Amazon Redshift vs Apache Kudu

Amazon Redshift is a cloud data warehouse for SQL analytics across data warehouses and data lakes. It offers provisioned and serverless deployments, with options AWS says can scale to petabytes and support thousands of concurrent users. Redshift runs read-only SQL queries on Apache Iceberg, Apache Hudi, and Delta Lake tables, plus open file formats in Amazon S3. Zero-ETL integrations connect with Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, and enterprise applications. Streaming ingestion connects with Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka. Listed integrations include QuickSight, Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Alteryx, Jupyter Notebook, Informatica, dbt, MicroStrategy, and Looker. The Data API supports AWS SDK languages including Python, Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, and C++. Security includes encryption, row- and column-level controls, and dynamic masking. It is paid, has no free plan, offers a free trial, and starts at $0.54 per month for Provisioned or $1.50 per month for Serverless.

Apache Kudu is an open-source distributed storage engine for analytics on rapidly changing data. It combines fast inserts and updates with efficient columnar scans in one storage layer. Tables use strongly typed columns and primary keys, allowing reads, updates, and deletes by key, with millisecond-scale access to individual rows. Java, C++, and Python APIs are provided, and frequently used integrations include Apache Impala, Apache NiFi, Apache Spark SQL, and Presto. Kudu runs on Linux, stores data in the Linux filesystem, and recommends ext4 or XFS for storage directories. Raft replicates tablet operations, while clients can use strict snapshot consistency. Security options include Kerberos authentication, TLS for authenticated internal connections, and fine-grained Apache Ranger authorization. It is self-hosted, supports Parquet, and is free under the Apache 2.0 license. Kudu is not designed as an OLTP system and does not currently support automatic record deletion through a time-to-live property. The listed latest release is 1.18.1, released January 9, 2026.