Hadoop and Apache Spark are key projects in the big data ecosystem, providing frameworks for distributed processing of large datasets. Hadoop features components like HDFS for storage, YARN for resource management, and MapReduce for processing, while Spark offers in-memory computations and easier programming capabilities, alongside Spark SQL for structured data and Spark Streaming for real-time data processing. Spark is generally considered faster and more efficient than Hadoop MapReduce, particularly in terms of ease of coding and latency performance.