Databricks
Ranked 5 of 9 cloud data warehouses by recommenders
People recommend it for easy-to-use managed Spark and Lakehouse tooling that developers like, with the most common caveat being high costs and vendor lock-in.
People recommend it for easy-to-use managed Spark and Lakehouse tooling that developers like, with the most common caveat being high costs and vendor lock-in.
40 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 20
- criticize it
- 20
- approval share
- 50%
Recommended in 10 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 20 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1 recommender for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 10 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Developers like it over other tools
“I have not come across anything that our developers (fresh grads up to seasoned Spark veterans) liked as much as Databricks.”
Comment from 16 Nov 2025 in “650GB of Data (Delta Lake on S3). Polars vs. DuckDB vs. Daft vs. Spark” “even compared to Databricks”
Comment from 5 Nov 2025 in “Pg_lake: Postgres with Iceberg and data lake access” Easy to use, click and go
“brings unstructured assets (multimodal data) ((video, audio, etc)) into the Lakehouse with the ease that we expect”
Comment from 28 Sep 2026 on Hacker News “Databricks still wins on ease-of-use: you just click and go.”
Comment from 19 Nov 2025 in “Apache Iceberg vs. Databricks – benchmarked” Access to many LLMs via API
“our Databricks instance exposes an API endpoint that provides access to a wide range of LLMs”
Comment from 15 Jan 2026 in “Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?” “I can compare them easily in the playground and govern them through unity AI gateway.”
Comment from 9 Jul 2026 in “Why the Next Era of AI Is About Infrastructure, Not Just Models” Early leader setting industry patterns
“They were early movers and established a lot of the patterns in the space, but I just don't see them holding on to this lead.”
Comment from 29 Oct 2026 in “MiniLake Is a Local Databricks API Emulator with SQL, Delta Lake and Spark” “databricks probably being the biggest success”
Comment from 24 May 2026 in “Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Costs rise, large bills
“All signs point to them ending up in the same situation with expensive DataBricks bills, vendor lock in”
Comment from 16 Apr 2026 in “Distributed DuckDB Instance” “Databricks markup is even higher ranging anywhere from 30% to 100% markup”
Comment from 16 Jan 2026 in “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (January 2026)” “DBUs start piling up. We smile, our boss smiles, Databricks smiles.”
Comment from 4 Nov 2025 on Hacker News - Comment from 14 Nov 2025 in “650GB of Data (Delta Lake on S3). Polars vs. DuckDB vs. Daft vs. Spark”
Vendor lock-in concerns
“Vendor lock-in is coming back in style (e.g. Databricks)”
Comment from 18 Dec 2025 in “Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work” “Databricks wants your enterprise on their platform. I dont think they particularly care about open source or the little guy.”
Comment from 7 Aug 2026 in “Databricks drove down AI coding spend 70%” “All signs point to them ending up in the same situation with expensive DataBricks bills, vendor lock in”
Comment from 16 Apr 2026 in “Distributed DuckDB Instance” Frequent renames and stack churn
“Databricks renames everything like every 6 months so keeping up with them is non-trivial”
Comment from 29 Oct 2026 in “MiniLake Is a Local Databricks API Emulator with SQL, Delta Lake and Spark” “Databricks will have you churning and changing everything on your stack every 18 months”
Comment from 14 Nov 2025 in “650GB of Data (Delta Lake on S3). Polars vs. DuckDB vs. Daft vs. Spark”
Other cloud data warehouses people recommend
The four most recommended other cloud data warehouses, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Palantir | 86 | 613 | 12% | 12 | — | — |
| Snowflake | 26 | 24 | 52% | 12 | — | — |
| Google BigQuery | 26 | 9 | 74% | 10 | — | Approved |
| Palantir Foundry | 21 | 31 | 40% | 8 | — | — |
| DatabricksThis page | 20 | 20 | 50% | 10 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 46 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“They were early movers and established a lot of the patterns in the space, but I just don't see them holding on to this lead.”
“Spark is such a headache to run that people would rather pay Databricks to do it for them.”
“Databricks renames everything like every 6 months so keeping up with them is non-trivial”
“Databricks is a furnace. It burns money.”
“I feel like we might have some a tech theranos on our hands here.”
“brings unstructured assets (multimodal data) ((video, audio, etc)) into the Lakehouse with the ease that we expect”
“i've actually used databricks and experienced their crap product”
“the cache is the dominating cost reduction force”
“I like Databricks. While cosplaying enterprise CTO, I've directed the purchase and heavy integration of their work for over a decade.”
“I've directed the purchase and heavy integration of their work for over a decade.”
“Databricks wants your enterprise on their platform. I dont think they particularly care about open source or the little guy.”
“half baked overly expensive platform”
“AI query generation is next to useless”
“The chargeback model for databricks is predatory at best.”
“Databricks implicitly saying no thanks for the foreseeable future did a lot of damage here”
“The fact Databricks doesn't care much about the language also did tremendous damage”
“It pivots every time there's a new technology and isn't really ever any good at any of them.”
“I can compare them easily in the playground and govern them through unity AI gateway.”
“marketing talkpoints from Databricks and friends to get people into paying for managed distributed systems”
“databricks probably being the biggest success”
“I'm using Jupyter notebooks in Databricks.”
“Snowflake and Databricks are printing money by making it a more user friendly experience”
“All signs point to them ending up in the same situation with expensive DataBricks bills, vendor lock in”
“The Databricks thing was a ploy.”
“chose a better software product to sell on their platform than what they had in house”
“it's nice to see some tools like data bricks that will at least let you reauth in a new tab”
“with no additonal compute markups, unlike EMR and Databricks”
“Databricks took six years before upgrading their proprietary Spark runtime to Scala 2.13.”
“Databricks markup is even higher ranging anywhere from 30% to 100% markup”
“our Databricks instance exposes an API endpoint that provides access to a wide range of LLMs”
“Databricks and Snowflake have really demonstrated ability to stay resilient”
“Vendor lock-in is coming back in style (e.g. Databricks)”
“Databricks still wins on ease-of-use: you just click and go.”
“Databricks has been losing more and more money and their evaluation just keeps rising.”
“I have not come across anything that our developers (fresh grads up to seasoned Spark veterans) liked as much as Databricks.”
“it was an order of magnitude more expensive than what they expected”
“Databricks will have you churning and changing everything on your stack every 18 months”
“they chose it for the same reasons big orgs use Microsoft: it comes out of a box and has a big company behind it”
“even compared to Databricks”
“DBUs start piling up. We smile, our boss smiles, Databricks smiles.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.