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Presto vs Trino

Trino was forked from Presto in 2020 by Presto's own creators and has since become the more widely adopted of the two outside Meta.

Side by side

Presto Trino
Vendor Presto Foundation (Linux Foundation) Trino Software Foundation
Pricing model Open source + paid options Open source + paid options
Free tier Yes Yes
Deployment Self-hosted Self-hosted
Open source Yes (Apache-2.0) Yes (Apache-2.0)
Best for Organizations running large-scale interactive SQL over Hadoop/lake storage who want an Apache-governed alternative to Trino. Teams needing a single SQL query layer across data already spread across multiple systems.
Pricing

Free and open source under the Presto Foundation; no single vendor sells a dedicated managed Presto service.

Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.

Free and open source; commercial managed and enterprise-supported distributions are sold separately by Starburst.

Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.

Features
  • Federated SQL queries across Hive, object storage and databases
  • Coordinator/worker distributed execution
  • Pluggable connector architecture
  • ANSI SQL support
  • Cost-based optimizer
  • Used as the engine behind Amazon Athena
  • Federated SQL queries across heterogeneous data sources
  • Pluggable connector architecture (Iceberg, Hive, Kafka, JDBC sources)
  • Massively parallel, in-memory distributed execution
  • ANSI SQL compatibility
  • Cost-based query optimizer
  • Fine-grained access control via connectors

Verdict

This is one of the more concrete comparisons in the category because the history is unusually clear. Trino was forked from Presto in 2020 by Presto's original creators, who took most of the surrounding community and momentum with them; since then, the two projects have diverged under independent governance — PrestoDB under the Presto Foundation (part of the Linux Foundation), Trino under the Trino Software Foundation. Presto continues under Meta, Uber and IBM leadership and is notably the engine behind Amazon Athena's newer versions. Trino has become the more commonly adopted of the two outside Meta, and Starburst — founded by Trino's own creators — offers commercial support and enterprise governance on top of it.

Choose Presto if

  • You're already using or building on Amazon Athena, which is built on a Presto-derived engine.
  • Your organization already runs PrestoDB infrastructure or operates at Meta- or Uber-scale query volume.
  • You value the specific governance track record of the Presto Foundation under the Linux Foundation.

Choose Trino if

  • You're starting fresh with no existing Presto investment and want the project with the larger current open-source community and connector momentum.
  • You want the option of commercial support and enterprise governance features through Starburst.
  • You want the SQL federation engine most actively compared against and adopted alongside modern lakehouse table formats like Iceberg.

What they share

Both use a coordinator/worker architecture with massively parallel, in-memory execution and a pluggable connector model for federating SQL across Hive, object storage, Kafka and relational databases without an ETL step. Both are Apache-2.0 licensed, self-hosted by default, and support ANSI SQL with a cost-based optimizer.

The honest caveat

Because Trino and Presto share original code and architecture, migrating between them is comparatively low-friction compared to switching to a genuinely different engine — for most teams the deciding factor is community and vendor-support preference rather than a real technical gap. If you're not already committed to one, that preference is worth resolving before the query workload grows large enough to make a later switch expensive.

Last reviewed September 22, 2026

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