Databricks
A lakehouse platform combining data engineering, SQL warehousing and machine learning on your cloud.
- Verified facts
- 4 of 4
- Alternatives ranked
- 3
- Approved reviews
- 0
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About Databricks
Databricks is a data and AI platform built around the lakehouse idea: data stays in open formats such as Delta Lake and Parquet in your own cloud storage, and Databricks provides the compute and tools on top. It was founded by the creators of Apache Spark, and Spark-based data engineering remains its core, alongside Databricks SQL warehouses for BI, collaborative notebooks, MLflow for machine learning, and Unity Catalog for governance. It runs on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, and is aimed at data engineering and data science teams in mid-sized and large organisations. Pricing is pay-as-you-go in Databricks Units (DBUs), a normalised measure of processing, and on most clouds you also pay the cloud provider separately for the underlying virtual machines. A free trial is available. It is more of a platform to learn than a plain SQL warehouse, which makes it heavier than needed for teams that only want dashboards.
Best for: Data engineering and ML teams that want SQL, Spark and model training on one platform.
Pros and cons
What works
- Data stays in open formats in your own cloud storage
- Covers ETL, SQL analytics and machine learning in one place
- Available on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud
Why people leave
- Billing in DBUs plus separate cloud compute charges is hard to predict
- Steeper learning curve than a pure SQL warehouse
- Overkill for teams that only need BI dashboards
Top Databricks alternatives
See all 3- 1
Snowflake66.5Simpler to run for SQL-first analytics teams, with less cluster and runtime configuration.
- 2
Google BigQuery62.6Serverless with nothing to configure, and cheaper for occasional queries thanks to its free allowance.
- 3
ClickHouse59.6Open source and far faster for real-time analytical queries if Spark and ML tooling aren't needed.
Why people left Databricks
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Databricks: common questions
Is Databricks free?
No, Databricks is a paid product.
Is Databricks open source?
No, Databricks is not open source.
What platforms does Databricks run on?
Databricks is available for Web.
What are the best alternatives to Databricks?
The highest-ranked Databricks alternatives right now are Snowflake, Google BigQuery and ClickHouse. See the full ranked list for pricing, platforms and verified facts.