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Databricks vs Firebolt 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

Databricks
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
92
Ranking in other categories
Data Science Platforms (1st), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (5th), Streaming Analytics (1st)
Firebolt
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
16th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Databricks is 9.2%, up from 6.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Firebolt is 1.6%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Databricks9.2%
Firebolt1.6%
Other89.2%
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

SimonRobinson - PeerSpot reviewer
Governance And Engagement Lead
Improved data governance has enabled sensitive data tracking but cost management still needs work
I believe we could improve Databricks integration with cloud service providers. The impact of our current integration has not been particularly good, and it's becoming very expensive for us. The inefficiencies in our implementation, such as not shutting down warehouses when they're not in use or reserving the right number of credits, have led to increased costs. We made several beginner mistakes, such as not taking advantage of incremental loading and running overly complicated queries all the time. We should be using ETL tools to help us instead of doing it directly in Databricks. We need more experienced professionals to manage Databricks effectively, as it's not as forgiving as other platforms such as Snowflake. I think introducing customer repositories would facilitate easier implementation with Databricks.
Iqbal Hossain Raju - PeerSpot reviewer
Junior Software Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Can quickly query it to generate quick results
We have used Snowflake before. We support both. Firebolt has better performance, executing queries much quicker than Snowflake. However, Snowflake has more functionality. Depending on the client's needs, we can recommend the best option. Firebolt is a relatively new technology. Snowflake has many functionalities. Firebolt does not support unloading data to S3. There is no built-in way to do this in Firebolt. Alternatively, the data can be retrieved using API calls and loaded to S3 manually. Data can be unloaded to S3 directly using Snowflake. Firebolt significantly improves our performance over Snowflake because it takes less time to execute queries. This is especially important for our company because we use some KPIs that require fast loading times.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Databricks has a Unified Catalog that assists with secured access and governance."
"Databricks' most valuable feature is the data transformation through PySpark."
"Databricks has improved my organization by allowing us to transform data from sources to a different format and feed that to the analytics, business intelligence, and reporting teams. This tool makes it easy to do those kinds of things."
"The initial setup is pretty easy."
"The built-in optimization recommendations halved the speed of queries and allowed us to reach decision points and deliver insights very quickly."
"It's easy to increase performance as required."
"Having one solution for everything, from data engineering to machine learning, is beneficial since everything comes under one hood."
"Automation with Databricks is very easy when using the API."
"Firebolt is fast for analytical purposes. For example, we have analytical data in our data warehouse, and Firebolt can quickly query it to generate quick results."
 

Cons

"Databricks has added some alerts and query functionality into their SQL persona, but the whole SQL persona, which is like a role, needs a lot of development. The alerts are not very flexible, and the query interface itself is not as polished as the notebook interface that is used through the data science and machine learning persona. It is clunky at present."
"Databricks doesn't offer the use of Python scripts by itself and is not connected to GitHub repositories or anything similar. This is something that is missing. if they could integrate with Git tools it would be an advantage."
"The API deployment and model deployment are not easy on the Databricks side."
"I have had some issues with some of the Spark clusters running on Databricks, where the Spark runtime and clusters go up and down, which is an area for improvement."
"The API deployment and model deployment are not easy on the Databricks side."
"Can be improved by including drag-and-drop features."
"The product should incorporate more learning aspects. It needs to have a free trial version that the team can practice."
"Databricks would have more collaborative features than it has. It should have some more customization for the jobs."
"Firebolt's engine takes a long time to start because it needs to make engine calls."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Price-wise, I would rate Databricks a three out of five."
"I'm not involved in the financing, but I can say that the solution seemed reasonably priced compared to the competitors. Similar products are usually in the same price range. With five being affordable and one being expensive, I would rate Databricks a four out of five."
"We only pay for the Azure compute behind the solution."
"We have only incurred the cost of our AWS cloud services. This is because during this period, Databricks provided us with an extended evaluation period, and we have not spent much money yet. We are just starting to incur costs this month, I will know more later on the full cost perspective."
"My smallest project is around a hundred euros, and my most expensive is just under a thousand euros a week. That is based on terabytes of data processed each month."
"I am based in South Africa, where it is expensive adapting to the cloud, and then there is the price for the tool itself."
"The solution is based on a licensing model."
"Databricks are not costly when compared with other solutions' prices."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise56
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Which do you prefer - Databricks or Azure Machine Learning Studio?
Databricks gives you the option of working with several different languages, such as SQL, R, Scala, Apache Spark, or Python. It offers many different cluster choices and excellent integration with ...
How would you compare Databricks vs Amazon SageMaker?
We researched AWS SageMaker, but in the end, we chose Databricks. Databricks is a Unified Analytics Platform designed to accelerate innovation projects. It is based on Spark so it is very fast. It...
Which would you choose - Databricks or Azure Stream Analytics?
Databricks is an easy-to-set-up and versatile tool for data management, analysis, and business analytics. For analytics teams that have to interpret data to further the business goals of their orga...
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Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Microsoft, Teradata and others in Cloud Data Warehouse. Updated: January 2026.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.