptly.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Amazon SageMaker is highly scalable, handling diverse data needs effectively but may require deployment expertise for optimal efficiency.
Sentiment score
7.4
Databricks is scalable and flexible, enabling efficient data processing and resource adjustment across diverse cloud platforms, despite cost concerns.
The availability of GPU instances can be a challenge, requiring proper planning.
Amazon SageMaker is scalable and works well from an infrastructure perspective.
The patches have sometimes caused issues leading to our jobs being paused for about six hours.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Amazon SageMaker is stable and reliable, with minor issues mainly due to user configuration errors, not infrastructure problems.
Sentiment score
7.7
Databricks is highly stable and reliable, though occasional update issues are quickly resolved, rating 8-9 in stability.
I rate the stability of Amazon SageMaker between seven and eight.
They release patches that sometimes break our code.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon SageMaker needs UI simplification, better documentation, cost efficiency improvements, enhanced security, scalability, training resources, and performance optimization.
Databricks users seek better visualization, integration, user interface, documentation, and scalability, while desiring improvements in pricing and features.
Having all documentation easily accessible on the front page of SageMaker would be a great improvement.
Integration of the latest machine learning models like the new Amazon LLM models could enhance its capabilities.
This would empower citizen data scientists to utilize the tool more effectively since many data scientists do not have a core development background.
We prefer using a small to mid-sized cluster for many jobs to keep costs low, but this sometimes doesn't support our operations properly.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon SageMaker is costly, especially for notebook instances, with better visibility needed to optimize pay-as-you-go costs.
Databricks offers flexible, pay-per-use pricing that varies by usage and platform, considered competitive yet sometimes expensive.
For a single user, prices might be high yet could be cheaper for user-managed services compared to AWS-managed services.
The pricing can be up to eight or nine out of ten, making it more expensive than some cloud alternatives yet more economical than on-premises setups.
The cost for small to medium instances is not very high.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon SageMaker provides flexible AI/ML solutions with easy AWS integration, strong deployment features, and comprehensive tools for scalability.
Databricks excels in data analytics with a user-friendly interface, SQL-Python integration, collaboration, scalability, and diverse language support.
These features facilitate rapid development and deployment of AI applications.
SageMaker supports building, training, and deploying AI models from scratch, which is crucial for my ML project.
This allows monitoring and performance grading, as I instantly know when someone has a bad call.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon SageMaker
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
3rd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
AI Development Platforms (4th)
Databricks
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
85
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Data Science Platforms category, the mindshare of Amazon SageMaker is 7.7%, down from 10.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Databricks is 19.1%, up from 18.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Science Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

Hemant Paralkar - PeerSpot reviewer
Improves team collaboration with advanced feature sharing but needs a better user experience
Improvement is needed in the no-code and low-code capabilities of Amazon SageMaker. This would empower citizen data scientists to utilize the tool more effectively since many data scientists do not have a core development background. Additionally, dealing with frequent UI updates can be challenging, especially for infrastructure architects like myself. It involves effort to migrate to new UIs, making the updates not seamless. User auditing requires enhancements as tracking operations performed by users can be difficult due to dynamic IP validation and role propagation.
Parag Bhosale - PeerSpot reviewer
Integrating engineering and learning, but cost challenges arise with cluster management
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. We prefer using a small to mid-sized cluster for many jobs to keep costs low, but this sometimes doesn't support our operations properly. We need to stay in sync with the DVR versions, and migrations can pose challenges. For example, issues arose when we moved a cluster from a previous version to the latest one. We could use their job clusters, however, that increases costs, which is challenging for us as a startup. Maintaining this infrastructure can be a headache.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Educational Organization
14%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How would you compare Databricks vs Amazon SageMaker?
We researched AWS SageMaker, but in the end, we chose Databricks. Databricks is a Unified Analytics Platform designed to accelerate innovation projects. It is based on Spark so it is very fast. It...
What do you like most about Amazon SageMaker?
We've had experience with unique ML projects using SageMaker. For example, we're developing a platform similar to ChatGPT that requires models. We utilize Amazon SageMaker to create endpoints for t...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon SageMaker?
Before deploying SageMaker, I reviewed the pricing, especially for notebook instances. The cost for small to medium instances is not very high.
Which do you prefer - Databricks or Azure Machine Learning Studio?
Databricks gives you the option of working with several different languages, such as SQL, R, Scala, Apache Spark, or Python. It offers many different cluster choices and excellent integration with ...
Which would you choose - Databricks or Azure Stream Analytics?
Databricks is an easy-to-set-up and versatile tool for data management, analysis, and business analytics. For analytics teams that have to interpret data to further the business goals of their orga...
What do you like most about Databricks?
Databricks is hosted on the cloud. It is very easy to collaborate with other team members who are working on it. It is production-ready code, and scheduling the jobs is easy.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

AWS SageMaker, SageMaker
Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

DigitalGlobe, Thomson Reuters Center for AI and Cognitive Computing, Hotels.com, GE Healthcare, Tinder, Intuit
Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon SageMaker vs. Databricks and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
831,020 professionals have used our research since 2012.