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Amazon MSK vs Databricks comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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
7.1
Amazon MSK provides positive ROI by reducing integration time, minimizing licensing costs, and supporting flexible, cost-efficient experimentation with large data volumes.
Sentiment score
6.5
Databricks offers cloud scalability and ease of use, but financial benefits and effectiveness depend on specific use cases.
For a lot of different tasks, including machine learning, it is a nice solution.
When it comes to big data processing, I prefer Databricks over other solutions.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.2
Amazon MSK customer service is generally praised for accessibility and responsiveness, but expertise and cost can vary by plan.
Sentiment score
7.2
Databricks offers highly rated, responsive support with clear documentation, proactive engagement, and multiple contact options, despite occasional delays.
Amazon's support is excellent.
Whenever we reach out, they respond promptly.
As of now, we are raising issues and they are providing solutions without any problems.
I rate the technical support as fine because they have levels of technical support available, especially partners who get really good support from Databricks on new features.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Amazon MSK offers efficient manual scalability, rated six to nine by users, suitable for different organizational needs.
Sentiment score
7.5
Databricks offers seamless scalability across clouds, efficiently handling data sizes and increasing users, with praised ease and robust performance.
The functionality for scaling comes out of the box and is very effective.
Databricks is an easily scalable platform.
I would rate the scalability of this solution as very high, about nine out of ten.
The patches have sometimes caused issues leading to our jobs being paused for about six hours.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Amazon MSK is stable with high user ratings, though concerns exist due to its newness and some Windows-specific issues.
Sentiment score
7.7
Databricks is highly stable and reliable, despite minor issues, effectively managing large data volumes and supporting enterprise use.
Although it is too early to definitively state the platform's stability, we have not encountered any issues so far.
They release patches that sometimes break our code.
I would rate the stability of Databricks as highly stable, around nine out of ten.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon MSK needs better integration, configuration ease, improved documentation, cost reduction, and feature enhancements to compete and integrate effectively.
Databricks needs an improved UI, better integration, affordable pricing, enhanced machine learning, and streamlined, collaborative features.
The increase in cloud costs by 50% to 60% does not justify the savings.
It would be beneficial to have utilities where code snippets are readily available.
They're now coming up with their IBI dashboard, and I think they're on the right track to improve that even further.
We use MLflow for managing MLOps, however, further improvement would be beneficial, especially for large language models and related tools.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon MSK is cost-effective for large workloads but can be expensive for smaller use cases, needing careful evaluation.
Databricks pricing is usage-based and competitive, with mixed reviews regarding cost-effectiveness, especially for heavy data processing.
Once we started using Kafka, our cloud costs rose by 50% to 60%.
It is not a cheap solution.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon MSK offers seamless AWS integration, cost-efficiency, simplified setup, and reliable performance for CDC pipelines and asynchronous data collection.
Databricks offers a user-friendly interface, fast querying, multi-language support, and integrated AI for streamlined, collaborative data processing.
The scalability and usability are quite remarkable.
Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed.
The Unity Catalog is for data governance, and the Delta Lake is to build the lakehouse.
The platform allows us to leverage cloud advantages effectively, enhancing our AI and ML projects.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon MSK
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
7th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Databricks
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
90
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (7th), Data Science Platforms (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon MSK is 7.3%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Databricks is 14.6%, up from 10.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

FNU AKSHANSH - PeerSpot reviewer
Streamlines our processes, and we don't need to configure any VPCs; it's automatic
We don't have many use cases involving ingesting large amounts of data and scaling up and down. We have a clear understanding of our data volume, which remains relatively constant throughout the week. While we're aware of other features Amazon MSK offers, we feel confident in our current setup. If our requirements change significantly in the future, we'll reassess our needs and consider adopting Amazon MSK.
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.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Healthcare Company
4%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon MSK?
Amazon MSK has significantly improved our organization by building seamless integration between systems.
What needs improvement with Amazon MSK?
The cost of using Amazon MSK is high, which is a significant disadvantage, as the increase in cloud costs by 50% to 60% does not justify the savings. There were no other notable issues.
What is your primary use case for Amazon MSK?
We used Amazon MSK to manage high-volume third-party data entering our system. It served as a buffer when our system was unable to consume data at high speeds in real-time. The data initially went ...
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka
Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon MSK vs. Databricks and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.