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Amazon EMR vs Apache Spark 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.3
Companies using Amazon EMR often experience significant ROI, with savings up to 20% and substantial returns over on-premise systems.
Sentiment score
6.6
Apache Spark enhances machine learning, cutting operational costs by up to 50%, with efficiency reliant on resources and expertise.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.6
Amazon EMR support is generally proactive and efficient, but experiences vary, especially during open-source product integration.
Sentiment score
5.9
Apache Spark support feedback varies, with mixed reviews on community forums, vendor support, and documentation adequacy.
They help with billing, cost determination, IAM properties, security compliance, and deployment and migration activities.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Amazon EMR effectively scales to enterprise needs, with auto-scaling and adaptability, despite occasional peak demand resource allocation delays.
Sentiment score
7.5
Apache Spark excels in scalability, efficiently handling large data workloads with ease, though it requires skilled infrastructure management.
Scalability can be provisioned using the auto-scaling feature, EC2 instances, on-demand instances, and storage locations like block storage, S3, or file storage.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon EMR is generally stable and reliable, despite occasional data-related stability issues, with robust failover and monitoring features.
Sentiment score
7.5
Apache Spark is generally stable, trusted by companies; newer versions enhance reliability, though memory issues may arise without proper configuration.
Regular updates, patch installations, monitoring, logging, alerting, and disaster recovery activities are crucial for maintaining stability.
MapReduce needs to perform numerous disk input and output operations, while Apache Spark can use memory to store and process data.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon EMR struggles with a steep learning curve, complex configurations, unpredictable costs, and needs enhancements in stability and support.
Apache Spark requires improvements in scalability, usability, documentation, memory efficiency, real-time processing, and broader language support for better performance.
There is room for improvement with respect to retries, handling the volume of data on S3 buckets, cluster provisioning, scaling, termination, security, and integration between services like S3, Glue, Lake Formation, and DynamoDB.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EMR's costs vary by resources used, with potential high monthly expenses, requiring careful management to prevent surprises.
Apache Spark is cost-effective but may incur expenses from hardware, cloud resources, or commercial support, impacting deployment costs.
Cost optimization can be achieved through instance usage, cluster sharing, and auto-scaling.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EMR is scalable, easy to use, cost-effective, integrates well with Hadoop, and supports diverse analytics applications.
Apache Spark offers fast in-memory processing, scalable analytics, MLlib for machine learning, SQL support, and seamless integration with languages.
Amazon EMR helps in scalability, real-time and batch processing of data, handling efficient data sources, and managing data lakes, data stores, and data marts on file systems and in S3 buckets.
Apache Spark is the solution, and within it, you have PySpark, which is the API for Apache Spark to write and run Python code.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EMR
Ranking in Hadoop
3rd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (12th)
Apache Spark
Ranking in Hadoop
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
Compute Service (4th), Java Frameworks (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Hadoop category, the mindshare of Amazon EMR is 13.6%, down from 15.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache Spark is 19.2%, down from 20.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Hadoop
 

Featured Reviews

Prashant  Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamless data integration enhances reporting efficiency and an easy setup
Amazon EMR has multiple connectors that can connect to various data sources. The service charges are based on processing only, depending on the resources used, which can help save money. It is easy to integrate with other services for storage, allowing data to be shifted to cheaper storage based on usage.
Omar Khaled - PeerSpot reviewer
Empowering data consolidation and fast decision-making with efficient big data processing
I can improve the organization's functions by taking less time to make decisions. To make the right decision, you need the right data, and a solution can provide this by hiring talent and employees who can consolidate data from different sources and organize it. Not all solutions can make this data fast enough to be used, except for solutions such as Apache Spark Structured Streaming. To make the right decision, you should have both accurate and fast data. Apache Spark itself is similar to the Python programming language. Python is a language with many libraries for mathematics and machine learning. Apache Spark is the solution, and within it, you have PySpark, which is the API for Apache Spark to write and run Python code. Within it, there are many APIs, including SQL APIs, allowing you to write SQL code within a Python function in Apache Spark. You can also use Apache Spark Structured Streaming and machine learning APIs.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
13%
Educational Organization
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon EMR?
Amazon EMR is a good solution that can be used to manage big data.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EMR?
Compared to others, Amazon seems efficient and is considered good for Big Data workloads. Costs are involved based on cluster resources, data volumes, EC2 ( /products/amazon-ec2-reviews ) instances...
What needs improvement with Amazon EMR?
There is room for improvement with respect to retries, handling the volume of data on S3 ( /products/amazon-s3-reviews ) buckets, cluster provisioning, scaling, termination, security, and integrati...
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?
Apache Spark is open-source, so it doesn't incur any charges.
What needs improvement with Apache Spark?
There is complexity when it comes to understanding the whole ecosystem, especially for beginners. I find it quite complex to understand how a Spark job is initiated, the roles of driver nodes, work...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic MapReduce
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Yelp
NASA JPL, UC Berkeley AMPLab, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, UC Santa Cruz, TripAdvisor, Taboola, Agile Lab, Art.com, Baidu, Alibaba Taobao, EURECOM, Hitachi Solutions
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EMR vs. Apache Spark and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.