Query engines & federation · Starburst Data, Inc.

Starburst

Commercial data platform built on Trino, offering managed and self-hosted federated SQL query with enterprise governance.

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Starburst is a commercial company founded by core contributors to Trino that packages Trino as an enterprise data platform for federated SQL analytics across lakes, warehouses and databases. Starburst Galaxy is its fully managed SaaS offering, billed by compute credit consumption with a free tier for small workloads, while Starburst Enterprise is a self-managed distribution for organizations that must keep the query engine inside their own infrastructure. On top of open-source Trino, Starburst adds fine-grained access control, a data catalog and lineage layer, autoscaling cluster management, caching, and an AI-assisted query and governance layer (AIDA) billed separately. It is positioned for organizations with data spread across many systems that want one governed SQL access layer instead of consolidating everything into a single warehouse first. Pricing scales by tier (Free, Pro, Enterprise, Mission-Critical), each with a different per-credit rate and support level.

At a glance

Vendor Starburst Data, Inc.
Pricing model Usage-based
Free tier Yes
Deployment Cloud, Self-hosted
Open source No
Best for Enterprises needing governed, federated SQL access across many existing data systems with vendor support.

Pricing

Free tier for small workloads; paid tiers bill by compute credit consumption at increasing per-credit rates as support and governance features expand.

Plan Price Notes
Free $0 Up to 3 clusters, standard execution mode
Pro From $0.50/credit Flexible cluster execution modes, streaming ingest
Enterprise From $0.75/credit Advanced autoscaling, fine-grained access control, AWS PrivateLink; AIDA billed separately
Mission-Critical From $1.00/credit Elite support, advanced governance, highest uptime guarantees

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Features

  • Managed (Galaxy) and self-hosted (Enterprise) Trino distributions
  • Federated queries across lakes, warehouses and databases
  • Fine-grained access control and data catalog
  • Autoscaling cluster management
  • Query result caching
  • AI-assisted query and governance tooling (AIDA)

Integrations

Profile last reviewed September 21, 2026

Alternatives

Trino Open-source distributed SQL engine that queries data across warehouses, lakes and databases without moving it. Presto Open-source distributed SQL engine originally built at Facebook for interactive queries across large datasets. Apache Spark Open-source distributed processing engine for large-scale batch, SQL, streaming and machine-learning workloads.

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Terms to know

Data lakehouse A storage architecture that adds warehouse-style structure and transactions directly on top of low-cost data lake storage. Data governance The policies, roles and processes that determine how data is defined, owned, accessed and kept compliant. Data catalog A searchable inventory of an organization's data assets, with descriptions, ownership and usage attached. Query engine The software component that parses, plans, and executes queries against one or more data sources.

Related guides

How to choose a distributed query engine This category bundles two different jobs — federating SQL across existing systems, and distributed compute for pipelines and ML — start by telling them apart.