Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Databricks VS Amazon SageMaker

Compare Databricks VS Amazon SageMaker and see what are their differences

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Databricks logo Databricks

Databricks provides a Unified Analytics Platform that accelerates innovation by unifying data science, engineering and business.‎What is Apache Spark?

Amazon SageMaker logo Amazon SageMaker

Amazon SageMaker provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly.
  • Databricks Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-14
  • Amazon SageMaker Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-15

Databricks features and specs

  • Unified Data Analytics Platform
    Databricks integrates various data processing and analytics tools, offering a unified environment for data engineering, machine learning, and business analytics. This integration can streamline workflows and reduce the complexity of data management.
  • Scalability
    Databricks leverages Apache Spark and other scalable technologies to handle large datasets and high computational workloads efficiently. This makes it suitable for enterprises with significant data processing needs.
  • Collaborative Environment
    The platform offers collaborative notebooks that allow data scientists, engineers, and analysts to work together in real-time. This enhances productivity and fosters better communication within teams.
  • Performance Optimization
    Databricks includes various performance optimization features such as caching, indexing, and query optimization, which can significantly speed up data processing tasks.
  • Support for Various Data Formats
    The platform supports a wide range of data formats and sources, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, making it versatile and adaptable to different use cases.
  • Integration with Cloud Providers
    Databricks is designed to work seamlessly with major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, allowing users to easily integrate it into their existing cloud infrastructure.

Possible disadvantages of Databricks

  • Cost
    Databricks can be expensive, especially for large-scale deployments or high-frequency usage. It may not be the most cost-effective solution for smaller organizations or projects with limited budgets.
  • Complexity
    While powerful, Databricks can be complex to set up and manage, requiring specialized knowledge in Apache Spark and cloud infrastructure. This might lead to a steeper learning curve for new users.
  • Dependency on Cloud Providers
    Being heavily integrated with cloud providers, Databricks might face issues like vendor lock-in, where switching providers becomes difficult or costly.
  • Limited Offline Capabilities
    Databricks is primarily designed for cloud environments, which means offline or on-premise capabilities are limited, posing challenges for organizations with strict data governance policies.
  • Resource Management
    Efficiently managing and allocating resources can be challenging in Databricks, especially in large multi-user environments. Mismanagement of resources could lead to increased costs and reduced performance.

Amazon SageMaker features and specs

  • Fully Managed Service
    Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that eliminates the heavy lifting involved with setting up and maintaining infrastructure for machine learning. This allows data scientists and developers to focus on building and deploying machine learning models without worrying about underlying servers or infrastructure.
  • Scalability
    Amazon SageMaker provides scalable resources that can automatically adjust to the needs of your workload, ensuring that you can handle anything from small-scale experimentation to large-scale production deployments.
  • Integrated Development Environment
    SageMaker includes a built-in Jupyter notebook interface, which makes it straightforward for data scientists to write code, visualize data, and run experiments interactively without leaving the platform.
  • Support for Popular Machine Learning Frameworks
    SageMaker supports popular frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, Apache MXNet, and more. It also provides pre-built algorithms that can be used out-of-the-box, offering flexibility in choosing the right tool for your ML tasks.
  • Automatic Model Tuning
    SageMaker includes hyperparameter tuning capabilities that automate the process of finding the best set of hyperparameters for your model, thus saving significant time and computational resources.
  • Advanced Security Features
    SageMaker integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for fine-grained access control, supports encryption of data at rest and in transit, and complies with various security standards, ensuring that your machine learning projects are secure.
  • Cost Management
    With SageMaker, you only pay for what you use. This pay-as-you-go pricing model allows for better cost management and optimization, making it a cost-effective solution for various machine learning workloads.

Possible disadvantages of Amazon SageMaker

  • Complexity for New Users
    The plethora of features and options available in SageMaker can be overwhelming for beginners who are new to machine learning or the AWS ecosystem. It might require a steep learning curve to become proficient in using the platform effectively.
  • Vendor Lock-In
    Using Amazon SageMaker ties you to the AWS ecosystem, which can be a disadvantage if you want flexibility in switching between different cloud providers. Migrating models and workflows from SageMaker to another platform could be challenging.
  • Cost Management Challenges
    While SageMaker offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model, the costs can quickly add up, especially for large-scale or long-running tasks. It may require diligent monitoring and optimization to avoid unexpectedly high bills.
  • Resource Limitations
    While SageMaker is highly scalable, there are certain resource limits (like instance types and quotas) that might be restrictive for very high-demand or specialized machine learning tasks. These limits could potentially hinder the flexibility you get from an on-premises or custom deployed solution.
  • Integration Complexity
    Integrating SageMaker with other tools and systems within your workflow might require additional development effort. Custom integrations can be complex and could involve additional overhead to set up and maintain.

Databricks videos

Introduction to Databricks

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Azure Databricks Tutorial | Data transformations at scale
  • Review - Databricks - Data Movement and Query

Amazon SageMaker videos

Build, Train and Deploy Machine Learning Models on AWS with Amazon SageMaker - AWS Online Tech Talks

More videos:

  • Review - An overview of Amazon SageMaker (November 2017)

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Databricks and Amazon SageMaker)
Data Dashboard
100 100%
0% 0
Data Science And Machine Learning
Database Tools
100 100%
0% 0
AI
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Databricks and Amazon SageMaker

Databricks Reviews

Jupyter Notebook & 10 Alternatives: Data Notebook Review [2023]
Databricks notebooks are a popular tool for developing code and presenting findings in data science and machine learning. Databricks Notebooks support real-time multilingual coauthoring, automatic versioning, and built-in data visualizations.
Source: lakefs.io
7 best Colab alternatives in 2023
Databricks is a platform built around Apache Spark, an open-source, distributed computing system. The Databricks Community Edition offers a collaborative workspace where users can create Jupyter notebooks. Although it doesn't offer free GPU resources, it's an excellent tool for distributed data processing and big data analytics.
Source: deepnote.com
Top 5 Cloud Data Warehouses in 2023
Jan 11, 2023 The 5 best cloud data warehouse solutions in 2023Google BigQuerySource: https://cloud.google.com/bigqueryBest for:Top features:Pros:Cons:Pricing:SnowflakeBest for:Top features:Pros:Cons:Pricing:Amazon RedshiftSource: https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/Best for:Top features:Pros:Cons:Pricing:FireboltSource: https://www.firebolt.io/Best for:Top...
Top 10 AWS ETL Tools and How to Choose the Best One | Visual Flow
Databricks is a simple, fast, and collaborative analytics platform based on Apache Spark with ETL capabilities. It accelerates innovation by bringing together data science and data science businesses. It is a fully managed open-source version of Apache Spark analytics with optimized connectors to storage platforms for the fastest data access.
Source: visual-flow.com
Top Big Data Tools For 2021
Now Azure Databricks achieves 50 times better performance thanks to a highly optimized version of Spark. Databricks also enables real-time co-authoring and automates versioning. Besides, it features runtimes optimized for machine learning that include many popular libraries, such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras, etc.

Amazon SageMaker Reviews

7 best Colab alternatives in 2023
Amazon SageMaker Studio is a fully integrated development environment (IDE) for machine learning. It allows users to write code, track experiments, visualize data, and perform debugging and monitoring all within a single, integrated visual interface, making the process of developing, testing, and deploying models much more manageable.
Source: deepnote.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Amazon SageMaker should be more popular than Databricks. It has been mentiond 44 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Databricks mentions (18)

  • Platform Engineering Abstraction: How to Scale IaC for Enterprise
    Vendors like Confluent, Snowflake, Databricks, and dbt are improving the developer experience with more automation and integrations, but they often operate independently. This fragmentation makes standardizing multi-directional integrations across identity and access management, data governance, security, and cost control even more challenging. Developing a standardized, secure, and scalable solution for... - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • dolly-v2-12b
    Dolly-v2-12bis a 12 billion parameter causal language model created by Databricks that is derived from EleutherAI’s Pythia-12b and fine-tuned on a ~15K record instruction corpus generated by Databricks employees and released under a permissive license (CC-BY-SA). Source: about 2 years ago
  • Clickstream data analysis with Databricks and Redpanda
    Global organizations need a way to process the massive amounts of data they produce for real-time decision making. They often utilize event-streaming tools like Redpanda with stream-processing tools like Databricks for this purpose. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • DeWitt Clause, or Can You Benchmark %DATABASE% and Get Away With It
    Databricks, a data lakehouse company founded by the creators of Apache Spark, published a blog post claiming that it set a new data warehousing performance record in 100 TB TPC-DS benchmark. It was also mentioned that Databricks was 2.7x faster and 12x better in terms of price performance compared to Snowflake. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
  • A Quick Start to Databricks on AWS
    Go to Databricks and click the Try Databricks button. Fill in the form and Select AWS as your desired platform afterward. - Source: dev.to / about 3 years ago
View more

Amazon SageMaker mentions (44)

  • Dashboard for Researchers & Geneticists: Functional Requirements [System Design]
    Leverage Amazon SageMaker: For machine learning (ML) tasks, users can leverage Amazon SageMaker to analyze large datasets and build predictive models. - Source: dev.to / 18 days ago
  • Address Common Machine Learning Challenges With Managed MLflow
    MLflow, an Apache 2.0-licensed open-source platform, addresses these issues by providing tools and APIs for tracking experiments, logging parameters, recording metrics and managing model versions. It also helps to address common machine learning challenges, including efficiently tracking, managing, deploying ML models and enhancing workflows across different ML tasks. Amazon SageMaker with MLflow offers secure... - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • How I suffered my first burnout as software developer
    Our first task for the client was to evaluate various MLOps solutions available on the market. Over the summer of 2022, we conducted small proofs-of-concept with platforms like Amazon SageMaker, Iguazio (the developer of MLRun), and Valohai. However, because we weren’t collaborating directly with the teams we were supposed to support, these proofs-of-concept were limited. Instead of using real datasets or models... - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • 👋🏻Goodbye Power BI! 📊 In 2025 Build AI/ML Dashboards Entirely Within Python 🤖
    Taipy’s ecosystem doesn’t stop at dashboards. With Taipy you can orchestrate data workflows and create advanced user interfaces. Besides, the platform supports every stage of building enterprise-grade applications. Additionally, Taipy’s integration with leading platforms such as Databricks, Snowflake, IBM WatsonX, and Amazon SageMaker ensures compatibility with your existing data infrastructure. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Understanding the MLOps Lifecycle
    Based on your technological stack, various services are used to deploy machine learning models. Some popular services are AWS Sagemaker, Azure Machine Learning, Vertex AI, and many others. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Databricks and Amazon SageMaker, you can also consider the following products

Google BigQuery - A fully managed data warehouse for large-scale data analytics.

IBM Watson Studio - Learn more about Watson Studio. Increase productivity by giving your team a single environment to work with the best of open source and IBM software, to build and deploy an AI solution.

Looker - Looker makes it easy for analysts to create and curate custom data experiences—so everyone in the business can explore the data that matters to them, in the context that makes it truly meaningful.

TensorFlow - TensorFlow is an open-source machine learning framework designed and published by Google. It tracks data flow graphs over time. Nodes in the data flow graphs represent machine learning algorithms. Read more about TensorFlow.

Jupyter - Project Jupyter exists to develop open-source software, open-standards, and services for interactive computing across dozens of programming languages. Ready to get started? Try it in your browser Install the Notebook.

Azure Machine Learning Studio - Azure Machine Learning Studio is a GUI-based integrated development environment for constructing and operationalizing Machine Learning workflow on Azure.