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Azure Databricks vs Saturn Cloud 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Azure Databricks
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
14th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
4.1
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Saturn Cloud
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
27th
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

SK
Sr. Technical Specialist at Softcell Technologies Limited
Data pipelines have accelerated and support reliable analytics collaboration across teams
From our experience, Azure Databricks could be improved with simpler cluster management and more predictable cost visibility and enhanced native monitoring for large enterprise environments. We would also like richer governance features, better debugging for distributed Spark jobs, and more granular controls for workload optimization over and across multiple teams, which we have at multiple customer environments and within our organization. In day-to-day operations, troubleshooting failed Spark jobs can still be time-consuming, especially in complex distributed workloads. We would like clearer root cause diagnostics and more actionable performance recommendations within Azure Databricks. Better cost optimization insights at the job and cluster level would also help us manage large multiple team environments more efficiently.
Alessandro Trinca Tornidor - PeerSpot reviewer
Sviluppatore software at TeamSystem
Good for creating POCs, training machine learning models, and experimenting without local resources
The project I’m currently working on relies on CUDA, but my local PC does not have any Nvidia GPUs. I’ve found the computational resources and ease of use provided by Saturn Cloud invaluable. Also, there are many ready-to-use Docker images and a rich documentation portal with useful examples. The dashboard for creating a new virtual environment contains almost all the features I needed: environment variable definitions, git repositories cloning directly from the new resources page, and an edit field to define a custom script during the boot process. For this reason, Saturn Cloud.io is a very good solution for creating POCs, training machine learning models, and generally experimenting a bit without worrying about local resources.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The concept of Azure Databricks is a very good one, especially for the data products concept and idea."
"Azure Databricks has significantly improved our ability to process data and large data sets, and deliver analytics projects faster for our customers."
"Azure Databricks gives the capability to handle a lot of big data use cases and machine learning use cases, but machine learning use cases need quite a lot of compute power, and that is where the cost spikes up."
"My pipelines are now significantly faster compared to older ETL tools, as what used to take over 12 to 14 hours to process 2 GB of source data in Synapse Analytics now completes within 5 hours using the Azure Databricks framework for the transformation part, illustrating a substantial improvement in performance."
"Regarding the learning curve, it is a good technology; it is the first time I am working on a cloud platform, and before that, I have not worked on any data engineering tool that is on cloud, so it is good learning."
"The best features in Azure Databricks for me are that it's easy to use, flexible, and has fast processing, and you can use multiple data types."
"It offered an excellent development environment while not touching our production cloud resources."
"The feature I like the most about Saturn Cloud is that it has lightning-fast CPUs."
"They provide a centralized space for data, code, and results."
"There is plenty of computational resources (both GPU, CPU and disk space)."
"Saturn Cloud supports GPU as part of the environment, which is essential for many computational tasks in machine learning projects. It also allows us to edit the environment, including the image, before we start the cloud resources. This feature lets us quickly set up the environment without the hassle of moving the data and code to another cloud device."
"It didn't take long to see that Saturn Cloud could scale with my needs, providing more resources when required."
 

Cons

"The biggest friction point I have experienced with Azure Databricks is its cost-effectiveness; for projects with less data volume, it is advisable to use Azure Fabric services instead, as Azure Databricks may not be suitable for low volume processing."
"The only concern is perhaps related to the pricing and cost that Azure Databricks incurs."
"I have given the product a rating of six out of ten just because I do not use all of the functionalities, and I see some direction for improvement as well; also, every product has something to improve, and I have not used many features in this product."
"Lower pricing is currently my only focus and I'm still exploring Azure Databricks, so it's too early to say something, but overall, I'm saying that it is the future."
"From our experience, Azure Databricks could be improved with simpler cluster management and more predictable cost visibility and enhanced native monitoring for large enterprise environments."
"At this point, I cannot comment on the cost being ideal; it is on the higher side, but in the cloud-based environment, compared to on-premise, it could be far lesser in cost."
"Saturn Cloud should include prebuilt images for advanced data science packages like LightGBM in the next release. If possible, they should also provide a Kaggle image, which contains the most common Python packages used in machine learning."
"We'd like to have the capability for installing more libraries."
"Providing more detailed and beginner-friendly documentation, especially for advanced features, could greatly enhance the user experience."
"My main suggestion for improvement centers on pricing. Introducing a tier modelled after AWS spot instances would be a game-changer."
"It would be nice to have more hardware category options, like TPU coprocessors or ARM64 CPUs."
"Public Clouds integration and sandbox environments would be a true game changer."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Construction Company
27%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Databricks?
Regarding the licensing cost of Azure Databricks, it has evolved quite a lot. The compute is the biggest cost, as with any other big data solutions. The storage cost is almost minimal or negligible...
What needs improvement with Azure Databricks?
From our experience, Azure Databricks could be improved with simpler cluster management and more predictable cost visibility and enhanced native monitoring for large enterprise environments. We wou...
What is your primary use case for Azure Databricks?
Azure Databricks is our primary platform for building scalable data engineering and analytics pipelines for enterprise customers. We use it to inject, transform, and process large volumes of struct...
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Nvidia, Snowflake, Kaggle, Faeth, Advantest, Stanford University, Senseye and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Databricks vs. Saturn Cloud and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
907,731 professionals have used our research since 2012.