Amazon EMR vs IBM InfoSphere BigInsights [EOL] comparison

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM are both solutions in the Hadoop category. Additionally, 83% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 83% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Amazon EMR

Read 25 Amazon EMR reviews

4,183 Views
1,841 Comparison Views

83% willing to recommend

IBM InfoSphere BigInsights ...

Read 7 IBM InfoSphere BigInsights [EOL] reviews

83% willing to recommend

Amazon EMR

IBM InfoSphere BigInsights ...

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon EMR and IBM InfoSphere BigInsights [EOL] based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Apache, Cloudera, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in Hadoop.

To learn more, read our detailed Hadoop Report (Updated: October 2026).

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Hadoop

October 2026

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Helped 917,433 peers since 2012

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

Amazon EMR

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Hadoop (3rd), Cloud Data Warehouse (13th)

IBM InfoSphere BigInsights ...

Average Rating

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Featured Reviews

reviewer2043696

Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Data pipelines have simplified complex transformations and provide faster insights for users

The features at Amazon EMR that I have found most valuable are fully customizable functions. I am using Amazon EMR for data transformation, where we load the data. The entire ETL process is encompassed within it. The first thing is the egress part, where we pull the data from various sources, which include our main core databases, the systems that include Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, and Postgres. We bring data from all these sources and use Amazon EMR specifically to combine all this data, clean the data, and combine it at a particular level. We bring everything to a particular level to make it more production-ready, and we simplify the data because every system has its own problems. We are using it to clean the data and transform the data in such a way that the end-user can get the insights faster.

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it_user743022

BigData Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Served our customers better by giving real-time suggestions and proactive maintenance, however the UI was not interactive

* The UI was not interactive: Responses used to be very slow and hang up at times. * The UI was not really helping to track the real-time jobs and its logs. * You can bring in a better UI for job management and health checks. * Developer API documentation needs improvement.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This is the best tool for hosts and it's really flexible and scalable."

"One of the valuable features about this solution is that it's managed services, so it's pretty stable, and scalable as much as you wish. It has all the necessary distributions. With some additional work, it's also possible to change to a Spark version with the latest version of EMR. It also has Hudi, so we are leveraging Apache Hudi on EMR for change data capture, so then it comes out-of-the-box in EMR."

"It's made life very easy."

"Overall a good cloud infrastructure and takes the burden of managing the distributed hardware and can easily scale up and scale down as per the requirement of the task at hand."

"Amazon EMR's most valuable features are processing speed and data storage capacity."

"This tool is simple to use and it's really accessible to many dev teams."

"Amazon EMR is a good solution that can be used to manage big data."

"The solution is scalable."

More Amazon EMR pros

"InfoSphere Streams was the one core product from the platform in which we were using. We were building a real-time response system and we built it on InfoSphere Streams."

"It integrates with JSqsh, enabling us to submit long-running exports from the shell."

"Definitely a product worth evaluating, esp if you are an IBM shop and if done on Bluemix, it gives a jump start on protoypes/POCs."

"It gives us the option of extending our analytics system."

"This is a very helpful product, with continuous improvements by IBM and a great customer service which enables easy access to valuable information for both Hadoop developers and system administrators."

"This helped us to serve our customers better by giving real-time suggestions and proactive maintenance."

"The thing that I have found most valuable in this solution is the BIQSQL implementation which is fully SQL ANSI compliant."

"Watson is the perfect engine for text analysis for us, but in 2014 it doesn’t support the Russian language."

Cons

"Spark jobs take longer on Amazon EMR compared to previous experiences."

"The web interface for managing all your cloud services is a bit patchy and needs improvement."

"There were times where they would release new versions and it seemed to end up breaking old versions, which is very strange."

"Whenever we have scaling policies for load balancing and our load increases the input rate, we increase the resources. However, at that time Amazon AWS is not providing the scale of the required resources in a short time."

"There is no need to pay extra for third-party software."

"The most complicated thing is configuring to the cluster and to ensure it's running correctly."

"The cost of Amazon EMR is very high."

"Modules and strategies should be better handled and notified early in advance."

More Amazon EMR cons

"The UI was not interactive: Responses used to be very slow and hang up at times."

"I'd like to see faster execution time, especially for simple queries that don't touch on many rows and don't involve many operations (Joins, Unions, Groupbys)."

"Initial setup is rather complex in comparison with Cloudera."

"For our business customer pricing is very important motivation, so I can advise change licensing policy from “by volume in the cluster” to “number of machines in the cluster”."

"I have found a lot of issues in Fluid Query and BigInsights Applications to move data in the enterprise version."

"I encountered issues with having the appropriate documentation resources, as well as getting the right stability when explored virtualized environments based on Virtualbox and HyperV software."

"Unfortunately the stability of the platform was an issue."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Amazon EMR's price is reasonable."

"There is a small fee for the EMR system, but major cost components are the underlying infrastructure resources which we actually use."

"The cost of Amazon EMR is very high."

"I rate the tool's pricing a five out of ten. It can be expensive since it's a managed service, and if you are not careful, you can run into unexpected charges. You can make a mistake that costs you tens of thousands of dollars. That's happened to us twice, so I'm sensitive to it. We're still trying to work on that. Our smallest client probably spends a hundred thousand dollars yearly on licensing, while our largest is well over a million."

"The product is not cheap, but it is not expensive."

"You don't need to pay for licensing on a yearly or monthly basis, you only pay for what you use, in terms of underlying instances."

"Amazon EMR is not very expensive."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

More Amazon EMR pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Construction Company

Healthcare Company

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	12

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Large Enterprise	4

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EMR?

I would rate the price for Amazon EMR, where one is high and ten is low, as a good one.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon EMR?

I feel some lack of functionality in Amazon EMR. I have thoughts on what would be great to see in the product, such as AI/ML features or additional options.

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Amazon EMR?

I find it easy to integrate Amazon EMR with other AWS services like S3 or EC2 for data processing needs. I would rate this review as eight out of ten.

See all answers

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Comparisons

Snowflake vs Amazon EMR

Compared 8% of the time

Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop vs Amazon EMR

Compared 7% of the time

Apache Spark vs Amazon EMR

Compared 6% of the time

Amazon Redshift vs Amazon EMR

Compared 6% of the time

HPE Data Fabric vs Amazon EMR

Compared 6% of the time

More Amazon EMR Competitors

Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop vs IBM InfoSphere BigInsights [EOL]

Compared 55% of the time

Apache Spark vs IBM InfoSphere BigInsights [EOL]

Compared 23% of the time

IBM Spectrum Computing vs IBM InfoSphere BigInsights [EOL]

Compared 11% of the time

More IBM InfoSphere BigInsights [EOL] Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EMR

October 2026

Download Amazon EMR product report

Buyer's Guide

Hadoop

October 2026

Download IBM InfoSphere BigInsights [EOL] product report

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic MapReduce

InfoSphere BigInsights

Overview

Amazon EMR simplifies big data processing by offering integration with popular tools. It's scalable and cost-efficient, enabling fast processing while managing infrastructure effortlessly. It's designed for users aiming to streamline data workflows and leverage its batch processing capabilities effectively.

Amazon EMR is a managed service that provides robust features for big data processing. It integrates seamlessly with S3, EC2, Hive, and Spark to facilitate sophisticated data transformation tasks and infrastructure management. It allows organizations to run data lakes, Spark, and Hadoop clusters effortlessly, offering flexibility with on-demand execution and extensive scalability. The platform is valued for its strong processing speed and comprehensive security features, making it ideal for complex data engineering projects. It supports both batch processing and real-time workflows, designed to eliminate hardware management while maintaining cost efficiency and stability.

What are the key features of Amazon EMR?

Cluster Management: Offers intuitive control and configuration of clusters
Integration: Seamlessly integrates with S3, EC2, Spark, and more
Scalability: Provides flexible scaling to meet data demands
Batch Processing: Allows efficient handling of large data sets
Cost Efficiency: Minimizes costs with managed service offerings

What benefits and ROI should be considered?

Processing Speed: Fast performance for data processing tasks
Security: Built-in features ensure data protection
Infrastructure Simplification: Eliminates hardware management needs
Flexibility: Adapts to changing data loads with ease
Affordability: Offers economic processing power

Amazon EMR is implemented by industries such as healthcare and tech processing for complex data tasks like building data lakes or financial data processing. It supports AI-driven analytics and data engineering projects, integrating with SageMaker for predictions and maintaining workflows in public health applications, allowing professionals in different fields to manage data pipelines, resource utilization, and job execution efficiently.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

IBM BigInsights delivers a rich set of advanced analytics capabilities that allows enterprises to analyze massive volumes of structured and unstructured data in its native format. The software combines open source Apache Hadoop with IBM innovations including sophisticated text analytics, IBM BigSheets for data exploration, IBM Big SQL for SQL access to data in Hadoop, and a range of performance, security and administrative features. The result is a cost-effective and user-friendly solution for complex, big data analytics.

IBM

Sample Customers

Yelp

Coherent Path Inc., Optibus, Delhaize America, Diyotta Inc., Ernst & Young, Teikoku Databank Ltd., NCSU, Vestas

Find out what your peers are saying about Apache, Cloudera, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in Hadoop. Updated: October 2026.

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