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Databricks vs Dremio comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 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

Databricks
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
8th
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
91
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (1st)
Dremio
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
7th
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Data Science Platforms category, the mindshare of Databricks is 15.9%, down from 19.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dremio is 3.7%, up from 3.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Science Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

ShubhamSharma7 - PeerSpot reviewer
Capability to integrate diverse coding languages in a single notebook greatly enhances workflow
Databricks offers various courses that I can use, whether it's PySpark, Scala, or R. I can leverage all these courses in a single notebook, which is beneficial for clients as they can access various tools in one place whenever needed. This is quite significant. I usually work with PySpark based on client requirements. After coding, I feed the Databricks notebooks into the ADF pipeline for updates. Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed. Furthermore, I can connect our Databricks notebook directly with Power BI and other visualization tools like Qlik. Once we develop code, it allows us to transform raw data into visualizations for clients using analysis diagrams, which is very helpful.
KamleshPant - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution offers quick data connection with an edge in computation
It's almost similar, yet it's better than Starburst in spinning up or connecting to the new source since it's on SaaS. It is a similar experience between the based application and cloud-based application. You just get the source, connect the data, get visualization, get connected, and do whatever you want. They say data reflection is one way where they do the caching and all that. Starburst also does the caching. In Starburst, you have a data product. Here, the data product comes from a reflection perspective. The y are working on a columnar memory map, columnar computation. That will have some edge in computation.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It helps integrate data science and machine learning capabilities."
"Databricks is based on a Spark cluster and it is fast. Performance-wise, it is great."
"Databricks is a scalable solution. It is the largest advantage of the solution."
"The load distribution capabilities are good, and you can perform data processing tasks very quickly."
"The setup was straightforward."
"Ability to work collaboratively without having to worry about the infrastructure."
"The solution is easy to use and has a quick start-up time due to being on the cloud."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Dremio is it can sit on top of any other data storage, such as Amazon S3, Azure Data Factory, SGFS, or Hive. The memory competition is good. If you are running any kind of materialized view, you'd be running in memory."
"Dremio gives you the ability to create services which do not require additional resources and sterilization."
"Dremio is very easy to use for building queries."
"Dremio allows querying the files I have on my block storage or object storage."
"We primarily use Dremio to create a data framework and a data queue."
"It's almost similar, yet it's better than Starburst in spinning up or connecting to the new source since it's on SaaS."
"Dremio enables you to manage changes more effectively than any other data warehouse platform. There are two things that come into play. One is data lineage. If you are looking at data in Dremio, you may want to know the source and what happened to it along the way or how it may have been transformed in the data pipeline to get to the point where you're consuming it."
"Overall, you can rate it as eight out of ten."
 

Cons

"Databricks' performance when serving the data to an analytics tool isn't as good as Snowflake's."
"In the future, I would like to see Data Lake support. That is something that I'm looking forward to."
"The tool should improve its integration with other products."
"I would like it if Databricks adopted an interface more like R Studio. When I create a data frame or a table, R Studio provides a preview of the data. In R Studio, I can see that it created a table with so many columns or rows. Then I can click on it and open a preview of that data."
"There has been a significant evolution in databases. One area of improvement is the Databricks File System (DBFS), where command-line challenges arise when accessing files."
"Databricks could improve in some of its functionality."
"The solution could be improved by adding a feature that would make it more user-friendly for our team. The feature is simple, but it would be useful. Currently, our team is more familiar with the language R, but Databricks requires the use of Jupyter Notebooks which primarily supports Python. We have tried using RStudio, but it is not a fully integrated solution. To fully utilize Databricks, we have to use the Jupyter interface. One feature that would make it easier for our team to adopt the Jupyter interface would be the ability to select a specific variable or line of code and execute it within a cell. This feature is available in other Jupyter Notebooks outside of Databricks and in our own IDE, but it is not currently available within Databricks. If this feature were added, it would make the transition to using Databricks much smoother for our team."
"I would like to see more documentation in terms of how an end-user could use it, and users like me can easily try it and implement use cases."
"Dremio doesn't support the Delta connector. Dremio writes the IT support for Delta, but the support isn't great. There is definitely room for improvement."
"We've faced a challenge with integrating Dremio and Databricks, specifically regarding authentication. It is not shaking hands very easily."
"They have an automated tool for building SQL queries, so you don't need to know SQL. That interface works, but it could be more efficient in terms of the SQL generated from those things. It's going through some growing pains. There is so much value in tools like these for people with no SQL experience. Over time, Dermio will make these capabilities more accessible to users who aren't database people."
"It shows errors sometimes."
"They need to have multiple connectors. Starburst is rich in connectors, however, they are lacking Salesforce connectivity as of today."
"There are performance issues at times due to our limited experience with Dremio, and the fact that we are running it on single nodes using a community version."
"I cannot use the recursive common table expression (CTE) in Dremio because the support page says it's currently unsupported."
"Dremio takes a long time to execute large queries or the executing of correlated queries or nested queries. Additionally, the solution could improve if we could read data from the streaming pipelines or if it allowed us to create the ETL pipeline directly on top of it, similar to Snowflake."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I'm not involved in the financing, but I can say that the solution seemed reasonably priced compared to the competitors. Similar products are usually in the same price range. With five being affordable and one being expensive, I would rate Databricks a four out of five."
"The price of Databricks is reasonable compared to other solutions."
"Whenever we want to find the actual costing, we have to send an email to Databricks, so having the information available on the internet would be helpful."
"We're charged on what the data throughput is and also what the compute time is."
"We have only incurred the cost of our AWS cloud services. This is because during this period, Databricks provided us with an extended evaluation period, and we have not spent much money yet. We are just starting to incur costs this month, I will know more later on the full cost perspective."
"Price-wise, I would rate Databricks a three out of five."
"The licensing costs of Databricks is a tiered licensing regime, so it is flexible."
"I rate the price of Databricks as eight out of ten."
"Right now the cluster costs approximately $200,000 per month and is based on the volume of data we have."
"Dremio is less costly competitively to Snowflake or any other tool."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
31%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Healthcare Company
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 ...
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...
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 Dremio?
Dremio allows querying the files I have on my block storage or object storage.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dremio?
The licensing is very expensive. We need a license to scale as we are currently using the community version.
What needs improvement with Dremio?
They need to have multiple connectors. Starburst is rich in connectors, however, they are lacking Salesforce connectivity as of today. They don't have Salesforce connectivity. However, Starburst do...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
UBS, TransUnion, Quantium, Daimler, OVH
Find out what your peers are saying about Databricks vs. Dremio and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.