Apache Drill vs Apache Kylin
Apache Drill
drill.apache.orgApache Kylin
kylin.apache.orgSide by side
| Figure | Apache Drill | Apache Kylin |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Query Engine Software | 8.9 (#2) | 8.5 (#4) |
| BI integrations | The site names Tableau, Qlik, MicroStrategy, Spotfire, SAS, and Excel as tools that can connect using Drill's JDBC and ODBC drivers. | The product page names Tableau, Power BI, and Excel as BI tools it can connect to. |
| Deployment | Drill can run embedded on a laptop or in distributed mode on a cluster of servers. | Kylin provides a web UI and can be deployed with query, job, or all server modes. |
| License | The Apache Drill site identifies the project as licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. | The project homepage states that Apache Kylin is distributed under the Apache License v2. |
| Support | The project directs questions to its drill-dev mailing list and welcomes contributions. | The project directs users to its user mailing list and Apache Kylin JIRA for questions and issues. |
Plans
In their own words
Apache Drill
Apache Drill is a schema-free SQL query engine for Hadoop, NoSQL databases, and cloud storage. It can query raw data where it resides without first loading it, defining schemas, or transforming it. Its JSON data model supports complex and nested structures, and a single query can join data across multiple datastores. Listed sources include HBase, MongoDB, HDFS, Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, Swift, NAS, and local files. JDBC and ODBC drivers connect Drill to tools including Tableau, Qlik, MicroStrategy, Spotfire, SAS, and Excel; developers can also use its REST API in custom applications. Drill can run embedded on a laptop or in distributed mode on a server cluster, and the homepage lists Mac, Windows, and Linux. Documented security options include Kerberos, username and password authentication, Digest, authorization, and impersonation. The software is free under Apache License 2.0. A compatibility limit: official support for Hadoop 2 and Java 8 was dropped with Drill 1.22.0.
Apache Kylin
Apache Kylin is an open-source OLAP engine for data analytics, designed for large-scale workloads with many concurrent users. Its pre-calculation approach is intended to support sub-second SQL queries. Kylin 5 can build models from SQL text, suggest index changes using query history, and use Apache Gluten as a native compute engine; the product overview describes a 2–4× improvement compared with vanilla Spark. For mixed data workloads, it supports Kafka streaming sources and fusion models for batch and streaming analysis, as well as internal tables for flexible queries and lakehouse scenarios. Teams can connect Tableau, Power BI, or Excel. A web UI supports table management, model design, job execution, and configuration. Deployment offers query, job, or all server modes. Kylin runs on Linux and uses Spark with Yarn or Standalone mode. Data storage can use HDFS or S3-compatible systems, while MySQL or PostgreSQL can hold metadata. The project is free under Apache License v2, with source and binary packages available. APIs use Basic Authentication; HTTPS is supported in Kylin 5 but disabled by default.