graal vs Databricks
Control plane, Delta and Iceberg formats, pricing model and MCP servers, with the takeover of your Python and Spark jobs.
Comparisons
Comparisons
Six pages, one plan: where the platform runs, who operates it, its license, its pricing model and its AI agents. Every cell links to its source, dated with the day we consulted it.
Six comparisons
graal against each platform
Each page compares graal with one competitor, criterion by criterion, in its own words, dated and sourced.
graal vs Snowflake
Hosting, license, contracting entity, pricing model, Cortex Agents and MCP server.
graal vs Microsoft Fabric
OneLake and open formats, capacities and licenses, data agent and MCP servers.
graal vs Cloudera
On-premises, private or public cloud, subscription, Anywhere Cloud and taking over a Hadoop estate.
graal vs Dataiku
The three installations, the license terms, the project MCP server and graal’s two platforms.
graal vs Palantir
Palantir Cloud or software on the customer side, licenses, Palantir MCP and Ontology MCP.
The criteria
Five questions that decide the choice
They matter more than the feature list, and answering them takes one meeting.
01
Where must the platform run?
In your datacenter, in your cloud, with a qualified hosting provider, or in the vendor’s cloud.
02
Who operates the control plane?
You, or the vendor: the answer determines the applicable law, reversibility and your conversations with your CISO.
03
How far do you need to go?
Exploring data, or taking workloads all the way to production: scheduled, governed, monitored.
04
What can your AI agents do?
Read, or act: create, run, schedule. And under which permissions, with which record.
05
How does the price evolve?
With usage, with the number of users, or on a fixed unit that you cap.
The overview table
What each one publishes
Every competitor cell links to its source and to the date we accessed it. Quotes stay in their original language.
| Criterion | graal | Databricks | Scaleway (formerly Saagie) | Onyxia | Palantir / ChapsVision |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Where the platform runs | Your Kubernetes or OpenShift: on-premises, in a private cloud or with the hosting provider of your choice, with no cluster administration rights. | AWS, Azure and GCP. “The control plane is located in the Databricks account, not your cloud account.” | Scaleway cloud: Data Orchestrator, a fully managed service, in public beta. | On a Kubernetes cluster, through Helm charts: “An interface for helm charts (e.g: Jupyter, RStudio) on demand on a Kubernetes cluster.” | Palantir: Palantir Cloud, “a hosted environment controlled by Palantir”, or software on the customer’s side, on its infrastructure or its cloud instance. ArgonOS: “On-premises, air-gapped, or sovereign cloud”. |
| Vendor | GRAAL.SYSTEMS SAS, Paris. Two open source products, under the Apache 2.0 license. | Databricks, Inc., San Francisco. A platform under contract; Spark, Delta Lake, Iceberg, MLflow and Unity Catalog are open source projects. | Scaleway (iliad group), which announced on 20/06/2025 that it had acquired Saagie. | Developed by INSEE, supported by DINUM; MIT license. | Palantir Technologies Inc., Delaware; principal offices in Aventura (Florida). ChapsVision: press release datelined Paris. |
| Promise, in their own words | From raw data to AI agents in production, on your infrastructure. | “Databricks is the data and AI company” | Pipelines built with drag-and-drop, or coded in YAML or Python: “Upload a YAML or design your DAG visually”. | “the glue between multiple open source backend technologies”, for data scientists. | Foundry: “foundational data operations platform”. ArgonOS: “Argonos transforms complex, fragmented data into actionable intelligence”. |
| AI agents (MCP) | Built-in MCP server: your agents create, run and schedule under a service account scoped to one project, with human approval for sensitive actions. No destructive tool enabled by default. The Agentic Platform puts any agent to work on your processes. | The Genie One MCP server has been generally available since 25/09/2026; the dbsql, sandbox and web_search servers require the Unity Gateway beta. | The Data Orchestrator product page does not describe an MCP server. | The project repository does not document an MCP server. | Palantir MCP and Ontology MCP are documented, with no availability status shown. |
| Public pricing | Annual vendor subscription per vCPU, unlimited users and agents, no usage-based billing. | Pay as you go, in DBUs, per second: “Only pay for the products you use at per second granularity.” | No price on the Data Orchestrator product page. | MIT license, no license fee. | Palantir: subscriptions, term licenses and professional services; no price list in the documents consulted. |
A cell older than 90 days is re-checked or removed. Has something changed? Write to contact@graal.systems and we will correct it.
On the graal side
Two open source platforms, independent and complementary
Under the Apache 2.0 license. Each one installs, runs and is bought on its own; the agents of one drive the other through MCP.
graal Data Platform
From source to model in production, on your infrastructure: connectors, low-code pipelines exported as code, orchestration and compute, Iceberg lakehouse and SQL, notebooks, ML and generative AI, governance.
Discover the Data Platformgraal Agentic Platform
Your AI agents move your processes forward, under measured guarantees: any agent, human approval, a budget per run, evidence and audit.
Discover the Agentic PlatformCompare on your own data
The 8-week pilot puts graal to the test on your use case, in your infrastructure.