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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

"Provides a viable open-source solution for enterprise implementations and reliable, intelligent data analysis."
"Cloudera Manager is the most valuable feature for its ease of use, features, ease of upgrade and install components."
"In terms of scalability, if you have enough hardware you can scale out. Scalability doesn't have any issues."
"Very solid. Excellent user experience. good documentation."
"The product is completely secure."
"Professional support enabled us to provide great customer service and our clients are able to perform proactive maintenance in an efficient manner."
"Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop provides numerous features and capabilities combined into one platform, offers power processing, supports different file systems and query engines, and provides parallel processing for handling many requests."
"Cloudera won as it had more functionality with HUE, Sqoop, and Solr as built-in functions."
"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."
"The speed of getting 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 stability was fine. It behaved as expected."
"The scalability of the solution is good."
"It is a stable solution."
"Speed is the major benefit of using Spark SQL."
"I find the Thrift connection valuable."
 

Cons

"I would like to see an improvement in how the solution helps me to handle the whole cluster."
"There are better solutions out there that have more features than this one."
"The Cloudera training is terrible."
"The one thing that we struggled with predominately was support. Because it was relatively new, support was always a big issue and I think it's still a bit of an ongoing concern with the team currently managing it."
"Currently, we are using many other tools such as Spark and Blade Job to improve the performance."
"They should focus on upgrading their technical capabilities in the market."
"Cloudera is not as easy, as it requires more DevOps resources than other solutions."
"This is a very expensive solution."
"The initial setup is a bit complex."
"The solution needs to include graphing capabilities. Including financial charts would help improve everything overall."
"It takes a bit of time to get used to using this solution versus Pandas as it has a steep learning curve."
"SparkUI could have more advanced versions of the performance and the queries and all."
"It would be useful if Spark SQL integrated with some data visualization tools."
"In the next release, maybe the visualization of some command-line features could be added."
"It would be beneficial for aggregate functions to include a code block or toolbox that explains its calculations or supported conditional statements."
"This solution could be improved by adding monitoring and integration for the EMR."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cloudera requires a license to use."
"I believe we pay for a three-year license."
"The solution is fairly expensive."
"I haven't bought a license for this solution. I'm only using the Apache license version."
"The price is very high. The solution is expensive."
"Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop is expensive, with support costs involved."
"I wouldn't recommend CDH to others because of its high cost."
"When comparing with Oracle Sybase and SQL, it's cheaper. It's not expensive."
"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."
"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 open-sourced and free."
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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.