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Apache Spark vs Hortonworks Data Platform 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
65
Ranking in other categories
Compute Service (3rd), Java Frameworks (2nd)
Hortonworks Data Platform
Ranking in Hadoop
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (14th), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Hadoop category, the mindshare of Apache Spark is 17.7%, down from 20.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Hortonworks Data Platform is 3.4%, up from 3.0% 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.
Prashant  Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
A good technology with an easy setup but is at end of life
The solution is fairly simple to set up. It's not too complex or difficult. If you know the solution, it's easy. However, there is a learning curve. If you don't know anything about it, it can be more complex. You can typically deploy it within a week. We have five or six people capable of handling a deployment.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This solution provides a clear and convenient syntax for our analytical tasks."
"Spark can handle small to huge data and is suitable for any size of company."
"The most crucial feature for us is the streaming capability. It serves as a fundamental aspect that allows us to exert control over our operations."
"The processing time is very much improved over the data warehouse solution that we were using."
"ETL and streaming capabilities."
"The most valuable feature of Apache Spark is its ease of use."
"Features include machine learning, real time streaming, and data processing."
"The memory processing engine is the solution's most valuable aspect. It processes everything extremely fast, and it's in the cluster itself. It acts as a memory engine and is very effective in processing data correctly."
"We use it for data science activities."
"The upgrades and patches must come from Hortonworks."
"Now, using this solution, it is much cheaper to have all of the data available for searching, not in real-time, but whenever there is a pending request."
"Ambari Web UI: user-friendly."
"Hortonworks should not be expensive at all to those looking into using it."
"Distributed computing, secure containerization, and governance capabilities are the most valuable features."
"The data platform is pretty neat. The workflow is also really good."
"Ranger for security; with Ranger we can manager user’s permissions/access controls very easily."
 

Cons

"The logging for the observability platform could be better."
"Needs to provide an internal schedule to schedule spark jobs with monitoring capability."
"The setup I worked on was really complex."
"There were some problems related to the product's compatibility with a few Python libraries."
"The solution must improve its performance."
"If you have a Spark session in the background, sometimes it's very hard to kill these sessions because of D allocation."
"When you want to extract data from your HDFS and other sources then it is kind of tricky because you have to connect with those sources."
"We've had problems using a Python process to try to access something in a large volume of data. It crashes if somebody gives me the wrong code because it cannot handle a large volume of data."
"Security and workload management need improvement."
"More information could be there to simplify the process of running the product."
"It would also be nice if there were less coding involved."
"It's at end of life and no longer will there be improvements."
"I would like to see more support for containers such as Docker and OpenShift."
"The version control of the software is also an issue."
"I work a lot with banking, IT and communications customers. Hortonworks must improve or must upgrade their services for these sectors."
"Hive performance. If Hive performance increased, Hadoop would replace (not everywhere) traditional databases."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"On the cloud model can be expensive as it requires substantial resources for implementation, covering on-premises hardware, memory, and licensing."
"The tool is an open-source product. If you're using the open-source Apache Spark, no fees are involved at any time. Charges only come into play when using it with other services like Databricks."
"Apache Spark is an open-source tool."
"It is an open-source platform. We do not pay for its subscription."
"The solution is affordable and there are no additional licensing costs."
"They provide an open-source license for the on-premise version."
"It is quite expensive. In fact, it accounts for almost 50% of the cost of our entire project."
"Apache Spark is not too cheap. You have to pay for hardware and Cloudera licenses. Of course, there is a solution with open source without Cloudera."
"Currently, we are using the product in a sandbox environment, and there is no licensing. We might choose a licensing option once we get the results."
"It is priced well and it is affordable"
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
5%
No data available
 

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 Spark solution could improve in scheduling tasks and managing dependencies. Spark alone cannot handle sequential tasks, requiring environments like Airflow scheduler or scripts. For instance, o...
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?
I haven't done a price analysis specifically for HDP. However, when it was first introduced as Hadoop 2.0, there were a few use cases where the price was quite high. It was particularly expensive f...
What needs improvement with Hortonworks Data Platform?
Since Cloudera acquired HDP, it's been bundled with CBH and HDP. However, the biggest challenge is cloud storage integration with Azure, GCP, and AWS. These platforms offer competitive storage solu...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Hortonworks, HDP
 

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
Mayo Clinic, Symantec, Progressive Insurance, Noble Energy, Cardinal Health, Rogers, Mercy, Neustar, TRUECar, T-Mobile
Find out what your peers are saying about Apache Spark vs. Hortonworks Data Platform and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.