Databricks vs Spring Cloud Data Flow comparison

Databricks and VMware are both solutions in the Streaming Analytics category. Databricks is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.3, while VMware is ranked #9 with an average rating of 7.7. Databricks holds a 14.6% mindshare in SA, compared to VMware’s 5.0% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Databricks users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 88% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Databricks

Read 88 Databricks reviews

5,646 Views
4,053 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Spring Cloud Data Flow

Read 9 Spring Cloud Data Flow reviews

2,071 Views
1,552 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Databricks

Spring Cloud Data Flow

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Databricks and Spring Cloud Data Flow operate in the data processing and analytics domain. Databricks has a competitive edge due to its robust analytics capabilities and fast data processing integration with Python and Spark.

Features: Databricks supports large-scale analytics with built-in optimization recommendations for enhanced query performance and speed. The integration with Python and Spark provides fast data processing and machine learning capabilities. Its flexible use of programming languages and collaborative notebooks offer significant versatility. Spring Cloud Data Flow excels in microservices orchestration, dependency injection, and composability, ideal for flexible lightweight processing tasks.

Room for Improvement: Databricks could improve its visualization capabilities, enhance integration with tools like Power BI, and expand machine learning libraries. Users have noted its high cost and desire for more accessible technical documentation. Spring Cloud Data Flow could benefit from a better user interface, additional language support, and greater community engagement, along with improved documentation and dashboard features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Databricks supports deployments in public and hybrid clouds, praised for its responsive technical support, though communication may occasionally falter due to intermediary providers. Spring Cloud Data Flow is generally deployed on-premises or in private clouds, with clear documentation but less robust community support due to its open-source nature.

Pricing and ROI: Databricks operates on a pay-per-use model, often deemed expensive yet justified by its comprehensive features, with ROI experiences varying by cloud usage and scale. Spring Cloud Data Flow, as an open-source option, offers cost benefits, though official support incurs fees, aligning with its community-driven framework and offering good value in community editions.

To learn more, read our detailed Databricks vs. Spring Cloud Data Flow Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Databricks vs. Spring Cloud Data Flow

March 2025

Download the complete report

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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 Streaming Analytics

1st

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Data Warehouse (7th), Data Science Platforms (1st)

Spring Cloud Data Flow

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

9th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Integration (24th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Databricks is 14.6%, up from 10.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spring Cloud Data Flow is 5.0%, up from 4.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Streaming Analytics

Featured Reviews

ShubhamSharma7

Data Engineer at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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NitinGoyal

Engineering Lead at Naukri.com

Has a plug-and-play model and provides good robustness and scalability

The solution's community support could be improved. I don't know why the Spring Cloud Data Flow community is not very strong. Community support is very limited whenever you face any problem or are stuck somewhere. I'm not sure whether it has improved in the last six months because this pipeline was set up almost two years ago. I struggled with that a lot. For example, there was limited support whenever I got an exception and sought help from Stack Overflow or different forums. Interacting with Kubernetes needs a few certificates. You need to define all the certificates within your application. With the help of those certificates, your Java application or Spring Cloud Data Flow can interact with Kubernetes. I faced a lot of hurdles while placing those certificates. Despite following the official documentation to define all the replicas, readiness, and liveliness probes within the Spring Cloud Data Flow application, it was not working. So, I had to troubleshoot while digging in and debugging the internals of Spring Cloud Data Flow at that time. It was just a configuration mismatch, and I was doing nothing weird. There was a small spelling difference between how Spring Cloud Data Flow was expecting it and how I passed it. I was just following the official documentation.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"There are good features for turning off clusters."

"The initial setup phase of Databricks was good."

"The solution is built from Spark and has integration with MLflow, which is important for our use case."

"The processing capacity is tremendous in the database."

"Databricks' most valuable features are the workspace and notebooks. Its integration, interface, and documentation are also good."

"Databricks gives you the flexibility of using several programming languages independently or in combination to build models."

"I haven't heard about any major stability issues. At this time I feel like it's stable."

"Databricks is a unified solution that we can use for streaming. It is supporting open source languages, which are cloud-agnostic. When I do database coding if any other tool has a similar language pack to Excel or SQL, I can use the same knowledge, limiting the need to learn new things. It supports a lot of Python libraries where I can use some very easily."

More Databricks pros

"The dashboards in Spring Cloud Dataflow are quite valuable."

"The most valuable feature is real-time streaming."

"The ease of deployment on Kubernetes, the seamless integration for orchestration of various pipelines, and the visual dashboard that simplifies operations even for non-specialists such as quality analysts."

"The solution's most valuable feature is that it allows us to use different batch data sources, retrieve the data, and then do the data processing, after which we can convert and store it in the target."

"The product is very user-friendly."

"The most valuable features of Spring Cloud Data Flow are the simple programming model, integration, dependency Injection, and ability to do any injection. Additionally, auto-configuration is another important feature because we don't have to configure the database and or set up the boilerplate in the database in every project. The composability is good, we can create small workloads and compose them in any way we like."

"There are a lot of options in Spring Cloud. It's flexible in terms of how we can use it. It's a full infrastructure."

"The best thing I like about Spring Cloud Data Flow is its plug-and-play model."

Cons

"I believe that this product could be improved by becoming more user-friendly."

"Databricks may not be as easy to use as other tools, but if you simplify a tool too much, it won't have the flexibility to go in-depth. Databricks is completely in the programmer's hands. I prefer flexibility rather than simplicity."

"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."

"The product could be improved regarding the delay when switching to higher-performing virtual machines compared to other platforms."

"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."

"Databricks' performance when serving the data to an analytics tool isn't as good as Snowflake's."

"Databricks would benefit from enhanced metrics and tighter integration with Azure's diagnostics."

"Support for Microsoft technology and the compatibility with the .NET framework is somewhat missing."

More Databricks cons

"The configurations could be better. Some configurations are a little bit time-consuming in terms of trying to understand using the Spring Cloud documentation."

"The solution's community support could be improved."

"I would improve the dashboard features as they are not very user-friendly."

"Spring Cloud Data Flow is not an easy-to-use tool, so improvements are required."

"Spring Cloud Data Flow could improve the user interface. We can drag and drop in the application for the configuration and settings, and deploy it right from the UI, without having to run a CI/CD pipeline. However, that does not work with Kubernetes, it only works when we are working with jars as the Spring Cloud Data Flow applications."

"On the tool's online discussion forums, you may get stuck with an issue, making it an area where improvements are required."

"Some of the features, like the monitoring tools, are not very mature and are still evolving."

"There were instances of deployment pipelines getting stuck, and the dashboard not always accurately showing the application status, requiring manual intervention such as rerunning applications or refreshing the dashboard."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"The solution uses a pay-per-use model with an annual subscription fee or package. Typically this solution is used on a cloud platform, such as Azure or AWS, but more people are choosing Azure because the price is more reasonable."

"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."

"The pricing depends on the usage itself."

"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."

"There are different versions."

"We implement this solution on behalf of our customers who have their own Azure subscription and they pay for Databricks themselves. The pricing is more expensive if you have large volumes of data."

More Databricks pricing and cost advice

"The solution provides value for money, and we are currently using its community edition."

"If you want support from Spring Cloud Data Flow there is a fee. The Spring Framework is open-source and this is a free solution."

"This is an open-source product that can be used free of charge."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

26%

Computer Software Company

17%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

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 ...

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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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Spring Cloud Data Flow?

There were instances of deployment pipelines getting stuck, and the dashboard not always accurately showing the application status, requiring manual intervention such as rerunning applications or r...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Spring Cloud Data Flow?

We had a project for content management, which involved multiple applications each handling content ingestion, transformation, enrichment, and storage for different customers independently. We want...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Spring Cloud Data Flow?

I would definitely recommend Spring Cloud Data Flow. It requires minimal additional effort or time to understand how it works, and even non-specialists can use it effectively with its friendly docu...

See all answers

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Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 3% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Databricks

April 2025

Download Databricks product report

Buyer's Guide

Spring Cloud Data Flow

March 2025

Download Spring Cloud Data Flow product report

Also Known As

Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash

No data available

Overview

Databricks is utilized for advanced analytics, big data processing, machine learning models, ETL operations, data engineering, streaming analytics, and integrating multiple data sources.

Organizations leverage Databricks for predictive analysis, data pipelines, data science, and unifying data architectures. It is also used for consulting projects, financial reporting, and creating APIs. Industries like insurance, retail, manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals use Databricks for data management and analytics due to its user-friendly interface, built-in machine learning libraries, support for multiple programming languages, scalability, and fast processing.

What are the key features of Databricks?

User-friendly interface: Simplifies operations and usability.
Built-in machine learning libraries: Facilitates machine learning tasks.
Support for multiple programming languages: Enhances flexibility.
Scalability: Efficiently handles growing data needs.
Fast processing: Improves performance and speed.
Automated optimization: Reduces manual efforts.
Data visualization: Provides insightful visuals.
Collaborative features: Enhances teamwork.
Delta Lake performance: Boosts data management.
Seamless cluster management: Simplifies system operations.

What are the benefits or ROI to look for in Databricks reviews?

Efficiency in handling large datasets: Ensures smooth processing.
Interactive workspace environment: Improves user collaboration.
Integration with platforms: Provides connectivity benefits.
Performance optimization: Enhances overall system performance.
Support for data governance and security: Ensures data integrity and protection.

Databricks is implemented in insurance for risk analysis and claims processing; in retail for customer analytics and inventory management; in manufacturing for predictive maintenance and supply chain optimization; and in pharmaceuticals for drug discovery and patient data analysis. Users value its scalability, machine learning support, collaboration tools, and Delta Lake performance but seek improvements in visualization, pricing, and integration with BI tools.

Databricks

Spring Cloud Data Flow is a toolkit for building data integration and real-time data processing pipelines.
Pipelines consist of Spring Boot apps, built using the Spring Cloud Stream or Spring Cloud Task microservice frameworks. This makes Spring Cloud Data Flow suitable for a range of data processing use cases, from import/export to event streaming and predictive analytics. Use Spring Cloud Data Flow to connect your Enterprise to the Internet of Anything—mobile devices, sensors, wearables, automobiles, and more.

VMware

Sample Customers

Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Databricks vs. Spring Cloud Data Flow

March 2025

Free Report: Databricks vs. Spring Cloud Data Flow

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