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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 (10th)
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 June 2026, in the Hadoop category, the mindshare of Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop is 14.7%, down from 25.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spark SQL is 5.1%, down from 10.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Hadoop Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop14.7%
Spark SQL5.1%
Other80.2%
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

"Implement the free version as it provides enough services."
"We were able to utilize data which was untapped previously."
"Customer service and support were able to fix whatever the issue was."
"Cloudera is a very manageable solution with good support."
"We switched because Cloudera just works."
"Cloudera is always developing new tools and supports a wide range of tools."
"The product is completely secure."
"Cloudera is doing a great job in the field offering an enterprise ready data platform."
"Speed is the major benefit of using Spark SQL."
"The solution is easy to understand if you have basic knowledge of SQL commands."
"Spark SQL gives us a handful of methods to design queries based on its own syntax and also incorporates the regular SQL syntax within tasks."
"One of Spark SQL's most beautiful features is running parallel queries to go through enormous data."
"I find the Thrift connection valuable."
"Certain data sets that are very large are very difficult to process with Pandas and Python libraries. Spark SQL has helped us a lot with that."
"Overall the solution is excellent."
"This solution is useful to leverage within a distributed ecosystem."
 

Cons

"The security of this solution could be improved. There should also be a way to basically have a blockchain enabled storage with the HDFS."
"Sometimes the heavy queries do not finish at all."
"There are better solutions out there that have more features than this one."
"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."
"I subscribe to Cloudera to get an enterprise version but I have found that I can get some of its features from other vendors that would be at a lower cost than Cloudera."
"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."
"While the deployed product is generally functional, there are instances where it presents difficulties."
"The pricing needs to improve."
"I've experienced some incompatibilities when using the Delta Lake format."
"The initial setup is a bit complex."
"It would be beneficial for aggregate functions to include a code block or toolbox that explains its calculations or supported conditional statements."
"There should be better integration with other solutions."
"In the next release, maybe the visualization of some command-line features could be added."
"This solution could be improved by adding monitoring and integration for the EMR."
"Being a new user, I am not able to find out how to partition it correctly. I probably need more information or knowledge. In other database solutions, you can easily optimize all partitions. I haven't found a quicker way to do that in Spark SQL. It would be good if you don't need a partition here, and the system automatically partitions in the best way. They can also provide more educational resources for new users."
"Being a new user, I am not able to find out how to partition it correctly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an expensive product."
"The tool is not expensive."
"The product’s price depends from project to project."
"I wouldn't recommend CDH to others because of its high cost."
"The solution is expensive."
"Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop is expensive, with support costs involved."
"Cloudera requires a license to use."
"The price could be better for the product."
"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 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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Construction Company
10%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
21%
University
12%
Healthcare Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

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: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.