No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

BigQuery vs Databricks comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

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
4.2
BigQuery offers major cost savings and performance improvements, providing a strong ROI despite initial training costs and minimal documentation.
Sentiment score
6.7
Organizations experience mixed ROI from Databricks, with benefits in efficiency but challenges in converting improvements to monetary returns.
This reduction in both time and money resulted in real-time impact and significant cost savings.
Consultant at Nice Software Solutions
For a lot of different tasks, including machine learning, it is a nice solution.
Senior Data Engineer at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
When it comes to big data processing, I prefer Databricks over other solutions.
Head CEO at bizmetric
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.8
BigQuery users find customer service varies, with premium users pleased but lower-tiered users facing access challenges and delays.
Sentiment score
7.0
Databricks' customer service has mixed reviews, with high ratings for professionalism but concerns about response times and partner delays.
rating the customer support at ten points out of ten
Sr. Team Lead - IT at InfoStretch
I have been self-taught and I have been able to handle all my problems alone.
Chief Technical Lead at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
I would rate their customer service pretty good on a scale of one to 10, as they gave me access to the platform on a grant.
Principal at Sgt Suds
Whenever we reach out, they respond promptly.
Senior Data Engineer at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
As of now, we are raising issues and they are providing solutions without any problems.
Data Platform Architect at KELLANOVA
I would give Databricks customer support a rating of ten.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
BigQuery efficiently manages large datasets with cloud-based infrastructure and auto-scaling, despite occasional performance and cost concerns.
Sentiment score
7.4
Databricks efficiently handles large datasets, leveraging scalable cloud infrastructure, despite cost and configuration concerns, benefiting various industry users.
It is a 10 out of 10 in terms of scalability.
Chief Technical Lead at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
We have not seen problems with scaling.
Director at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
The scalability is definitely good because we are migrating to the cloud since the computers on the premises or the big database we need are no longer enough.
Expert Analyst at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees
The sky's the limit with Databricks.
Governance And Engagement Lead
Databricks offers very good scalability, allowing you to increase or reduce processing resources according to the volume of data and demand.
Analista de Dados at Conta Azul
The patches have sometimes caused issues leading to our jobs being paused for about six hours.
Senior Data Engineer at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
BigQuery is highly stable and reliable, efficiently handling large data with strong support, though improvements are suggested.
Sentiment score
7.7
Databricks is highly rated for stability and reliability, with occasional minor issues quickly fixed by support.
In the past one and a half years that I have been running with BigQuery, I have not needed to raise any technical support with BigQuery or with Google.
Director at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
They release patches that sometimes break our code.
Senior Data Engineer at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
Although it is too early to definitively state the platform's stability, we have not encountered any issues so far.
Data Platform Architect at KELLANOVA
Databricks is definitely a very stable product and reliable.
Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Room For Improvement

BigQuery users want better user-friendliness, integrations, cost efficiency, advanced AI features, and simplified data handling for large datasets.
Databricks users seek improved integration, flexible pricing, better interfaces, enhanced tools, and support for various coding languages.
Improvement is needed in the sense that the AI model behind BigQuery should understand sometimes what the enterprise architecture is and how efficiently we can write queries.
Senior Manager - Consulting & Alliances at a outsourcing company with 51-200 employees
Troubleshooting requires opening each pipeline individually, which is time-consuming.
Sr. Team Lead - IT at InfoStretch
In general, if I know SQL and start playing around, it will start making sense.
Expert Analyst at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Adjusting features like worker nodes and node utilization during cluster creation could mitigate these failures.
Data Engineer at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We prefer using a small to mid-sized cluster for many jobs to keep costs low, but this sometimes doesn't support our operations properly.
Senior Data Engineer at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
We use MLflow for managing MLOps, however, further improvement would be beneficial, especially for large language models and related tools.
Solution Architect at Mercedes-Benz AG
 

Setup Cost

BigQuery's competitive pricing offers cost flexibility, but query costs can rise without proper optimization, making planning essential.
Databricks offers tiered, flexible pricing; though sometimes seen as expensive, it can be cost-effective with efficient resource use.
Being able to optimize the queries to data is critical. Otherwise, you could spend a fortune.
Chief Technical Lead at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
The price is perceived as expensive, rated at eight out of ten in terms of costliness.
Sr. Team Lead - IT at InfoStretch
It is not a cheap solution.
Data Platform Architect at KELLANOVA
I believe that in terms of credits for Databricks, we're spending between £15,000 and £20,000 a month.
Governance And Engagement Lead
I have had a very good experience with pricing, as there was a drop in costs compared to the previous tool.
Analista de Dados at Conta Azul
 

Valuable Features

BigQuery offers a scalable, cost-effective solution with AI, machine learning, fast response, and seamless tool integration for data analysis.
Databricks provides a unified platform with Lakehouse architecture, supporting multiple languages and robust tools for efficient data processing.
It is really fast because it can process millions of rows in just a matter of one or two seconds.
Expert Analyst at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees
We were able to save 60% of our time that used to go into writing SQL queries.
Senior Manager - Consulting & Alliances at a outsourcing company with 51-200 employees
BigQuery processes a substantial amount of data, whether in gigabytes or terabytes, swiftly producing desired data within one or two minutes.
Sr. Team Lead - IT at InfoStretch
Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed.
Data Engineer at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The platform allows us to leverage cloud advantages effectively, enhancing our AI and ML projects.
Data Platform Architect at KELLANOVA
The Unity Catalog is for data governance, and the Delta Lake is to build the lakehouse.
Data Engineer at CRAFT Tech
 

Categories and Ranking

BigQuery
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Databricks
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
95
Ranking in other categories
Data Science Platforms (1st), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (3rd), Streaming Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of BigQuery is 6.9%, down from 8.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Databricks is 9.3%, up from 8.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
BigQuery6.9%
Databricks9.3%
Other83.8%
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2807520 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Data processing has become faster and large analytical queries run reliably at multi‑region scale
The features I have found most valuable in BigQuery include the query cache, which is good and scales well. We have not seen problems with scaling. It handles huge amounts of data quite well, and the multi-regions feature works well. To measure the effectiveness of BigQuery, I think it is quite good. The metrics I use to evaluate BigQuery's effectiveness include that scaling is quite good and handling of big amounts of data. We do not see any glitches, and we do not see major timeouts. Google platform in general has been quite stable, and we do not see that many outages at resource level or at overall zonal level.
SimonRobinson - PeerSpot reviewer
Governance And Engagement Lead
Improved data governance has enabled sensitive data tracking but cost management still needs work
I believe we could improve Databricks integration with cloud service providers. The impact of our current integration has not been particularly good, and it's becoming very expensive for us. The inefficiencies in our implementation, such as not shutting down warehouses when they're not in use or reserving the right number of credits, have led to increased costs. We made several beginner mistakes, such as not taking advantage of incremental loading and running overly complicated queries all the time. We should be using ETL tools to help us instead of doing it directly in Databricks. We need more experienced professionals to manage Databricks effectively, as it's not as forgiving as other platforms such as Snowflake. I think introducing customer repositories would facilitate easier implementation with Databricks.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Data Warehouse solutions are best for your needs.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Media Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise21
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise60
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BigQuery?
I believe the cost of BigQuery is competitive versus the alternatives in the market, but it can become expensive if the tool is not used properly. It is on a per-consumption basis, the billing, so ...
What needs improvement with BigQuery?
The queries that BigQuery provides are not optimized at a greater level. For simple tasks it is good, but if I want to write complex analyzing queries, it doesn't give the queries up to the mark, s...
What is your primary use case for BigQuery?
My main use case for BigQuery is the analysis of our data, creating dashboards from large datasets, and querying the databases that we have, including both structured and unstructured data imported...
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

BQ
Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
Find out what your peers are saying about BigQuery vs. Databricks and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.