Their model is empty.
Ours arrives built.
Databricks metric views are a capable framework that ships with nothing in it. Connect Salesforce and you get raw tables: every measure, dimension and join is yours to write. Databasin arrives with 30 curated models, 369 entities and 174 governed gold views already built, so the first question gets answered the same afternoon.
Data landed is not a question answered.
Databricks is a genuinely strong platform and this page does not pretend otherwise. But the distance between "the data is in the lakehouse" and "the business got an answer" is the customer's labour, and nothing in the product closes it for you.
Unity Catalog metric views let you define measures, dimensions and joins once, and they are good at it. What they do not do is arrive with any. Databricks ships 40 first-party SaaS connectors that land raw source tables, and no library of pre-built models for any of them. Every metric is authored by your team, for every source, before anyone asks a question.
Around 30 native sources land zero-config: schemas mapped, relationships declared, business-ready gold views generated. Across the fleet that is 369 entities, 346 declared relationships and 174 gold views, shipped as versioned bundles. The AI answers against approved definitions instead of guessing at column names.
The Enhanced Security and Compliance add-on is 15% of product spend before discounts. Not a fixed fee, not scoped to the regulated workload, and calculated on list price rather than your negotiated rate. Mission Critical is 30%. A regulated buyer pays that premium on every DBU in the workspace, forever.
Databasin layers onto the Databricks you already bought. It stays a first-class query and semantic target: the connectors, pipelines, gold views and agents all apply to it. No rip-and-replace, no migration project, no vendor fight — and no political capital spent unwinding a decision you already defended.
From landed data to answered question.
The row that matters is the third one. Everything above it both platforms do well.
| Capability | Databasin | Databricks |
|---|---|---|
| Managed SaaS connectors | ✓77 active · 31 native, zero-config | 40 first-party SaaS connectors, plus CDC for four databases |
| What a connector delivers | ✓Schemas mapped, relationships declared, gold views built | Raw source tables, incrementally read |
| Pre-built semantic models | ✓30 sources, 369 entities, 174 gold views | Metric views are a framework; no pre-built models ship for any source |
| Query engines over your tables | ✓Trino, Spark, Doris and DuckDB, picked per workload | Spark and Photon. No alternate engine inside the platform |
| Photon | ✓n/a | Costs 2.0× the DBUs on all-purpose compute and 2.9× on jobs and pipelines; cannot be declined on a SQL warehouse |
| Compliance add-on | ✓HIPAA-ready in the base plan · BAA available | 15% of product spend before discounts (Mission Critical 30%) |
| Entry tier | ✓One plan | Standard tier is end-of-life; Premium is now the floor |
| Control plane | ✓Hosted, or entirely inside your own Azure tenant | "The control plane is located in the Databricks account, not your cloud account" |
| Federated sources | ✓Query live, and write back through pipelines | Lakehouse Federation is read-only |
Databricks behaviour and rates are taken from docs.databricks.com and Databricks' published AWS rate card, checked 17 August 2026, and vary by cloud, region and tier. Databasin connector and model counts are taken from the shipped connector bundles on the same date. Photon multipliers are DBU rates for the same instance type, not statements about total cost: whether Photon is cheaper overall depends on how much runtime it saves on your workload, which neither we nor Databricks publish. Verify at databricks.com/product/pricing.
15% of everything, on list.
Most platforms gate compliance behind a tier. Databricks charges a percentage of your entire product spend, calculated before any discount you negotiated. It is the one line that grows every time you use the platform more.
A comparison that only flatters us is not worth reading.
If you are evaluating both, you already know these. Pretending otherwise would tell you we had not looked.
What the rate card leaves out.
The published DBU rate is not the bill. These are all from Databricks' own documentation, and each one lands on a different line of the invoice. Databasin meters per minute, and a stopped cluster costs nothing.
You do not have to choose.
Databasin layers onto the Databricks you already run and brings the connectors, the models and the gold views it was never going to ship you. Start on sample data and see a modelled source answer a question the same afternoon.
$50 credit · No card · Or read the deployment and security detail