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Cloudera Data Platform vs Spark SQL comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 18, 2026

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

Cloudera Data Platform
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Master Data Management (MDM) (6th), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (5th), AI Data Analysis (4th)
Spark SQL
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Cloudera Data Platform and Spark SQL aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Cloudera Data Platform is designed for Data Management Platforms (DMP) and holds a mindshare of 7.1%, up 5.9% compared to last year.
Spark SQL, on the other hand, focuses on Hadoop, holds 5.3% mindshare, down 7.9% since last year.
Data Management Platforms (DMP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudera Data Platform7.1%
Palantir Foundry13.3%
Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC)10.1%
Other69.5%
Data Management Platforms (DMP)
Hadoop Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Spark SQL5.3%
Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop14.6%
Apache Spark14.4%
Other65.7%
Hadoop
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2776239 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Uses handwritten notes and voice files to perform text analytics and gain real-time insights
Cloudera Data Platform can be improved in several areas. I recently attended their roadmap session. Whatever limitations they have identified involve moving data from on-premises to cloud as a single-pane view and better lineage. They have done some recent acquisitions as well to overcome their product limitations. They are on the right track by doing this analysis themselves, identifying what the weaknesses are, and then using mergers or acquisitions to overcome them. I would like to add that, beyond the platform itself, they should provide more training to systems integrators so that they can have a more ready workforce to use Cloudera Data Platform.
Kemal Duman - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead, Data Engineering at Nesine.com
Data pipelines have run faster and support flexible batch and streaming transformations
We do not have any performance problems, but we do have some resource problems. Spark SQL consumes so many resources that we migrated our streaming job from Spark to Apache Flink. Resource management in Spark SQL should be better. It consumes more resources, which is normal. The main reason we switched from Spark is memory and CPU consumption. The major reason is the resource problem because the number of streaming jobs has been increasing in our company. That is why we considered resource management as a priority. Because of the resource consumption, I would say the development of Spark SQL is better. For development purposes, it is a top product and not difficult to work with, but resources are the major problem. We changed to Flink regardless of development time. Development time is less in Spark compared with Flink.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The best features Cloudera Data Platform offers are the processing power with Spark and the distributed data storage, HDFS, which helps us handle massive volumes of data."
"We use it for data science activities."
"Cloudera Data Platform has positively impacted our organization by reducing overall manual intervention, requiring fewer efforts and resources to build a big data cluster compared to traditional methods."
"Cloudera Data Platform has impacted my organization positively in many ways, especially for banking customers, by providing a robust capability to handle structured and unstructured data via features like PDF extraction and speech-to-text conversion for analytics."
"With it, we have faster processing times for our apps."
"Cloudera Data Platform has positively impacted my organization by eliminating challenges we faced with CDH, which had not been supported for a cloud journey; in contrast, CDP allows for easy, mostly automated scalability where I can schedule job workflows, fine-tune system resource metrics, and add nodes with just a click."
"It has helped our organisation cater to clients who are using Big Data for data storage and analysis combined with our security product."
"Hortonworks is 100% Open Source."
"I find the Thrift connection valuable."
"The speed of getting data."
"The performance is one of the most important features, and it has an API to process the data in a functional manner."
"The scalability of the solution is good."
"One of Spark SQL's most beautiful features is running parallel queries to go through enormous data."
"Spark SQL's efficiency in managing distributed data and its simplicity in expressing complex operations make it an essential part of our data pipeline."
"The solution is easy to understand if you have basic knowledge of SQL commands."
"This solution is useful to leverage within a distributed ecosystem."
 

Cons

"A major drawback that I see with Cloudera Data Platform is that it tends to be one or two years behind the latest open-source implementation of the Apache toolkits such as Spark, Hive, and everything else, which relates to the guardrails of following compliance as the main driving factor, so that is something that could be done better on Cloudera Data Platform's side."
"I work a lot with banking, IT and communications customers. Hortonworks must improve or must upgrade their services for these sectors."
"The technical support is okay, but not excellent."
"More information could be there to simplify the process of running the product."
"The version control of the software is also an issue."
"Cloudera Data Platform can be improved in several areas. I recently attended their roadmap session. Whatever limitations they have identified involve moving data from on-premises to cloud as a single-pane view and better lineage."
"That said, there’s still room for improvement in integration speed and UI responsiveness, especially when managing large clusters or hybrid deployments."
"Almost every part of the Hadoop ecosystem has its problems and bugs."
"The solution needs to include graphing capabilities. Including financial charts would help improve everything overall."
"SparkUI could have more advanced versions of the performance and the queries and all."
"In terms of improvement, the only thing that could be enhanced is the stability aspect of Spark SQL."
"Being a new user, I am not able to find out how to partition it correctly."
"In the next update, we'd like to see better performance for small points of data. It is possible but there are better tools that are faster and cheaper."
"It would be useful if Spark SQL integrated with some data visualization tools."
"I've experienced some incompatibilities when using the Delta Lake format."
"It would be beneficial for aggregate functions to include a code block or toolbox that explains its calculations or supported conditional statements."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Currently, we are using the product in a sandbox environment, and there is no licensing. We might choose a licensing option once we get the results."
"It is priced well and it is affordable"
"The on-premise solution is quite expensive in terms of hardware, setting up the cluster, memory, hardware and resources. It depends on the use case, but in our case with a shared cluster which is quite large, it is quite expensive."
"The solution is bundled with Palantir Foundry at no extra charge."
"There is no license or subscription for this solution."
"We use the open-source version, so we do not have direct support from Apache."
"The solution is open-sourced and free."
"We don't have to pay for licenses with this solution because we are working in a small market, and we rely on open-source because the budgets of projects are very small."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
University
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Hortonworks Data Platform?
The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is very good.
What needs improvement with Hortonworks Data Platform?
Areas for improvement with Cloudera Data Platform could be the initial learning curve that can be a step for teams new to big data economy systems. Platform setup and configuration require careful ...
What is your primary use case for Hortonworks Data Platform?
Cloudera Data Platform on AWS was adopted as the core enterprise data platform, covering the full data lifecycle from ingestion to analytics and advanced use cases. Cloudera Data Platform was used ...
What needs improvement with Spark SQL?
We do not have any performance problems, but we do have some resource problems. Spark SQL consumes so many resources that we migrated our streaming job from Spark to Apache Flink. Resource manageme...
What is your primary use case for Spark SQL?
Spark SQL has been in our stack for less than one year, though some of our colleagues are using it. It is a useful product for transformation jobs. We generally use Spark SQL for batch processing. ...
What advice do you have for others considering Spark SQL?
Regarding the Catalyst query optimizer, I think we are using it. We were using it in the past, but I am not certain if we use it now. We used it a long time ago. I rate my experience with Spark SQL...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
UC Berkeley AMPLab, Amazon, Alibaba Taobao, Kenshoo, Hitachi Solutions
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