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Exasol

exasol.com

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Spec score 9.2 #1 of 31 in Analytics Databases

What it is

Exasol is a database for analytics and high-concurrency AI workloads, available in cloud, on-premises, hybrid, and fully managed SaaS deployments. The company says teams can analyze billions of rows in seconds and that automatic self-indexing helps tune performance. SaaS includes five databases, multi-cluster support, basic UDF support, advanced in-database analytics, and data virtualization. Teams can scale vertically or add clusters with dedicated compute for work such as data ingest or machine learning. The 30-day SaaS trial includes $200 of usage and requires no credit card. Pay-as-you-go compute is billed hourly; XS is $3.30 a month and S is $6.60 a month, while storage is listed separately at $25 a month. Free options include Exasol Personal, licensed for a single user and up to two connected data sources, and Community Edition, limited to 200GB of data. Exasol lists integrations including Airbyte, Alation, Amazon QuickSight, Apache Airflow, and Apache Superset. Its documentation covers multiple authentication methods and TLS encryption for database connections; encryption at rest must be configured on the supplied file systems and devices.

Spec sheet

What it does
Exasol is an analytics database designed for high-concurrency analytics, data warehousing, AI and machine-learning workloads.Read 14 Oct 2026 · exasol.com
Product
Exasol describes itself as a sovereign analytics database for high-concurrency AI and analytics workloads.Read 28 Sep 2026 · exasol.com
Intended users
Exasol SaaS is described as suited to organizations needing multi-departmental analytics, in-database machine learning or AI, and complex data integration or virtualization.Read 28 Sep 2026 · exasol.com
Deployment
Exasol lists on-premises, hybrid, and fully managed SaaS deployment options; on-premises environments can include air-gapped setups.Read 28 Sep 2026 · exasol.com
Free plan
YesRead 20 Sep 2026 · exasol.com
Trial
The SaaS trial includes $200 of free usage for 30 days and requires no credit card.Read 28 Sep 2026 · exasol.com
Integrations
Official ecosystem documentation lists BI integrations including Power BI, Tableau, Looker, Qlik Sense, SAS, Superset, Yellowfin and Amazon QuickSight.Read 14 Oct 2026 · docs.exasol.com
Security
Exasol states that it is ISO/IEC 27001 certified and describes controls including access control and incident response processes.Read 28 Sep 2026 · exasol.com
Support
Exasol’s support page lists 24/7 incident troubleshooting and monitoring, plus performance analysis, maintenance, and planning assistance.Read 28 Sep 2026 · exasol.com
Headquarters
Nuremberg, GermanyRead 28 Sep 2026 · exasol.com
Founded
2000Read 28 Sep 2026 · exasol.com
Analytics
Exasol says teams can analyze billions of rows in seconds and use the database in cloud, on-premises, or hybrid environments.Read 28 Sep 2026 · exasol.com
Authentication
Documented database authentication methods include passwords, LDAP/Active Directory, Kerberos single sign-on and OpenID.Read 14 Oct 2026 · docs.exasol.com
Automatic tuning
Exasol automatically gathers optimizer statistics, maintains join indexes, reorganizes tables and can reuse query-cache results.Read 14 Oct 2026 · docs.exasol.com
Company facts
LinkedIn lists Exasol as a public software company founded in 2000 with headquarters in Nürnberg and 201–500 employees.Read 14 Oct 2026 · linkedin.com
Company origin
Exasol began as a research and student project at Friedrich-Alexander University and formally became Exasol AG in 2000.Read 14 Oct 2026 · exasol.com
Core licence
The Exasol database is distributed under Exasol commercial EULAs and raw-data or pay-as-you-go licensing rather than as an open-source database.Read 14 Oct 2026 · docs.exasol.com
Database security
The documentation describes password, LDAP/AD, Kerberos SSO, and OpenID authentication, along with MFA support where the authentication provider supports it.Read 28 Sep 2026 · docs.exasol.com
Deployment choices
The vendor documents SaaS, on-premises, hybrid and air-gapped deployment models.Read 14 Oct 2026 · exasol.com
Documentation
The official documentation covers SaaS and self-managed deployment, SQL, administration, security, integrations, drivers, UDFs and troubleshooting.Read 14 Oct 2026 · docs.exasol.com
Drivers and clients
Exasol supports JDBC, ODBC and other drivers, with documented connections from DBeaver, DataGrip, DbVisualizer, EXAplus CLI and VS Code.Read 14 Oct 2026 · docs.exasol.com
Encryption
The documentation says Exasol uses TLS encryption for JDBC, ODBC, ADO.NET, CLI, and WebSockets, while encryption at rest must be configured on the supplied file systems and devices.Read 28 Sep 2026 · docs.exasol.com
In-memory MPP engine
The database uses in-memory processing, column storage, compression and massively parallel processing to accelerate analytical queries.Read 14 Oct 2026 · exasol.com
IPO
Exasol completed a Frankfurt Stock Exchange IPO in May 2020 and reported gross proceeds of EUR 48.5 million.Read 14 Oct 2026 · irpages2.eqs.com
ISO certification
Exasol AG holds an ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certificate valid from 17 June 2024 through 16 June 2027 for database development and associated services.Read 14 Oct 2026 · exasol.com
Lakehouse access
Lakehouse Turbo connects to a catalog and incrementally replicates selected lakehouse tables into Exasol for faster queries.Read 14 Oct 2026 · exasol.com
Legal name
Crunchbase identifies the legal name as Exasol AG and lists Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany as headquarters.Read 14 Oct 2026 · crunchbase.com
Limit: cost
Reviewers say high-performance virtual machines and the service price can become expensive for large datasets.Read 14 Oct 2026 · g2.com
Limit: documentation
G2’s review summary says some users find documentation, especially scripting guidance, in need of improvement.Read 14 Oct 2026 · g2.com
Limit: ecosystem
Reviewers note a smaller community and fewer niche integrations than Snowflake or Databricks, plus limited active partners.Read 14 Oct 2026 · g2.com
Limit: enterprise features
A TrustRadius reviewer reports missing native row-level and column-level security compared with some larger database systems.Read 14 Oct 2026 · trustradius.com
Limit: installation
G2 reviewers describe the installation process as complicated and say self-managed deployments require more setup than cloud-only databases.Read 14 Oct 2026 · g2.com
Managed SaaS
Exasol SaaS is fully managed, provides automatic maintenance and scaling, and runs on Amazon Web Services.Read 14 Oct 2026 · exasol.com
Notable limits
The free Community Edition is limited to 200GB of data, while Exasol Personal is licensed for a single user and allows up to two connected data sources.Read 28 Sep 2026 · exasol.com
Notable release
The Exasol 8 2025.1 release added SaaS session offloading, action scheduling and a biannual major-release cadence.Read 14 Oct 2026 · exasol.com
On-prem administration API
Self-managed clusters provide an Administration REST API built on ConfD with an OpenAPI specification available from each node.Read 14 Oct 2026 · docs.exasol.com
Performance
The company says automatic self-indexing helps tune database performance.Read 28 Sep 2026 · exasol.com
Praise: administration
Reviewers commonly praise low maintenance, automatic tuning, easy administration and strong vendor support.Read 14 Oct 2026 · trustradius.com
Praise: performance
G2 and TrustRadius reviewers repeatedly praise very fast query execution, strong throughput and responsive reporting on large datasets.Read 14 Oct 2026 · g2.com
Python driver
PyExasol is an officially supported Python connector using WebSockets, compression and parallel data streams, and its repository is MIT licensed.Read 14 Oct 2026 · github.com
Rating on Capterra
4.8 out of 5 from 12 reviewsRead 14 Oct 2026 · capterra.com
Rating on G2
4.7 out of 5 from 28 reviewsRead 14 Oct 2026 · g2.com
Rating on Gartner Peer Insights
4.8 out of 5 from 18 ratingsRead 14 Oct 2026 · gartner.com
Rating on TrustRadius
8.6 out of 10 from 4 reviewsRead 14 Oct 2026 · trustradius.com
SaaS features
Exasol SaaS lists five databases, multi-cluster support, basic UDF support, advanced in-database analytics, and data virtualization support.Read 28 Sep 2026 · exasol.com
SaaS free trial
Exasol advertises $200 of free usage for a 30-day SaaS trial without requiring a credit card.Read 14 Oct 2026 · exasol.com
SaaS pricing
SaaS compute is published from $3.3 per hour for XS through $158.4 per hour for 3XL, with storage and transfer charged separately.Read 14 Oct 2026 · exasol.com
SaaS REST API
The SaaS REST API exposes most web-console operations through OpenAPI-described endpoints, Swagger UI, curl or API clients using personal access tokens.Read 14 Oct 2026 · docs.exasol.com
Scaling
Exasol SaaS supports vertical scaling and adding clusters with dedicated compute for workloads such as data ingest or machine learning.Read 28 Sep 2026 · exasol.com
Security controls
SaaS provides role-based access control, encryption in transit and at rest, AWS DDoS/WAF protections, PCI payment infrastructure and GDPR-oriented controls.Read 14 Oct 2026 · exasol.com
Self-hosted requirements
On-premises deployment requires supported Linux hosts, prepared storage and network connectivity; the c4 command-line tool downloads and deploys the cluster.Read 14 Oct 2026 · docs.exasol.com
User-defined functions
Advanced editions support in-database UDF analytics using R, Java, Python and Lua, and the Personal product advertises the same language options.Read 14 Oct 2026 · exasol.com

Plans and prices

XS $3.30 a month Pay-as-you-go 8 vCPUs · 64 GB memory Read 20 Sep 2026 · exasol.com
S $6.60 a month Pay-as-you-go 16 vCPUs · 128 GB memory Read 20 Sep 2026 · exasol.com
M $13.20 a month Pay-as-you-go 32 vCPUs · 256 GB memory Read 20 Sep 2026 · exasol.com
L $26.40 a month Pay-as-you-go 64 vCPUs · 512 GB memory Read 20 Sep 2026 · exasol.com
XL $52.80 a month Pay-as-you-go 128 vCPUs · 1024 GB memory Read 20 Sep 2026 · exasol.com
2XL $105.60 a month Pay-as-you-go 256 vCPUs · 2048 GB memory Read 20 Sep 2026 · exasol.com
3XL $158.40 a month Pay-as-you-go 384 vCPUs · 3072 GB memory Read 20 Sep 2026 · exasol.com
Storage $25 a month Additional cost Separate storage pricing Read 20 Sep 2026 · exasol.com
Exasol Community Edition Free Free on-premises edition Up to 200GB of data · preconfigured sample data and scripts Read 28 Sep 2026 · exasol.com
Exasol Personal Free Free for personal use Unlimited data and clusters · two data sources · single-user personal license Read 28 Sep 2026 · exasol.com
Exasol Personal Free Free Personal use · Cloud or local deployment · Feature availability varies by deployment Read 14 Oct 2026 · exasol.com
Exasol SaaS XS $3.30 a month $3.3/hr 8 vCPUs · 64GB memory Read 14 Oct 2026 · exasol.com

Every Exasol plan and price →

Strong points and limits

Strong points

  • SaaS includes five databases and multi-cluster support.
  • Clusters can be added with dedicated compute.
  • 30-day trial includes $200 of usage without a credit card.
  • Free editions are available for personal use and on-premises.

Limits

  • Community Edition is limited to 200GB of data.
  • Personal is single-user and allows two connected data sources.
  • Storage is separately priced at $25 a month.
  • Encryption at rest must be configured on supplied systems.

Who it suits

Exasol SaaS is described for organizations needing multi-departmental analytics, in-database machine learning or AI, and complex data integration or virtualization. Its deployment options also include on-premises and air-gapped environments.

Exasol in depth

Read the full write-up

Exasol is an analytics database for organizations running demanding, concurrent queries and AI workloads across cloud and on-premises environments. It suits teams that need in-database analytics and flexible deployment; its appeal depends on whether the SaaS compute model and separate storage charge fit their budget.

Overview

Exasol combines analytics and machine-learning capabilities with deployment choices that include managed SaaS, hybrid, and on-premises installations. Air-gapped on-premises setups are also possible, a useful option for organizations that need isolated environments. The maker says the database can analyze billions of rows in seconds and uses automatic self-indexing to tune performance.

The breadth is meaningful for teams consolidating analytics, data integration, and machine-learning work around one database. But the editions have materially different boundaries: the free personal license is for one user and two connected data sources, while the free on-premises Community Edition caps data at 200GB.

Key features

Analytics and machine learning: Exasol supports data lake access, streaming ingestion, and in-database machine learning. SaaS also includes advanced in-database analytics and basic UDF support, which can suit teams bringing analytical work closer to their data.

Scaling: SaaS supports vertical scaling and additional clusters with dedicated compute for workloads such as data ingestion or machine learning. This offers a way to separate compute-heavy jobs, though storage is priced separately.

Data access and integrations: Data virtualization support is included in SaaS, and the integrations directory includes Airbyte, Alation, Amazon QuickSight, Apache Airflow, and Apache Superset.

Security and operations: Authentication options include passwords, LDAP/AD, Kerberos SSO, and OpenID; MFA is supported when the identity provider supports it. TLS covers JDBC, ODBC, ADO.NET, CLI, and WebSockets. Encryption at rest must be configured on the underlying file systems and devices, so deployment teams need to account for that responsibility.

Support: Exasol lists 24/7 incident troubleshooting and monitoring, along with performance analysis, maintenance, and planning assistance.

Pricing

Exasol has two free editions and pay-as-you-go SaaS compute tiers. SaaS compute is billed hourly, so the monthly figures below are plan rates rather than a fixed commitment; storage costs extra at $25 a month.

PlanPriceIncludedExasol PersonalfreeUnlimited data and clusters, two data sources, single-user personal licenseExasol Community EditionfreeOn-premises edition, up to 200GB of data, sample data and scriptsExasol SaaS XS$3.30 a month8 vCPUs, 64GB memory, five databasesExasol SaaS S$6.60 a month16 vCPUs, 128GB memory, five databasesExasol M$13.20 a month32 vCPUs, 256GB memoryExasol L$26.40 a month64 vCPUs, 512GB memoryExasol XL$52.80 a month128 vCPUs, 1024GB memoryExasol 2XL$105.60 a month256 vCPUs, 2048GB memoryExasol 3XL$158.40 a month384 vCPUs, 3072GB memoryThe Personal edition is the broadest free option for an individual who can work within its two-source limit; Community Edition is the more relevant starting point for an on-premises evaluation, provided 200GB is enough. XS and S provide five databases each, with S doubling compute and memory for twice the listed monthly price. Larger tiers scale resources in steps, making them relevant as workload requirements grow. The SaaS trial provides $200 of usage for 30 days with no credit card required.

Platforms

Exasol supports API, Linux, macOS, self-hosted, and web access. Its deployment range covers managed SaaS, hybrid, and on-premises use, including air-gapped on-premises environments.

Who it's for

Exasol SaaS is aimed at organizations coordinating analytics across departments, running in-database machine learning or AI, or handling complex integration and data virtualization. The dedicated-cluster option may help when ingest or machine-learning work needs its own compute. A single user exploring the product can start with Personal; teams evaluating an on-premises installation can use Community Edition if its 200GB ceiling is workable.

It is a less natural fit for buyers seeking a simple, fixed all-in monthly cost: compute is pay-as-you-go and storage is separate. Teams that need more than two sources on the free personal license, or more than 200GB in the free Community Edition, will need another edition or paid capacity.

Pros and cons

Pros: Multiple deployment models, including air-gapped on-premises; in-database machine learning, streaming ingestion, and data lake support; a 30-day, $200 SaaS trial without a credit card.

Cons: Storage is an additional $25 a month; the free editions impose a one-user/two-source or 200GB limit; at-rest encryption depends on configuration of the underlying storage devices.

Alternatives

Consider InfluxDB if its freemium model and pay-for-what-you-use Cloud Serverless data-in plan better match your usage; its listed platforms also include Windows. QuestDB is a fit to consider for a free, self-managed, single-instance Apache 2.0 core with community support. Choose CrateDB if a small shared free tier with 2 vCPUs, 2 GiB RAM, and 8 GiB storage is a closer starting point.

Databend offers a free self-hosted Community edition, while Dedicated pricing is custom. Apache Druid is a free, downloadable self-hosted analytics database. DuckDB UI is a free browser-based local SQL notebook with an optional MotherDuck connection. Snowflake CoCo is a paid option with a free trial. GreptimeDB offers a freemium model and a fully managed Enterprise plan from $290 a month.

Browse Columnar Databases, Data Warehouse Software, OLAP Databases, OLAP Software, and Database Software for more options.

Verdict

Exasol is a strong candidate for organizations that need high-concurrency analytics and in-database AI across managed, hybrid, or tightly controlled on-premises environments. Its deployment range and workload-specific scaling are the main reasons to choose it. Look elsewhere if predictable combined storage and compute costs or generous team use at no charge matter more than that flexibility.

Verdict

Exasol offers several deployment models and analytics capabilities, with free editions and pay-as-you-go SaaS tiers. Check the free-edition limits and separate storage charge when estimating fit and cost.

Where Specifiction places it

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