Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Databricks vs Saturn Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

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 Data Science Platforms
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
93
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (9th), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (5th), Streaming Analytics (1st)
Saturn Cloud
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
17th
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Data Science Platforms category, the mindshare of Databricks is 9.3%, down from 18.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Saturn Cloud is 0.7%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Science Platforms Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Databricks9.3%
Saturn Cloud0.7%
Other90.0%
Data Science Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

Satyam Wagh - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at Nice Software Solutions
Unified data workflows have cut ticket processing times and are driving faster business insights
Databricks already provides monthly updates and continuously works on delivering new features while enhancing existing ones. However, the platform could become easier to use. While instruction-led workshops are available, offering more free instructional workshops would allow a wider audience to access and learn about Databricks. Additionally, providing use cases would help beginners gain more knowledge and hands-on experience. Regarding my experience, I was initially unfamiliar with the platform and had to conduct research and learn through various videos. I did find some instruction-led classes, but several of those required payment. The platform should provide more free resources to enable a broader audience to access and learn about Databricks. The platform itself is user-friendly and easy to use without complex issues, so I believe it does not need improvement in its core functionality. Rather, supporting aspects can be enhanced.
Alessandro Trinca Tornidor - PeerSpot reviewer
Sviluppatore software at TeamSystem
Good for creating POCs, training machine learning models, and experimenting without local resources
The project I’m currently working on relies on CUDA, but my local PC does not have any Nvidia GPUs. I’ve found the computational resources and ease of use provided by Saturn Cloud invaluable. Also, there are many ready-to-use Docker images and a rich documentation portal with useful examples. The dashboard for creating a new virtual environment contains almost all the features I needed: environment variable definitions, git repositories cloning directly from the new resources page, and an edit field to define a custom script during the boot process. For this reason, Saturn Cloud.io is a very good solution for creating POCs, training machine learning models, and generally experimenting a bit without worrying about local resources.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"What I like about Databricks is that it's one of the most popular platforms that give access to folks who are trying not just to do exploratory work on the data but also go ahead and build advanced modeling and machine learning on top of that."
"The integration with Python and the notebooks really helps."
"Databricks is based on a Spark cluster and it is fast. Performance-wise, it is great."
"Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed."
"It helps integrate data science and machine learning capabilities."
"There are good features for turning off clusters."
"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."
"I like cloud scalability and data access for any type of user."
"Saturn Cloud supports GPU as part of the environment, which is essential for many computational tasks in machine learning projects. It also allows us to edit the environment, including the image, before we start the cloud resources. This feature lets us quickly set up the environment without the hassle of moving the data and code to another cloud device."
"It didn't take long to see that Saturn Cloud could scale with my needs, providing more resources when required."
"The feature I like the most about Saturn Cloud is that it has lightning-fast CPUs."
"It offered an excellent development environment while not touching our production cloud resources."
"They provide a centralized space for data, code, and results."
"There is plenty of computational resources (both GPU, CPU and disk space)."
 

Cons

"The connectivity with various BI tools could be improved, specifically the performance and real time integration."
"Databricks would benefit from enhanced metrics and tighter integration with Azure's diagnostics."
"This solution only supports queries in SQL and Python, which is a bit limiting."
"Databricks' technical support takes a while to respond and could be improved."
"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."
"The solution could be improved by adding a feature that would make it more user-friendly for our team. The feature is simple, but it would be useful. Currently, our team is more familiar with the language R, but Databricks requires the use of Jupyter Notebooks which primarily supports Python. We have tried using RStudio, but it is not a fully integrated solution. To fully utilize Databricks, we have to use the Jupyter interface. One feature that would make it easier for our team to adopt the Jupyter interface would be the ability to select a specific variable or line of code and execute it within a cell. This feature is available in other Jupyter Notebooks outside of Databricks and in our own IDE, but it is not currently available within Databricks. If this feature were added, it would make the transition to using Databricks much smoother for our team."
"It should have more compatible and more advanced visualization and machine learning libraries."
"Overall it's a good product, however, it doesn't do well against any individual best-of-breed products."
"My main suggestion for improvement centers on pricing. Introducing a tier modelled after AWS spot instances would be a game-changer."
"We'd like to have the capability for installing more libraries."
"It would be nice to have more hardware category options, like TPU coprocessors or ARM64 CPUs."
"Providing more detailed and beginner-friendly documentation, especially for advanced features, could greatly enhance the user experience."
"Saturn Cloud should include prebuilt images for advanced data science packages like LightGBM in the next release. If possible, they should also provide a Kaggle image, which contains the most common Python packages used in machine learning."
"Public Clouds integration and sandbox environments would be a true game changer."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is affordable."
"I do not exactly know the costs, but one of our clients pays between $100 USD and $200 USD monthly."
"The licensing costs of Databricks depend on how many licenses we need, depending on which Databricks provides a lot of discounts."
"It is an expensive tool. The licensing model is a pay-as-you-go one."
"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."
"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."
"We find Databricks to be very expensive, although this improved when we found out how to shut it down at night."
Information not available
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Science Platforms solutions are best for your needs.
881,665 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise56
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise3
 

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 Saturn Cloud?
There is plenty of computational resources (both GPU, CPU and disk space).
What needs improvement with Saturn Cloud?
My main suggestion for improvement centers on pricing. Introducing a tier modelled after AWS spot instances would be a game-changer. Users could bid on unused compute capacity, potentially leading ...
What is your primary use case for Saturn Cloud?
I'm leveraging a cloud-based platform for competitive machine learning. Tight deadlines and resource-intensive models demand powerful hardware. The cloud provides scalable GPUs and RAM, letting me ...
 

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
Nvidia, Snowflake, Kaggle, Faeth, Advantest, Stanford University, Senseye and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about Databricks vs. Saturn Cloud and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,665 professionals have used our research since 2012.