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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 (9th)
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 August 2026, in the Hadoop category, the mindshare of Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop is 14.4%, down from 23.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spark SQL is 5.1%, down from 10.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Hadoop Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop14.4%
Spark SQL5.1%
Other80.5%
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

"I am very comfortable with this product."
"Implementing a Hadoop cluster has become relatively straight-forward using CDH."
"Cloudera is always developing new tools and supports a wide range of tools."
"The most valuable feature is Impala, the querying engine, which is very fast."
"Improved Business Intelligence reporting from daily to every two hours satisfying the business stakeholders who would favour transactional systems to draft reports because it had the latest data."
"It has been helpful in allowing data storage in one centralized location with data lakes and all of the surrounding applications."
"It gives us the opportunity to offer more options to our clients and create better solution models."
"With a cluster available, you can manage the security layer using the shared SDX - it provides flexibility."
"Speed is the major benefit of using Spark SQL."
"Overall the solution is excellent."
"Data validation and ease of use are the most valuable features."
"The scalability of the solution is good."
"The stability was fine. It behaved as expected."
"One of Spark SQL's most beautiful features is running parallel queries to go through enormous data."
"It is a stable solution."
"The speed of getting data."
 

Cons

"The tool's ability to be deployed on a cloud model is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"There is a maximum of a one-gigabyte block size, which is an area of storage that can be improved upon."
"The Cloudera training is terrible."
"The areas of improvement depend on the scale of the project. For banking customers, security features and an essential budget for commercial licenses would be the top priority. Data regulation could be the most crucial for a project with extensive data or an extra use case."
"Currently, we are using many other tools such as Spark and Blade Job to improve the performance."
"It could be faster and more user-friendly."
"Cloudera CDH5.5.x does not support SparkR."
"The Data Science Workbench doesn't support multiple languages. It needs to support multiple programming languages."
"It takes a bit of time to get used to using this solution versus Pandas as it has a steep learning curve."
"It would be useful if Spark SQL integrated with some data visualization tools."
"There should be better integration with other solutions."
"Spark SQL consumes so many resources that we migrated our streaming job from Spark to Apache Flink."
"In terms of improvement, the only thing that could be enhanced is the stability aspect of Spark SQL."
"SparkUI could have more advanced versions of the performance and the queries and all."
"It would be beneficial for aggregate functions to include a code block or toolbox that explains its calculations or supported conditional statements."
"I've experienced some incompatibilities when using the Delta Lake format."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop is expensive, with support costs involved."
"The price could be better for the product."
"The product’s price depends from project to project."
"The tool is not expensive."
"The pricing must be improved."
"I haven't bought a license for this solution. I'm only using the Apache license version."
"I wouldn't recommend CDH to others because of its high cost."
"The solution is fairly expensive."
"The solution is open-sourced and free."
"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."
"We use the open-source version, so we do not have direct support from Apache."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
22%
University
11%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

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: August 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.