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Databricks vs RStudio Connect 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
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
91
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (8th), Data Science Platforms (1st), Streaming Analytics (1st)
RStudio Connect
Average Rating
6.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (20th), Data Visualization (21st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. Databricks is designed for Cloud Data Warehouse and holds a mindshare of 8.5%, up 5.1% compared to last year.
RStudio Connect, on the other hand, focuses on Reporting, holds 0.4% mindshare, down 0.8% since last year.
Cloud Data Warehouse
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

ShubhamSharma7 - PeerSpot reviewer
Capability to integrate diverse coding languages in a single notebook greatly enhances workflow
Databricks offers various courses that I can use, whether it's PySpark, Scala, or R. I can leverage all these courses in a single notebook, which is beneficial for clients as they can access various tools in one place whenever needed. This is quite significant. I usually work with PySpark based on client requirements. After coding, I feed the Databricks notebooks into the ADF pipeline for updates. Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed. Furthermore, I can connect our Databricks notebook directly with Power BI and other visualization tools like Qlik. Once we develop code, it allows us to transform raw data into visualizations for clients using analysis diagrams, which is very helpful.
LM
Graphical learning experience needs improvement but handles large datasets effectively
RStudio Connect is very powerful statistically and can handle large datasets, even on a free version on a laptop. It offers excellent customer service and educational resources. KNIME allows for visual data manipulation, with nodes representing operations, making it user-friendly and effective for statistical analysis and predictions. I appreciate its ability to integrate R or Python scripts, combining ease of use with powerful procedures.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Easy to use and requires minimal coding and customizations."
"Databricks gives us the ability to build a lakehouse framework and do everything implicit to this type of database structure. We also like the ability to stream events. Databricks covers a broad spectrum, from reporting and machine learning to streaming events. It's important for us to have all these features in one platform."
"It's easy to increase performance as required."
"In the manufacturing industry, Databricks can be beneficial to use because of machine learning. It is useful for tasks, such as product analysis or predictive maintenance."
"The tool helps with data processing and analytics with large-scale data or big data since it is associated with managing data at a large scale."
"The processing capacity is tremendous in the database."
"I haven't heard about any major stability issues. At this time I feel like it's stable."
"The built-in optimization recommendations halved the speed of queries and allowed us to reach decision points and deliver insights very quickly."
"RStudio Connect is very powerful statistically and can handle large datasets, even on a free version on a laptop."
 

Cons

"We'd like a more visual dashboard for analysis It needs better UI."
"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."
"There should be better integration with other platforms."
"There has been a significant evolution in databases. One area of improvement is the Databricks File System (DBFS), where command-line challenges arise when accessing files."
"It's not easy to use, and they need a better UI."
"In the future, I would like to see Data Lake support. That is something that I'm looking forward to."
"When I used the support, I had communication problems because of the language barrier with the agent. The accent was difficult to understand."
"Doesn't provide a lot of credits or trial options."
"I rate my experience with RStudio Connect as average because I am not yet comfortable enough to provide a definitive assessment."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Databricks is a very expensive solution. Pricing is an area that could definitely be improved. They could provide a lower end compute and probably reduce the price."
"We pay as we go, so there isn't a fixed price. It's charged by the unit. I don't have any details detail about how they measure this, but it should be a mix between processing and quantity of data handled. We run a simulation based on our use cases, which gives us an estimate. We've been monitoring this, and the costs have met our expectations."
"Licensing on site I would counsel against, as on-site hardware issues tend to really delay and slow down delivery."
"Whenever we want to find the actual costing, we have to send an email to Databricks, so having the information available on the internet would be helpful."
"The cost is around $600,000 for 50 users."
"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."
"We find Databricks to be very expensive, although this improved when we found out how to shut it down at night."
"I am based in South Africa, where it is expensive adapting to the cloud, and then there is the price for the tool itself."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Government
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Healthcare Company
9%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for RStudio Connect?
Both KNIME and RStudio Connect are free to use on a laptop. However, if I want to use a big server version, it is subsidized.
What needs improvement with RStudio Connect?
It could work on visibility or improve that. In RStudio Connect ( /products/rstudio-connect-reviews ), the learning process is not as graphical as KNIME ( /products/knime-reviews ). Although I can ...
What is your primary use case for RStudio Connect?
I use the software primarily for statistics. I have used it on census data from the UK, which covers millions of individuals. Additionally, I have utilized it for surveys and educational purposes, ...
 

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
ENERGETIC INSURANCE, PRECISION ANALYTICS, REDFIN, TWO SIX CAPITALSTACK OVERFLOW, LIBERTY MUTUAL, EDUCATION SUPERHIGHWAY, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Microsoft, Google and others in Cloud Data Warehouse. Updated: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.