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Apache Spark vs Spring Boot comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 27, 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
7.3
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (1st), Compute Service (4th)
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 August 2025, in the Java Frameworks category, the mindshare of Apache Spark is 8.1%, up from 8.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spring Boot is 39.9%, down from 42.6% 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

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.
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

"With Hadoop-related technologies, we can distribute the workload with multiple commodity hardware."
"DataFrame: Spark SQL gives the leverage to create applications more easily and with less coding effort."
"Now, when we're tackling sentiment analysis using NLP technologies, we deal with unstructured data—customer chats, feedback on promotions or demos, and even media like images, audio, and video files. For processing such data, we rely on PySpark. Beneath the surface, Spark functions as a compute engine with in-memory processing capabilities, enhancing performance through features like broadcasting and caching. It's become a crucial tool, widely adopted by 90% of companies for a decade or more."
"The distribution of tasks, like the seamless map-reduce functionality, is quite impressive."
"The solution is scalable."
"Spark helps us reduce startup time for our customers and gives a very high ROI in the medium term."
"I like Apache Spark's flexibility the most. Before, we had one server that would choke up. With the solution, we can easily add more nodes when needed. The machine learning models are also really helpful. We use them to predict energy theft and find infrastructure problems."
"The features we find most valuable are the machine learning, data learning, and Spark Analytics."
"The API gateway and cloud configuration allows us to configure the properties outside of the service with respect to enrollment."
"The solution is easy to use; I primarily employ integrated templates such as the REST template."
"The community surrounding Spring Boot is really good. If you face any issue with Spring Boot, you will get the answer from the community."
"The solution reduces our development time."
"The Spring Cloud Gateway, Load Balancer are the valuable features. Apart from them, handling a sync call, then multiple service communication through field clients are also useful features."
"It is a very scalable solution."
"The cloud version is very scalable."
"Spring Boot's main feature is that it's great for DevOps because you can write your own application. You don't need to install Apache Tomcat. You can create your project easily with a few clicks."
 

Cons

"The product could improve the user interface and make it easier for new users."
"Spark could be improved by adding support for other open-source storage layers than Delta Lake."
"This solution currently cannot support or distribute neural network related models, or deep learning related algorithms. We would like this functionality to be developed."
"At the initial stage, the product provides no container logs to check the activity."
"At times during the deployment process, the tool goes down, making it look less robust. To take care of the issues in the deployment process, users need to do manual interventions occasionally."
"It should support more programming languages."
"Apache Spark can improve the use case scenarios from the website. There is not any information on how you can use the solution across the relational databases toward multiple databases."
"The initial setup was not easy."
"When we change versions, we run into issues."
"Nothing really comes to mind in terms of areas of improvement."
"The cross framework compatibility has some shortcomings. With JUnit Test Runner and Spring Boot, it's really tedious to make them both work to write the test cases."
"If you want to create large microservices applications, you need to connect several applications and services to each other. It is very complicated, and Spring Boot does not have an integrated solution for it."
"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."
"Perhaps an even lighter-weight, leaner version could be made available, to compete with alternative solutions, such as NodeJS."
"Spring Boot is okay right now, but my team is looking for some integration where you can make a call to the JMS messaging service and other types of third-party integrations. If the integration with Spring Boot is improved, that would make the tool better. What I'd like to see in the next release of Spring Boot is its integration or tie-up with messaging servers and third-party EFPs, as that would make it very good and more competitive versus other new solutions in the market."
"The cloud packaging is not very straightforward."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Since we are using the Apache Spark version, not the data bricks version, it is an Apache license version, the support and resolution of the bug are actually late or delayed. The Apache license is free."
"They provide an open-source license for the on-premise version."
"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 not too cheap. You have to pay for hardware and Cloudera licenses. Of course, there is a solution with open source without Cloudera."
"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 quite expensive. In fact, it accounts for almost 50% of the cost of our entire project."
"Considering the product version used in my company, I feel that the tool is not costly since the product is available for free."
"The solution is affordable and there are no additional licensing costs."
"Spring Boot is free; even the Spring Tools Suite for Eclipse is free."
"The solution is free."
"If you want support there is paid enterprise version with support available."
"This is an open source solution."
"Spring Boot is open source. It's a free tool and free framework."
"It's open-source software, so it's free. It's a community license."
"Spring Boot is open source."
"Spring Boot is an open-source solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
30%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
 

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?
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...
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: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.