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

Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop vs Spark SQL 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudera Distribution for H...
Ranking in Hadoop
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
NoSQL Databases (11th)
Spark SQL
Ranking in Hadoop
4th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Hadoop category, the mindshare of Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop is 14.6%, down from 19.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spark SQL is 5.3%, down from 7.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Hadoop Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop14.6%
Spark SQL5.3%
Other80.1%
Hadoop
 

Featured Reviews

Rok Dolinsek - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Bussines Development & Co Owner at Troia d.o.o.
Enables on-premise implementation with powerful data processing capabilities
This is the only solution that is possible to install on-premise. Cloudera provides a hybrid solution that combines compute on cloud or on-premises. It includes all machine learning algorithms in the Spark machine learning library. All functionalities needed for a big data platform and ETL are on the platform, eliminating the need for other tools. It is scalable, ready for vertical scaling, and very powerful, offering numerous functionalities and configurations for generative AI.
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

"I like the combination of all the tools that allow me to provide solutions and enable me to solve the use cases I'm working on."
"The tool's most interesting features are the distributed file system and unstructured data processing capability. Because we have a lot of unstructured data, like XML and social media logs, these features make it more valuable than the usual data warehousing solutions."
"We had a data warehouse before all the data. We can process a lot more data structures."
"For enterprise organizations that can bear the cost, it's a good solution."
"It gives us the opportunity to offer more options to our clients and create better solution models."
"The solution is stable."
"The search function is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"It is helpful to gather and process data."
"The performance is one of the most important features, and it has an API to process the data in a functional manner."
"One of Spark SQL's most beautiful features is running parallel queries to go through enormous data."
"The scalability of the solution is good."
"The speed of getting data, as our TBs are big and it's a lot of data."
"This solution is useful to leverage within a distributed ecosystem."
"The team members don't have to learn a new language and can implement complex tasks very easily using only SQL."
"The stability was fine. It behaved as expected."
"Overall the solution is excellent."
 

Cons

"I had a bad experience connecting the Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop cluster to my other resources in the company, like the active directory or firewall."
"Cloudera is not as easy, as it requires more DevOps resources than other solutions."
"There is a maximum of a one-gigabyte block size, which is an area of storage that can be improved upon."
"The Data Science Workbench doesn't support multiple languages. It needs to support multiple programming languages."
"Cloudera CDH5.5.x does not support SparkR."
"The only thing that needs improvement is the cost, it's a very expensive solution and one of the main reasons companies are not attracted to the product."
"We found some difficulties when importing Hive tables from another cluster."
"The solution is not fit for on-premise distributions."
"Anything to improve the GUI would be helpful."
"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."
"Being a new user, I am not able to find out how to partition it correctly."
"There are many inconsistencies in syntax for the different querying tasks like selecting columns and joining between two tables so I'd like to see a more consistent syntax."
"In the next release, maybe the visualization of some command-line features could be added."
"The solution needs to include graphing capabilities. Including financial charts would help improve everything overall."
"Spark SQL consumes so many resources that we migrated our streaming job from Spark to Apache Flink."
"The initial setup is a bit complex."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is not expensive."
"The solution is expensive."
"The product’s price depends from project to project."
"I believe we pay for a three-year license."
"Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop is expensive, with support costs involved."
"The solution is fairly expensive."
"The price is very high. The solution is expensive."
"The price could be better for the product."
"We use the open-source version, so we do not have direct support from Apache."
"There is no license or subscription for this solution."
"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."
"The solution is bundled with Palantir Foundry at no extra charge."
"The solution is open-sourced and free."
"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."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Hadoop solutions are best for your needs.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing 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 Business16
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise32
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop?
The price for Cloudera is average, yet it is very good compared to other solutions. It can be deployed on-premises, unlike competitors' cloud-only solutions.
What needs improvement with Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop?
If they could support modifying the data more easily than the current implementation, it would be beneficial.
What is your primary use case for Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop?
We use Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop for many use cases including analytics, storing huge data sets, and various data processing tasks.
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

37signals, Adconion,adgooroo, Aggregate Knowledge, AMD, Apollo Group, Blackberry, Box, BT, CSC
UC Berkeley AMPLab, Amazon, Alibaba Taobao, Kenshoo, Hitachi Solutions
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop vs. Spark SQL and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.