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Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop vs Spark SQL 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

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 (12th)
Spark SQL
Ranking in Hadoop
5th
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 May 2026, in the Hadoop category, the mindshare of Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop is 14.8%, down from 25.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spark SQL is 5.3%, down from 10.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Hadoop Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop14.8%
Spark SQL5.3%
Other79.9%
Hadoop
 

Featured Reviews

SA
Head of Advaced Analytics & Intelligence; AGM at Alinma Bank
Integration of multiple features supports data analytics and processing
Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop provides numerous features and capabilities combined into one platform.The solution offers power processing and supports different file systems and query engines. It provides parallel processing for handling many requests. The platform includes role-based access control in Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop. It secures the data itself and provides users with different roles and privileges.
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

"Cloudera, as a whole, is designed to provide organizations with solutions for big data."
"We used it to build an enterprise data hub."
"For the clusters using CM, we are able to more tightly control and manage the configuration of all nodes in the clusters."
"We had a data warehouse before all the data. We can process a lot more data structures."
"The most valuable feature is Impala, the querying engine, which is very fast."
"Cloudera provides a hybrid solution that combines compute on cloud or on-premises."
"I don't see any performance issues."
"The product as a whole is good."
"Data validation and ease of use are the most valuable features."
"The team members don't have to learn a new language and can implement complex tasks very easily using only SQL."
"One of Spark SQL's most beautiful features is running parallel queries to go through enormous data."
"It is a stable solution."
"This solution is a much more scalable and adventurous solution."
"Offers a variety of methods to design queries and incorporates the regular SQL syntax within tasks."
"The solution is easy to understand if you have basic knowledge of SQL commands."
"Spark SQL's efficiency in managing distributed data and its simplicity in expressing complex operations make it an essential part of our data pipeline."
 

Cons

"The user infrastructure and user interface needs to be improved, as well as the performance. The GUI needs to be better."
"The price of this solution could be lowered."
"The procedure for operations could be simplified."
"The solution does not support multiple languages very well and this means users need to create work-arounds to implement some solutions."
"It could be faster and more user-friendly."
"The tool doesn't support reporting, and relational databases are still the major source of reporting data. Apache Iceberg will be launched soon within the Cloudera cluster for analytical purposes. The Cloudera Machine Learning aspect could be tuned and enhanced to enable us to host some predictive analytics machine learning and AI use cases."
"The Cloudera training is terrible."
"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."
"In the next release, maybe the visualization of some command-line features could be added."
"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."
"I've experienced some incompatibilities when using the Delta Lake format."
"This solution could be improved by adding monitoring and integration for the EMR."
"It takes a bit of time to get used to using this solution versus Pandas as it has a steep learning curve."
"The solution needs to include graphing capabilities. Including financial charts would help improve everything overall."
"It would be beneficial for aggregate functions to include a code block or toolbox that explains its calculations or supported conditional statements."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."
"It is an expensive product."
"The price is very high. The solution is expensive."
"I haven't bought a license for this solution. I'm only using the Apache license version."
"Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop is expensive, with support costs involved."
"The tool is not expensive."
"I believe we pay for a three-year license."
"I wouldn't recommend CDH to others because of its high cost."
"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."
"There is no license or subscription for this solution."
"The solution is bundled with Palantir Foundry at no extra charge."
"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
Financial Services Firm
23%
Marketing Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
20%
University
12%
Retailer
11%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise31
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: April 2026.
893,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.