Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) vs. Apache Hadoop

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon EMR
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Amazon EMR is a cloud-native big data platform for processing vast amounts of data quickly, at scale. Using open source tools such as Apache Spark, Apache Hive, Apache HBase, Apache Flink, Apache Hudi (Incubating), and Presto, coupled with the scalability of Amazon EC2 and scalable storage of Amazon S3, EMR gives analytical teams the engines and elasticity to run Petabyte-scale analysis.N/A
Hadoop
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Hadoop is an open source software from Apache, supporting distributed processing and data storage. Hadoop is popular for its scalability, reliability, and functionality available across commoditized hardware.N/A
Pricing
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)Apache Hadoop
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon EMRHadoop
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)Apache Hadoop
Considered Both Products
Amazon EMR
Chose Amazon EMR
Snowflake is a lot easier to get started with than the other options. Snowflake's data lake building capabilities are far more powerful. Although Amazon EMR isn't our first pick, we've had an excellent experience with EC2 and S3. Because of our current API interfaces, it made …
Chose Amazon EMR
1. Amazon EMR was faster than Google BigQuery and this made a difference when the amount of data was really large.
2. Amazon EMR was costlier than Google BigQuery so it was difficult to manage budget.
3. Amazon EMR has excellent integrations with other technologies.
Chose Amazon EMR
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) compares well against Microsoft Azure and Microsoft SQL servers in terms of performance and ease of use. This also means you pay more for the service. Amazon EMR is a great tool for handling large amounts of data. SQL Server would be a better …
Chose Amazon EMR
Compared to IBM Analytics Engine, Amazon EMR is a much cheaper option to get the work down. And compared to Alluxio, Amazon EMR is much more user-friendly. The drawback is that amazon EMR would be very costly if the run failed.
Chose Amazon EMR
Good choice for startup, open source and cost-effective and saves a lot of setup time.
Run times are reduced to minutes compared to hours on EC2 or other compute servers.
Easy to choose between hadoop or spark based EMR cluster, it can be used in combination with other AWS …
Chose Amazon EMR
Amazon EMR (Elastic Map Reduce) compares well against GCP and Azure - but you need to be careful of the costs involved in spinning up such a cluster. It is easy to configure however and it is my preferred platform to deploy our solutions because of its ease of use.
Chose Amazon EMR
Apache Hadoop required us to do all the leg work and we did not have the resources for that. It was ideal that AWS offers a MapReduce solution as we use it to host various servers. It is one place for all our needs. Very convenient. Apache Hadoop is still a good product but …
Chose Amazon EMR
Compared to Databricks, Amazon EMR is a much cheaper option to get the work down. And compared to Amazon ec2, Amazon EMR is a much more powerful tool to get large datasets transformation down in a fairly short amount of time. The drawback is that amazon EMR would be very costly …
Chose Amazon EMR
Amazon EMR is faster, cheaper, easier, and enjoyed more by our employees compared to Azure HDInsight. We selected Amazon because we saw an advertisement and wanted to try it out to see how it was. We will continue to use it until it is not around or until we find something that …
Chose Amazon EMR
EMR is more suited for developers. Databricks feel more for data science-oriented with its notebooks and customs visualizations. With EMR you can more easily add additional capacity on-damnd on the instance. With others is a more cumbersome process. And then, you can also …
Chose Amazon EMR
The alternatives to EMR are mainly hadoop distributions owned by the 3 companies above. I have not used the other distributions so it is difficult to comment, but the general tradeoff is, at the cost of a longer setup time and more infra management, you get more flexible …
Chose Amazon EMR
Having one of these enterprise edition license comes at its own costs. But, the flexibility to have the cluster spin up with the workbenches and code snippets on the same is really beneficial. Especially, if one had to move out of EMR and consider an option which reduces the …
Chose Amazon EMR
EMR provides dynamic cluster size, lots of documentation, and integration with other Amazon Web Services which are some of the things that Cloudera distribution for Hadoop lacked. Some products are hard to learn but EMR was much easier and helped save time spent on trying to …
Hadoop
Chose Hadoop
It’s open source nature
it’s community support
its being configurable
Chose Hadoop
Different departments of my organization have been getting the benefit from Apache Hadoop as it serves the purpose of saving lives when large amounts of data is unable to be converted and processed in a timely manner from a node or a simple computer. Hadoop also has an easier …
Chose Hadoop
I feel that this is a highly reliable and scalable solution computing technology that is highly capable of processing large data sets across multiple servers and thousands of machines in a well-defined and distributed manner. Apache Hadoop can automatically scale up the number …
Chose Hadoop
Spark is a good alternative to Hadoop that can have faster querying and processing performance and can offer more flexibility in terms of applications that it can support.

Google Bigquery has also been a great alternative and is especially great in terms of ease of use. The …
Chose Hadoop
MariaDB - Better to be already in the cloud you will use it for. Issues have improved as it has matured over the year.s
CockroachDB - Not nearly as performant (even out of the box) as Apache Hadoop. More configurations required just to make it work. In memory cacheing is an issue.
Chose Hadoop
Hadoop utilizes a SQL structure, which is great. You pay less for the services, but it's definitely less of an enterprise-level option and more just a good place to store your seldom-used data. Teradata and AWS are a lot faster in returning queries than Hadoop, but you pay …
Chose Hadoop
Hands down, Hadoop is less expensive than the other platforms we considered. Cloudera was easier to set up but the expense ruled it out. MS-SQL didn't have the performance we saw with the Hadoop clusters and was more expensive. We considered MS-SQL mainly for its ability …
Chose Hadoop
When comparing to the sophistication of IBM GPFS (Spectrum Scale) to Hadoop, it is clear that Spectrum Scale is a much better choice. That is maybe something you don't want to hear, but in all of our research, this has been the final decision of the client.
Chose Hadoop
Apache Spark can be considered as an alternative because of its similar capabilities around processing and storing big data. The reason we went with Hadoop was the literature available online and integration capability with platforms like R Studio. The popularity of Hadoop has …
Chose Hadoop
  • For real-time streaming, use Spark; can provide a stark contrast to the way MR works
  • Hadoop offers a scalable, cost-effective and highly available solution for big data storage and processing.
  • Amazon Redshift is somewhat closer to Hadoop. But to analyze Petabytes of data Hadoop …
Chose Hadoop
Hadoop offers a scalable, cost-effective and highly available solution for big data storage and processing. The use of a non-proprietary physical layer greatly reduces dependency on technology. It also offers elastic dimensioning capability when deployed on virtual machines or …
Chose Hadoop
I haven't worked with other Big Data aggregation services like Hadoop. As far as I know, Hadoop is the leading choice in this field with good cause. There is a lot of community support, custom modules, paid consultants, free and paid training. All this makes it an ideal choice …
Chose Hadoop
No SQL database were evaluated along with MPP platform. Hadoop performs very well compared to the other platforms. Also since lot of investment goes into Hadoop there is a good chance of getting what one needs from the developer community.
Chose Hadoop
Amazon Redshift is some what closer to Hadoop. But to analyze Petabytes of data Hadoop as better performance.
Chose Hadoop
As I am new to the hadoop ecosystem I have not used or evaluated any other similar products at this time. This was handed to me from a previous much older installation that was very under utilized. Our new platform will be working the new cluster much harder with jobs that run …
Chose Hadoop
Hadoop was a cheaper alternative to Amazon. Since I had to pay for every minute I use with Amazon, I had to make sure multiple times that the code was good enough before I purchased with Amazon. But since Hadoop was available on the cluster, I had the opportunity to code on the …
Chose Hadoop
Hadoop being open source, is cheaper to use and do POCs for clients. Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR also compete to contribute to open source Hadoop and keep their product conceptually similar to Hadoop.
Chose Hadoop
Apache Spark has an in memory processing model, making it powerful for lightning fast data processing. Apache Spark also exposes Scala and Python in APIs which is one of the most commonly used programming languages in data analytic and data processing domains.
Chose Hadoop
Not used any other product than Hadoop and I don't think our company will switch to any other product, as Hadoop is providing excellent results. Our company is growing rapidly, Hadoop helps to keep up our performance and meet customer expectations. We also use HDFS which …
Chose Hadoop
Hadoop provides storage for large data sets and a powerful processing model to crunch and transform huge amounts of data. It does not assume the underlying hardware or infrastructure and enables the users to build data processing infrastructure from commodity hardware. All the …
Chose Hadoop
Processing of big data has been the ultimate need for the me choosing Hadoop. Big data is massive and messy, and it’s coming at you uncontrolled. Data are gathered to be analyzed to discover patterns and correlations that could not be initially apparent, but might be useful in …
Chose Hadoop
Hadoop solves lot of problems (involving unstructured data and huge volumes of data ) better than traditional database systems . And it is completely free and open source ( so lots of cost savings ). Data analysis is very fast when compared to old systems, resulting in more …
Best Alternatives
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)Apache Hadoop
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Cloudera Manager
Cloudera Manager
Score 9.9 out of 10
Cloudera Manager
Cloudera Manager
Score 9.9 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Analytics Engine
IBM Analytics Engine
Score 7.1 out of 10
IBM Analytics Engine
IBM Analytics Engine
Score 7.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)Apache Hadoop
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.6
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(0 ratings)
7.5
(0 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
6.1
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)Apache Hadoop
Likelihood to Recommend
We are running it to perform preparation which takes a few hours on EC2 to be running on a spark-based EMR cluster to total the preparation inside minutes rather than a few hours. Ease of utilization and capacity to select from either Hadoop or spark. Processing time diminishes from 5-8 hours to 25-30 minutes compared with the Ec2 occurrence and more in a few cases.
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Apache Hadoop (and its subsequent add-ons) are well-suited to larger, unstructured data flows, such as aggregation of web traffic or advertising. Geospatial algorithms and their outputs are well-suited for this kind of aggregation as structuring that data is challenging, but leaving it unstructured and performing queries as-needed is a better fit for most business models. With the advent of data science, I would expect Hadoop fits a LOT of their initial outputs quite well.
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Pros
  • The cluster size of MapReduce is very dynamic and therefore scalability is good for EMR.
  • It also works well with other Amazon Web Services like Amazon Simple Storage Service, which means that data can be taken from those services and written back to them.
  • I tried using the in-house hosting at the university I work in, but there would be a lot of complications with technical support required. For Amazon, the support and documentation was good to solve these problems faster.
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  • HDFS is reliable and solid, and in my experience with it, there are very few problems using it
  • Enterprise support from different vendors makes it easier to 'sell' inside an enterprise
  • It provides High Scalability and Redundancy
  • Horizontal scaling and distributed architecture
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Cons
  • Sometimes bootstrapping certain tools comes with debugging costs. The tools provided by some of the enterprise editions are great compared to EMR.
  • Like some of the enterprise editions EMR does not provide on premises options.
  • No UI client for saving the workbooks or code snippets. Everything has to go through submitting process. Not really convenient for tracking the job as well.
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  • Hadoop is a batch oriented processing framework, it lacks real time or stream processing.
  • Hadoop's HDFS file system is not a POSIX compliant file system and does not work well with small files, especially smaller than the default block size.
  • Hadoop cannot be used for running interactive jobs or analytics.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
Hadoop is organization-independent and can be used for various purposes ranging from archiving to reporting and can make use of economic, commodity hardware. There is also a lot of saving in terms of licensing costs - since most of the Hadoop ecosystem is available as open-source and is free
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Usability
Documentation is quite good and the product is regularly updated, so new features regularly come out. The setup is straightforward enough, especially once you have already established the overall platform infrastructure and the aws-cli APIs are easy enough to use. It would be nice to have some out-of-the-box integrations for checking logs and the Spark UI, rather than relying on know-how and digging through multiple levels to find the informations
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Great! Hadoop has an easy to use interface that mimics most other data warehouses. You can access your data via SQL and have it display in a terminal before exporting it to your business intelligence platform of choice. Of course, for smaller data sets, you can also export it to Microsoft Excel.
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Support Rating
I give the overall support for Amazon EMR this rating because while the support technicians are very knowledgeable and always able to help, it sometimes takes a very long time to get in contact with one of the support technicians. So overall the support is pretty good for Amazon EMR.
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We went with a third party for support, i.e., consultant. Had we gone with Azure or Cloudera, we would have obtained support directly from the vendor. my rating is more on the third party we selected and doesn't reflect the overall support available for Hadoop. I think we could have done better in our selection process, however, we were trying to use an already approved vendor within our organization. There is plenty of self-help available for Hadoop online.
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Online Training
No answers on this topic
Hadoop is a complex topic and best suited for classrom training. Online training are a waste of time and money.
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Alternatives Considered
Snowflake is a lot easier to get started with than the other options. Snowflake's data lake building capabilities are far more powerful. Although Amazon EMR isn't our first pick, we've had an excellent experience with EC2 and S3. Because of our current API interfaces, it made more sense for us to continue with Hadoop rather than explore other options.
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I feel that this is a highly reliable and scalable solution computing technology that is highly capable of processing large data sets across multiple servers and thousands of machines in a well-defined and distributed manner. Apache Hadoop can automatically scale up the number of servers and machines that are needed to process, store, and analyze data sets. It also handles explosions in data with big data technology. Apache Hadoop is good at handling all node failures as well.
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Return on Investment
  • It was obviously cheaper and convenient to use as most of our data processing and pipelines are on AWS. It was fast and readily available with a click and that saved a ton of time rather than having to figure out the down time of the cluster if its on premises.
  • It saved time on processing chunks of big data which had to be processed in short period with minimal costs. EMR solved this as the cluster setup time and processing was simple, easy, cheap and fast.
  • It had a negative impact as it was very difficult in submitting the test jobs as it lags a UI to submit spark code snippets.
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  • As it was open source makes it popular choice for handling large chuck of datasets
  • It was free earlier but now it’s licensed but still enterprise is a fine tuned version which makes it easier for new users and administrators to use it
  • Our investment is worth every single penny.
  • Initial cost is more as you might need to hire administrators to setup the cluster and make them in scalable. But once done it’s pretty easy
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