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Amazon SageMaker vs Google Cloud Datalab comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

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 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 (5th)
Google Cloud Datalab
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
16th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (18th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Data Science Platforms category, the mindshare of Amazon SageMaker is 7.3%, down from 9.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Cloud Datalab is 0.9%, down from 1.2% 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.
Nilesh Gode - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to setup, stable and easy to design data pipelines
The scalability is average. We have not faced any issues with scalability. There are more than 500 end users using this solution in our company. It is an integral part of the daily operations. The usage pattern is not a one-time thing; employees regularly access and utilize the application. We use it at a global level with a scattered user base. This means that users don't all use the application at the same time. So, around 300 out of 500 employees use the solution, and this usage is spread out throughout the day.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is easy to scale...The documentation and online community support have been sufficient for us so far."
"The technical support from AWS is excellent."
"The tool makes our ML model development a bit more efficient because everything is in one environment."
"The intuitive interface and streamlined user experience make it easy to navigate and set up various tools like Visual Studio Code or Jupyter Notebook."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon SageMaker is that you don't have to do any programming in order to perform some of your use cases."
"The solution's ability to improve work at my organization stems from the ensemble model and a combination of various models it provides."
"The technical support of the tool was good."
"I have seen a return on investment, probably a factor of four or five."
"All of the features of this product are quite good."
"Google Cloud Datalab is very customizable."
"For me, it has been a stable product."
"The APIs are valuable."
"The infrastructure is highly reliable and efficient, contributing to a positive experience."
"In MLOps, when we are designing the data pipeline, the designing of the data pipeline is easy in Google Cloud."
 

Cons

"I would suggest that Amazon SageMaker provide free slots to allow customers to practice, such as a free slot to try out working with a Sandbox."
"For any cloud provider, the cost has to be substantially reduced, especially in the case of Amazon SageMaker, which is extremely expensive for huge workloads."
"In my opinion, one improvement for Amazon SageMaker would be to offer serverless GPUs. Currently, we incur costs on an hourly basis. It would be beneficial if the tool could provide pay-as-you-go pricing based on endpoints."
"The platform could be more accessible to users with basic coding skills, making it more intuitive and easier for beginners to use comfortably."
"The main challenge with Amazon SageMaker is the integrations."
"The user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) of SageMaker and AWS, in general, need improvement as they are not intuitive and require substantial time to learn how to use specific services."
"The documentation must be made clearer and more user-friendly."
"I would say the IDE is quite immature, but it is still in its infancy, so I expect it to get better over time."
"The product must be made more user-friendly."
"Connectivity challenges for end-users, particularly when loading data, environments, and libraries, need to be addressed for an enhanced user experience."
"There is room for improvement in the graphical user interface. So that the initial user would use it properly, that would be a good option."
"Even if your application is always connected to its database, the processing can be cumbersome. It shouldn't be so complicated."
"The interface should be more user-friendly."
"We have also encountered challenges during our transition period in terms of data control and segmentation. The management of each channel and data structure as it has its own unique characteristics requires very detailed and precise control. The allocation should be appropriate and the complexity increases due to the different time zones and geographic locations of our clients. The process usually involves migrating the existing database sets to gcp and ensure data integrity is maintained. This is the only challenge that we faced while navigating the integers of the solution and honestly it was an interesting and unique experience."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In terms of pricing, I'd also rate it ten out of ten because it's been beneficial compared to other solutions."
"The support costs are 10% of the Amazon fees and it comes by default."
"Databricks solution is less costly than Amazon SageMaker."
"SageMaker is worth the money for our use case."
"The pricing is complicated as it is based on what kind of machines you are using, the type of storage, and the kind of computation."
"Amazon SageMaker is a very expensive product."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten."
"The solution is relatively cheaper."
"The pricing is quite reasonable, and I would give it a rating of four out of ten."
"It is affordable for us because we have a limited number of users."
"The product is cheap."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Educational Organization
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
12%
University
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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.
What do you like most about Google Cloud Datalab?
Google Cloud Datalab is very customizable.
What needs improvement with Google Cloud Datalab?
Access is always via URL, and unless your network is fast, it would be a little tough in India. In India, if we had a faster network, it would be easier. In a big data environment, like when forcin...
What is your primary use case for Google Cloud Datalab?
It's for our daily data processing, and there's a batch job that executes it. The process involves more than ten servers or systems. Some of them use a mobile network, some are ONTAP networks, and ...
 

Also Known As

AWS SageMaker, SageMaker
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

DigitalGlobe, Thomson Reuters Center for AI and Cognitive Computing, Hotels.com, GE Healthcare, Tinder, Intuit
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon SageMaker vs. Google Cloud Datalab and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.