Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Apache Spark vs Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Apache Spark
Ranking in Hadoop
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
64
Ranking in other categories
Compute Service (4th), Java Frameworks (2nd)
Cloudera Distribution for H...
Ranking in Hadoop
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
NoSQL Databases (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Hadoop category, the mindshare of Apache Spark is 18.4%, down from 21.5% 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

Ilya Afanasyev - PeerSpot reviewer
Reliable, able to expand, and handle large amounts of data well
We use batch processing. It works well with our formats and file versions. There's a lot of functionality. In our pipeline each hour, we make a copy of data from MongoDB, of the changes from MongoDB to some specific file. Each time pipeline copied all of the data, it would do it each time without changes to all of the tables. Tables have a lot of data, and in the last MongoDB version, there is a possibility to read only changed data. This reduced the cost and configuration of the cluster, and we saved about $150,000. The solution is scalable. It's a stable product.
Miodrag-Stanic - PeerSpot reviewer
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We switched to Airflow because Cloudera is outdated.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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Apache Spark provides a very high-quality implementation of distributed data processing."
"The processing time is very much improved over the data warehouse solution that we were using."
"The most valuable feature of Apache Spark is its ease of use."
"The product’s most valuable features are lazy evaluation and workload distribution."
"It is useful for handling large amounts of data. It is very useful for scientific purposes."
"It provides a scalable machine learning library."
"The most valuable feature of Apache Spark is its memory processing because it processes data over RAM rather than disk, which is much more efficient and fast."
"The most valuable feature of Apache Spark is its flexibility."
"We're now able to store large volumes of data through Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop. We're able to push large volumes of data to the platform, and that used to be a challenge, especially when storing a terabyte of information. This is the area where Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop improved the organization."
"Cloudera is a very manageable solution with good support."
"We also really like the Cloudera community. You can have any question and will have your answer within a few hours."
"The tool's most interesting features are the distributed file system and unstructured data processing capability. Because we have a lot of unstructured data, like XML and social media logs, these features make it more valuable than the usual data warehousing solutions."
"The product is completely secure."
"With a cluster available, you can manage the security layer using the shared SDX - it provides flexibility."
"The product provides better data processing features than other tools."
"Customer service and support were able to fix whatever the issue was."
 

Cons

"If you have a Spark session in the background, sometimes it's very hard to kill these sessions because of D allocation."
"The solution needs to optimize shuffling between workers."
"We are building our own queries on Spark, and it can be improved in terms of query handling."
"I would like to see integration with data science platforms to optimize the processing capability for these tasks."
"At the initial stage, the product provides no container logs to check the activity."
"The graphical user interface (UI) could be a bit more clear. It's very hard to figure out the execution logs and understand how long it takes to send everything. If an execution is lost, it's not so easy to understand why or where it went. I have to manually drill down on the data processes which takes a lot of time. Maybe there could be like a metrics monitor, or maybe the whole log analysis could be improved to make it easier to understand and navigate."
"One limitation is that not all machine learning libraries and models support it."
"Apache Spark lacks geospatial data."
"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. The Cloudera Machine Learning aspect could be tuned and enhanced to enable us to host some predictive analytics machine learning and AI use cases."
"The security of this solution could be improved. There should also be a way to basically have a blockchain enabled storage with the HDFS."
"It could be faster and more user-friendly."
"The price of this solution could be lowered."
"We experienced many issues when we started working with Hadoop 3.0 in the Cloudera 6.0 version, so there is a lot of things that need to improve."
"There are multiple bugs when we update."
"The user infrastructure and user interface needs to be improved, as well as the performance. The GUI needs to be better."
"The one thing that we struggled with predominately was support. Because it was relatively new, support was always a big issue and I think it's still a bit of an ongoing concern with the team currently managing it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the free version of the solution."
"It is quite expensive. In fact, it accounts for almost 50% of the cost of our entire project."
"They provide an open-source license for the on-premise version."
"Apache Spark is open-source. You have to pay only when you use any bundled product, such as Cloudera."
"Considering the product version used in my company, I feel that the tool is not costly since the product is available for free."
"I did not pay anything when using the tool on cloud services, but I had to pay on the compute side. The tool is not expensive compared with the benefits it offers. I rate the price as an eight out of ten."
"Apache Spark is an open-source solution, and there is no cost involved in deploying the solution on-premises."
"Apache Spark is an open-source tool."
"When comparing with Oracle Sybase and SQL, it's cheaper. It's not expensive."
"The solution is expensive."
"It is an expensive product."
"The product’s price depends from project to project."
"The tool is not expensive."
"Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop is expensive, with support costs involved."
"I believe we pay for a three-year license."
"Cloudera requires a license to use."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Hadoop solutions are best for your needs.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
University
5%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
14%
Educational Organization
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Apache Spark?
We use Spark to process data from different data sources.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Spark?
Compared to other solutions like Doc DB, Spark is more costly due to the need for extensive infrastructure. It requires significant investment in infrastructure, which can be expensive. While cloud...
What needs improvement with Apache Spark?
The main concern is the overhead of Java when distributed processing is not necessary. In such cases, operations can often be done on one node, making Spark's distributed mode unnecessary. Conseque...
What do you like most about Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop?
The tool can be deployed using different container technologies, which makes it very scalable.
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...
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. ...
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NASA JPL, UC Berkeley AMPLab, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, UC Santa Cruz, TripAdvisor, Taboola, Agile Lab, Art.com, Baidu, Alibaba Taobao, EURECOM, Hitachi Solutions
37signals, Adconion,adgooroo, Aggregate Knowledge, AMD, Apollo Group, Blackberry, Box, BT, CSC
Find out what your peers are saying about Apache Spark vs. Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.