Install
Databricks alternatives
3 tools to consider instead of Databricks, shown against it.
| Databricks | Apache Spark | Starburst | Trino | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Databricks, Inc. | Apache Software Foundation | Starburst Data, Inc. | Trino Software Foundation | ||||||||
| Pricing model | Usage-based | Open source + paid options | Usage-based | Open source + paid options | ||||||||
| Free tier | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||||||||
| Deployment | Cloud | Self-hosted | Cloud, Self-hosted | Self-hosted | ||||||||
| Open source | No | Yes (Apache-2.0) | No | Yes (Apache-2.0) | ||||||||
| Best for | Organizations wanting a single managed platform spanning data engineering, SQL analytics and machine learning on Spark. | Data engineering teams building large-scale batch ETL, streaming or machine-learning pipelines. | Enterprises needing governed, federated SQL access across many existing data systems with vendor support. | Teams needing a single SQL query layer across data already spread across multiple systems. | ||||||||
| Pricing | Pay-as-you-go pricing metered in Databricks Units (DBUs) per second, varying by workload type and tier, plus separate underlying cloud infrastructure costs; committed-use contracts offer discounts. A limited free Community Edition exists. Checked on the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026: no prices are published. Expect to be quoted. | Free and open source under the Apache Software Foundation; managed lakehouse platforms built on Spark, such as Databricks, are priced separately. Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site. | Free tier for small workloads; paid tiers bill by compute credit consumption at increasing per-credit rates as support and governance features expand.
Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget. | 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. | ||||||||
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