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Apache Spark vs Spring Boot 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Apache Spark
Ranking in Java Frameworks
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
65
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (1st), Compute Service (3rd)
Spring Boot
Ranking in Java Frameworks
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
38
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Java Frameworks category, the mindshare of Apache Spark is 5.9%, down from 7.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spring Boot is 41.7%, down from 43.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Java Frameworks
 

Q&A Highlights

MT
Aug 28, 2023
 

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.
RajuGottupalli - PeerSpot reviewer
Minimizes a lot of coding, improves the time to market, and is easily deployable and configurable
Spring Boot is a bounded framework. The services we develop are purely synchronous services, so there's a blocking and waiting state. This is a big problem in microservices. To avoid this problem, we have to make the service a reactive session. It has to be reactive to a particular load, particular condition, or based on the number of requests hitting the particular service. All these factors make the service a reactor. There's another module in which Spring Boot provides spring reflex. This module enables the reactiveness of the service, meaning that it eliminates the blocking and waiting state. For example, if you're sending a get operation or a post operation, there won't be any waiting for it to actually hit that particular network to get the data from another service. It continuously flows the request, and there is a zero waiting pack. Vert.x is another good framework where there are similar features or similar benefits with having a reactive session. Spring Boot is a license resource, so it's a framework where we can customize our solution or a particular requirement to build a good solution using Spring Boot. But it's an opinionated framework, meaning that it's completely bounded. You have only one direction to find a solution, whereas Vert.x is an unopinionated framework. Unopinionated is a kind of a toolkit where you can have more optimization and a more flexible solution, which is suitable to your requirements. In Spring Boot, the opportunities are limited. With Vert.x and other programming tools, we have multiple options to explore the solution in a different way and achieve a nonfunctional requirement of thousands transactions in a second. Spring Boot might not support this kind of non-functional requirement. Vert.X is a very good solution to solve critical NFRs for a particular application.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution has been very stable."
"The scalability has been the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"AI libraries are the most valuable. They provide extensibility and usability. Spark has a lot of connectors, which is a very important and useful feature for AI. You need to connect a lot of points for AI, and you have to get data from those systems. Connectors are very wide in Spark. With a Spark cluster, you can get fast results, especially for AI."
"This solution provides a clear and convenient syntax for our analytical tasks."
"Its scalability and speed are very valuable. You can scale it a lot. It is a great technology for big data. It is definitely better than a lot of earlier warehouse or pipeline solutions, such as Informatica. Spark SQL is very compliant with normal SQL that we have been using over the years. This makes it easy to code in Spark. It is just like using normal SQL. You can use the APIs of Spark or you can directly write SQL code and run it. This is something that I feel is useful in Spark."
"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 main feature that we find valuable is that it is very fast."
"Spark is used for transformations from large volumes of data, and it is usefully distributed."
"It's easy to set up the solution."
"Spring Boot has a very lightweight framework, and you can develop projects within a short time. It's open-source and customizable. It's easy to control, has a very interesting deployment policy, and a very interesting testing policy. It's sophisticated."
"Spring Boot's most valuable functionalities include inversion of control, dependency injection, and the ability to gather all services, models, and controllers together for easy connectivity to your REST API, as well as the ability to build a modular response and request system. It seamlessly integrates with various backends, such as SQL, events, and messaging systems, making it a user-friendly and efficient Java tool. Additionally, it functions as a reliable business transaction layer, providing excellent support for front-end and back-end visual tools."
"The configuration setup in Spring Boot is pretty simplified compared to Hibernate ORM."
"The platform is easy for developers to download."
"It gives you confidence in a readily available platform."
"Spring Boot facilitates the use of Java which is open source. We use Github and other libraries that are available which assist in the building we need to do."
"It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten...The initial setup was not complex and was a simple process."
 

Cons

"Apache Spark provides very good performance The tuning phase is still tricky."
"The logging for the observability platform could be better."
"The main concern is the overhead of Java when distributed processing is not necessary."
"The management tools could use improvement. Some of the debugging tools need some work as well. They need to be more descriptive."
"Needs to provide an internal schedule to schedule spark jobs with monitoring capability."
"For improvement, I think the tool could make things easier for people who aren't very technical. There's a significant learning curve, and I've seen organizations give up because of it. Making it quicker or easier for non-technical people would be beneficial."
"There could be enhancements in optimization techniques, as there are some limitations in this area that could be addressed to further refine Spark's performance."
"Apart from the restrictions that come with its in-memory implementation. It has been improved significantly up to version 3.0, which is currently in use."
"The services we develop are purely synchronous services, so there's a blocking and waiting state. This is a big problem in microservices."
"Spring Boot could improve the interface, error handling, and integration performance."
"Nothing really comes to mind in terms of areas of improvement."
"Building a new product in Spring Boot can take a long time since the solution uses reflection. This is one area the solution could be improved."
"We have specific algorithms for our Load Balancer or API gateway. So those things, if they could make it more precise, that would be beneficial. Sometimes when we are under pressure or any new person who looks into that stuff, we'll get confused or scared because of some difficulties in understanding Which algorithm needs to be used to implement a Load Balancer. When when we Yeah. Because when we say circuit breaker, we need to use it, and then the user gets a blank circuit breaker. This means we are saying the circuit breaker needs to be moved, and then that circuit breaker needs to be elaborated more. What type of algorithm should I do, and what exactly do I need to get done so that this circuit breaker can help me to resolve my issue? Because, you know, because if you go for the circuit breaker, it will ask to open the new tab, you know, since it will check. If the service is not responding, it will wait and go for another connection. So in similar words, if they can explain it a bit more, that will be helpful. Everyone could do their own Google stuff, and they will get it, but they need help understanding how this could help them to resolve the issue. It will be good if Spring Boot provides information about real-time use cases."
"communicationbetween different services from the third party layers or with the legacy applications needs to improve."
"The performance could be better."
"When we change versions, we run into issues."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"They provide an open-source license for the on-premise version."
"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."
"The product is expensive, considering the setup."
"We are using the free version of the solution."
"On the cloud model can be expensive as it requires substantial resources for implementation, covering on-premises hardware, memory, and licensing."
"Apache Spark is an open-source solution, and there is no cost involved in deploying the solution on-premises."
"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."
"It is an open-source platform. We do not pay for its subscription."
"As Spring Boot is an open-source tool, it's free."
"The solution is free."
"This solution is free unless you apply for support."
"It's open-source software, so it's free. It's a community license."
"If you want support there is paid enterprise version with support available."
"I am using a free version of Spring Boot."
"The solution is an open-source tool."
"Spring Boot is open source. It's a free tool and free framework."
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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%
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

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 Spring Boot?
1. Open Source2. Excellent Community Support -- Widely used across different projects -- so your search for answers would be easy and almost certain.3. Extendable Stack with a wide array of availab...
Which is better - Spring Boot or Eclipse MicroProfile?
Springboot is a Java-based solution that is very popular and easy to use. You can use it to build applications quickly and confidently. Springboot has a very large, helpful learning community, whic...
Which is better - Spring Boot or Jakarta EE?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Spring Boot or Jakarta EE application creation software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Spring Boot. Spring Boot offe...
 

Comparisons

 

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
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Find out what your peers are saying about Apache Spark vs. Spring Boot and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
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