Databricks Data Intelligence Platform vs. H2O.ai

Medium to Large data throughput shops will benefit the most from Databricks Spark processing. Smaller use cases may find the barrier to entry a bit too high for casual use cases. Some of the overhead to kicking off a Spark compute job can actually lead to your workloads taking longer, but past a certain point the performance returns cannot be beat.

Incentivized

Most suited if in little time you wanted to build and train a model. Then, H2O makes life very simple. It has support with R, Python and Java, so no programming dependency is required to use it. It's very simple to use. If you want to modify or tweak your ML algorithm then H2O is not suitable. You can't develop a model from scratch.

Incentivized

• Process raw data in One Lake (S3) env to relational tables and views
• Share notebooks with our business analysts so that they can use the queries and generate value out of the data
• Try out PySpark and Spark SQL queries on raw data before using them in our Spark jobs
• Modern day ETL operations made easy using Databricks. Provide access mechanism for different set of customers

Incentivized

• Excellent analytical and prediction tool
• In the beginning, usage of H20 Flow in Web UI enables quick development and sharing of the analytical model
• Readily available algorithms, easy to use in your analytical projects
• Faster than Python scikit learn (in machine learning supervised learning area)
• It can be accessed (run) from Python, not only JAVA etc.
• Well documented and suitable for fast training or self studying
• In the beginning, one can use the clickable Flow interface (WEB UI) and later move to a Python console. There is then no need to click in H20 Flow
• It can be used as open source

Incentivized

• Connect my local code in Visual code to my Databricks Lakehouse Platform cluster so I can run the code on the cluster. The old databricks-connect approach has many bugs and is hard to set up. The new Databricks Lakehouse Platform extension on Visual Code, doesn't allow the developers to debug their code line by line (only we can run the code).
• Maybe have a specific Databricks Lakehouse Platform IDE that can be used by Databricks Lakehouse Platform users to develop locally.
• Visualization in MLFLOW experiment can be enhanced

Incentivized

• Better documentation
• Improve the Visual presentations including charting etc

Incentivized

Because it is an amazing platform for designing experiments and delivering a deep dive analysis that requires execution of highly complex queries, as well as it allows to share the information and insights across the company with their shared workspaces, while keeping it secured.

in terms of graph generation and interaction it could improve their UI and UX

Incentivized

One of the best customer and technology support that I have ever experienced in my career. You pay for what you get and you get the Rolls Royce. It reminds me of the customer support of SAS in the 2000s when the tools were reaching some limits and their engineer wanted to know more about what we were doing, long before "data science" was even a name. Databricks truly embraces the partnership with their customer and help them on any given challenge.

The overall experience I have with H2O is really awesome, even with its cost effectiveness.

Incentivized

The most important differentiating factor for Databricks Lakehouse Platform from these other platforms is support for ACID transactions and the time travel feature. Also, native integration with managed MLflow is a plus. EMR, Cloudera, and Hortonworks are not as optimized when it comes to Spark Job Execution. Other platforms need to be self-managed, which is another huge hassle.

Incentivized

Both are open source (though H2O only up to some level). Both comprise of deep learning, but H2O is not focused directly on deep learning, while Tensor Flow has a "laser" focus on deep learning. H2O is also more focused on scalability. H2O should be looked at not as a competitor but rather a complementary tool. The use case is usually not only about the algorithms, but also about the data model and data logistics and accessibility. H2O is more accessible due to its UI. Also, both can be accessed from Python. The community around TensorFlow seems larger than that of H2O.

Incentivized

• The ability to spin up a BIG Data platform with little infrastructure overhead allows us to focus on business value not admin
• DB has the ability to terminate/time out instances which helps manage cost.
• The ability to quickly access typical hard to build data scenarios easily is a strength.

Incentivized

• Positive impact: saving in infrastructure expenses - compared to other bulky tools this costs a fraction
• Positive impact: ability to get quick fixes from H2O when problems arise - compared to waiting for several months/years for new releases from other vendors
• Positive impact: Access to H2O core team and able to get features that are needed for our business quickly added to the core H2O product

Incentivized