DuckDB alternatives

2 tools to consider instead of DuckDB, shown against it.

DuckDB Apache Spark Trino
Vendor DuckDB Foundation Apache Software Foundation Trino Software Foundation
Pricing model Open source + paid options Open source + paid options Open source + paid options
Free tier Yes Yes Yes
Deployment Self-hosted Self-hosted Self-hosted
Open source Yes (MIT) Yes (Apache-2.0) Yes (Apache-2.0)
Best for Analysts and engineers running fast local SQL analytics on files without standing up a database server. Data engineering teams building large-scale batch ETL, streaming or machine-learning pipelines. Teams needing a single SQL query layer across data already spread across multiple systems.
Pricing

Free and open source under the MIT license; a hosted/hybrid cloud version is sold separately by MotherDuck.

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

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 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
  • In-process embedded SQL engine, no server required
  • Vectorized columnar execution
  • Direct querying of CSV, Parquet, JSON and Iceberg/Delta files
  • Bindings for Python, R, Java, Node.js and more
  • ACID transactions on local databases
  • Extensions for HTTP(S)/S3 access and spatial data
  • Unified batch, SQL, streaming and ML APIs
  • In-memory distributed execution (RDDs/DataFrames)
  • Structured Streaming for near-real-time pipelines
  • MLlib for distributed machine learning
  • Runs on Kubernetes, YARN or standalone
  • Broad connector ecosystem for storage and lakehouse formats
  • 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

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