Great Expectations vs Databricks
Side-by-side comparison of AI visibility scores, market position, and capabilities
San Francisco CA open-source data quality framework; raised $40M+; GX Cloud adds hosted monitoring and collaboration on top of the widely-used OSS library.
About
Great Expectations is a data quality and validation company founded in 2018 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company was founded by Abe Gong and James Campbell to commercialize the Great Expectations open-source Python framework, which they had originally built to solve data quality problems at their previous companies. The Great Expectations framework introduced the concept of treating data as code — defining expected data behaviors as declarative "expectations" in code, running them as part of CI/CD pipelines, and generating human-readable validation reports.\n\nGreat Expectations raised $40 million in funding from investors including Index Ventures and CRV. The open-source framework became one of the most widely adopted data quality tools, with millions of downloads and an active community of contributors. It supports a broad range of data sources including Pandas DataFrames, Spark, SQL databases, and all major cloud data warehouses, and integrates with orchestration tools like Airflow, Dagster, and Prefect. GX Cloud, the commercial SaaS product, adds a managed platform for sharing validation results, tracking data quality trends over time, setting up alert routing, and collaborating on data quality remediation across data teams.\n\nGreat Expectations's code-first approach and deep Pythonic integration make it the preferred data quality tool for data engineering teams with strong software engineering backgrounds. Its strength in the developer community, large library of community-contributed expectations and plugins, and integration with every major data platform give it broad reach across the data engineering ecosystem. The company has positioned GX Cloud as the collaboration and observability layer on top of the battle-tested open-source foundation.
$4.8B revenue run-rate; 55% YoY growth; $134B valuation (Series L). Mosaic AI for enterprise LLM fine-tuning and inference; Unity Catalog for data governance. DBRX open-source model; every major enterprise AI deployment runs on the lakehouse.
About
Databricks was founded in 2013 by the original creators of Apache Spark — Ali Ghodsi, Matei Zaharia, and five other UC Berkeley researchers — to unify data engineering, analytics, and machine learning on a single platform. The company commercialized the lakehouse architecture, combining the flexibility of data lakes with the reliability of data warehouses. Databricks runs on AWS, Azure, and GCP and leads the commercial distribution of the open-source Delta Lake and MLflow projects.\n\nThe platform includes the Databricks Lakehouse for unified data processing, Unity Catalog for governance and lineage tracking, and Mosaic AI for enterprise LLM fine-tuning, model serving, and generative AI application development. It supports data engineering, SQL analytics, BI, feature engineering, and model training within a single governance perimeter, serving enterprises in financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and media.\n\nDatabricks achieved a $4.8 billion annualized revenue run-rate in early 2025 with 55% year-over-year growth and a $62 billion valuation from its Series L round — one of the most valuable private software companies globally. Its dual role as the leading commercial lakehouse vendor and steward of influential open-source projects gives it a unique ecosystem advantage as enterprises accelerate investment in AI infrastructure.
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