Apache Hudi vs Delta Lake vs Apache Iceberg Lakehouse Feature Comparison

With the growing popularity of Lakehouse, there is growing interest in analyzing and comparing the open source projects that are at the heart of this data architecture: Apache Hudi, Delta Lake, and Apache Iceberg.

Most of the comparison articles currently published seem to rate these projects simply as table/file formats for traditional add-only workloads, neglecting certain qualities and features that are essential for modern lake rigs that need to support heavy update workloads with continuous table management. . This article will dive deeper to highlight the technical differentiators of Apache Hudi and how it is a full-fledged data lake platform that is one step ahead of the rest.

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This article is regularly updated to keep up with the rapidly changing landscape. The latest update was January 2023, which updated the feature comparison matrix, added community adoption stats, and referenced recent published industry benchmarks.

Let's look at an overall feature comparison first. As you read, note how the Hudi community has invested heavily in comprehensive platform services in addition to the lake storage format. While formats are essential for standardization and interoperability, table/platform services give you a powerful toolkit to easily develop and manage your data lake deployments.

Community is equally important to the functionality and capabilities of an open source project. The community can make or break development momentum, ecosystem adoption, or platform objectivity. Below is a comparison between Hudi, Delta, and Iceberg when it comes to their communities:

Github Stars:

Github stars are a vanity metric that represents popularity more than contribution. Delta Lake leads the pack in notoriety and popularity.

Github watchers and forks

A more specific indication of project engagement/use:

Github contributors

As of December 2022, Apache Hudi has nearly 90 unique authors contributing to the project. More than 2x Iceberg and 3x Delta Lake.

PR and Github issues

In December 2022, Hudi and Iceberg merged at roughly the same number of PRs, while the number of open PRs doubled in Hudi.

Diversity of contributions

Apache Hudi and Apache Iceberg have a strong diversity in the community that contributes to the project.

Apache Hudi:

Apache Iceberg:

Delta Lake: