They claim to perform much better on sparse data sets. &quot;DSSTNE is much faster than any other DL package (2.1x compared to Tensorflow in 1 g2.8xlarge) for problems involving sparse data&quot;. It also has good support for distributing the computation over multiple GPUS. Theano for example can&#x27;t do anything like that. On the other hand using JSON to design my models sound much worse than using a programming language.