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Databricks vs SAS Visual Analytics 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.5
Databricks offers cloud scalability and ease of use, but financial benefits and effectiveness depend on specific use cases.
Sentiment score
6.3
Organizations saw varied ROI from SAS Visual Analytics, noting improved efficiency and financial tracking despite initial cost challenges.
When it comes to big data processing, I prefer Databricks over other solutions.
For a lot of different tasks, including machine learning, it is a nice solution.
The enterprise subscription offers more benefits, ensuring valuable outcomes.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.2
Databricks offers highly rated, responsive support with clear documentation, proactive engagement, and multiple contact options, despite occasional delays.
Sentiment score
6.8
SAS Visual Analytics customer service is mixed, with praise for technical support but noted gaps in business needs and regional availability.
As of now, we are raising issues and they are providing solutions without any problems.
Whenever we reach out, they respond promptly.
I rate the technical support as fine because they have levels of technical support available, especially partners who get really good support from Databricks on new features.
They provide callbacks to ensure clarity and resolution of any queries.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Databricks offers seamless scalability across clouds, efficiently handling data sizes and increasing users, with praised ease and robust performance.
Sentiment score
7.8
SAS Visual Analytics effectively scales for large datasets and users, though high resource demands and expenses may concern some.
Databricks is an easily scalable platform.
I would rate the scalability of this solution as very high, about nine out of ten.
The patches have sometimes caused issues leading to our jobs being paused for about six hours.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Databricks is highly stable and reliable, despite minor issues, effectively managing large data volumes and supporting enterprise use.
Sentiment score
7.1
SAS Visual Analytics is generally reliable but can face performance issues with large data, often due to user practices.
They release patches that sometimes break our code.
Although it is too early to definitively state the platform's stability, we have not encountered any issues so far.
I would rate the stability of Databricks as highly stable, around nine out of ten.
SAS Visual Analytics is stable and manages data effectively without crashing.
 

Room For Improvement

Databricks needs an improved UI, better integration, affordable pricing, enhanced machine learning, and streamlined, collaborative features.
SAS Visual Analytics is complex and costly, with challenges in integration, performance, user-friendliness, and external language support.
We could use their job clusters, however, that increases costs, which is challenging for us as a startup.
If I could right-click to copy absolute paths or to read files directly into a data frame, it would standardize and simplify the process.
This feature, if made publicly available, may act as a game-changer, considering many global organizations use SAP data for their ERP requirements.
In terms of configuration, I would like to see AI capabilities since many applications are now integrating AI.
 

Setup Cost

Databricks pricing is usage-based and competitive, with mixed reviews regarding cost-effectiveness, especially for heavy data processing.
SAS Visual Analytics is costly for small enterprises, but offers strong analytics and simplicity, though consulting and scaling add expenses.
 

Valuable Features

Databricks offers a user-friendly interface, fast querying, multi-language support, and integrated AI for streamlined, collaborative data processing.
SAS Visual Analytics excels in data visualization, advanced analytics, and user-friendly interface with rapid processing and seamless integration.
Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed.
The Unity Catalog is for data governance, and the Delta Lake is to build the lakehouse.
The platform allows us to leverage cloud advantages effectively, enhancing our AI and ML projects.
In terms of reporting, it is easy to extract quick reports and provides graphical representations of the data, which is a great feature.
 

Categories and Ranking

Databricks
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
90
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (7th), Data Science Platforms (1st), Streaming Analytics (1st)
SAS Visual Analytics
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. Databricks is designed for Cloud Data Warehouse and holds a mindshare of 8.8%, up 3.7% compared to last year.
SAS Visual Analytics, on the other hand, focuses on Data Visualization, holds 4.2% mindshare, down 6.0% since last year.
Cloud Data Warehouse
Data Visualization
 

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.
Renato Vazamin - PeerSpot reviewer
Single environment for multiple phases saves us time, and has good visualizations
We had that solution installed previously in another solution, Selvaya, but I don't think we used it at the time. We are now using SAS Detect Investigation as a complementary solution, in which we have part of the process, use a gene, SAS collects information and identifies some business situations, and the business guys use Visual Analytics to explore the results of the process. We previously used the FICO platform, but we switched because FICO's pricing was not scalable. Bringing more data or workloads to the platform required a significant investment in order to scale. We needed to change because we have a lot of data to process every day. FICO was also a little more complicated than SAS Visual Analytics.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Government
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 do you like most about SAS Visual Analytics?
The most solution's notable aspect, in my view, is the ability to integrate various data sources and harness advanced technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. This helps w...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAS Visual Analytics?
It's about an average of five. It's easy to scale, but it comes with cost.
What needs improvement with SAS Visual Analytics?
In terms of configuration, I would like to see AI capabilities since many applications are now integrating AI. It may be that our current subscription does not include AI-enabled features, but I wo...
 

Also Known As

Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
SAS BI
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
Staples, Ausgrid, Scotiabank, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, Oklahoma Gas & Electric, Xcel Energy, and Triad Analytics Solutions.
Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Microsoft, Google and others in Cloud Data Warehouse. Updated: May 2025.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.