Apache Spark vs. Azure Databricks vs. Dask vs. python-sql Comparison Chart

Apache Spark™ is a unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing. Apache Spark achieves high performance for both batch and streaming data, using a state-of-the-art DAG scheduler, a query optimizer, and a physical execution engine. Spark offers over 80 high-level operators that make it easy to build parallel apps. And you can use it interactively from the Scala, Python, R, and SQL shells. Spark powers a stack of libraries including SQL and DataFrames, MLlib for machine learning, GraphX, and Spark Streaming. You can combine these libraries seamlessly in the same application. Spark runs on Hadoop, Apache Mesos, Kubernetes, standalone, or in the cloud. It can access diverse data sources. You can run Spark using its standalone cluster mode, on EC2, on Hadoop YARN, on Mesos, or on Kubernetes. Access data in HDFS, Alluxio, Apache Cassandra, Apache HBase, Apache Hive, and hundreds of other data sources.

Dask is open source and freely available. It is developed in coordination with other community projects like NumPy, pandas, and scikit-learn. Dask uses existing Python APIs and data structures to make it easy to switch between NumPy, pandas, scikit-learn to their Dask-powered equivalents. Dask's schedulers scale to thousand-node clusters and its algorithms have been tested on some of the largest supercomputers in the world. But you don't need a massive cluster to get started. Dask ships with schedulers designed for use on personal machines. Many people use Dask today to scale computations on their laptop, using multiple cores for computation and their disk for excess storage. Dask exposes lower-level APIs letting you build custom systems for in-house applications. This helps open source leaders parallelize their own packages and helps business leaders scale custom business logic.