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Databricks vs VAST Data comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

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
94
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (4th), Data Science Platforms (1st), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (5th), Streaming Analytics (1st)
VAST Data
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (28th), File and Object Storage (19th), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Databricks and VAST Data aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Databricks is designed for Cloud Data Warehouse and holds a mindshare of 9.5%, up 8.9% compared to last year.
VAST Data, on the other hand, focuses on NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays, holds 5.9% mindshare, down 6.0% since last year.
Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Databricks9.5%
Snowflake15.3%
Teradata8.7%
Other66.5%
Cloud Data Warehouse
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VAST Data5.9%
Dell PowerStore13.8%
NetApp AFF11.0%
Other69.3%
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays
 

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.
Alan Powers - PeerSpot reviewer
HPC CTO at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Stability-wise, a device that has been up and running for years
The failover capability and resiliency are some of the solution's valuable features. The big thing is resilience because it has richer coding in it, so multiple devices can't fail. Also, one can still access a number of CBoxes that can allow one to access their file system. Once a device fails, it fails the transparency of the end-user, and it just starts using another resource. The encryption capability, the snapshots, along with a whole bunch of features make the tool valuable. VAST Data keeps adding more and more features all the time.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I work in the data science field and I found Databricks to be very useful."
"I like cloud scalability and data access for any type of user."
"Databricks is quite easy to use and requires less coding and customizations than a solution like AWS SageMaker, enabling more people to efficiently build and host their ML code while leveraging the already integrated MLflow to track and monitor all our different experiments."
"One of the features provides nice interactive clusters, or compute instances that you don't really need to manage often."
"The solution is built from Spark and has integration with MLflow, which is important for our use case."
"Databricks' most valuable feature is the data transformation through PySpark."
"You can spin up an Azure Databricks clustered, and integrating with it is seamless."
"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."
"This has been one of the most reliable storage systems that I have ever used."
"The solution is useful for machine learning and scientific applications, including computer simulations."
 

Cons

"I think the automatic categorization of variables needs to be improved; the current functionality is not always efficiently identifying the features of the data that is collected."
"Cluster failure is one of the biggest weaknesses I notice in our Databricks."
"The solution is not exactly stable. We've faced a few bugs which have really affected it, especially when it comes to connecting with Spark."
"Databricks could improve in some of its functionality."
"I think the aspects of Databricks that should be improved are that it could be faster and that I would like to be able to run direct queries from the server."
"A lot of people are required to manage this solution."
"The product should provide more advanced features in future releases."
"The interface of Databricks could be easier to use when compared to other solutions. It is not easy for non-data scientists. The user interface is important before we had to write code manually and as solutions move to "No code AI" it is critical that the interface is very good."
"The write performance could be improved because it is less than half of the read performance."
"The read/write ratio is an area in the solution with some flaws and needs improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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 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."
"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 cost is around $600,000 for 50 users."
"The product pricing is moderate."
"We find Databricks to be very expensive, although this improved when we found out how to shut it down at night."
"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."
"We acquired VAST Data as a one-time, capital purchase."
"Price-wise, VAST Data is not the cheapest, not the most expensive one."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
6%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise58
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...
Ask a question
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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
Norwest Venture Partners, General Dynamics Information Technology, Ginkgo Bioworks
Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Teradata, Google and others in Cloud Data Warehouse. Updated: July 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.