Apache Druid vs Apache Kylin
Apache Druid
druid.apache.orgApache Kylin
kylin.apache.orgSide by side
| Figure | Apache Druid | Apache Kylin |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Big Data Analytics Software | 9.0 (#2) | 8.5 (#8) |
| Spec score · OLAP Software | 9.0 (#3) | 8.6 (#6) |
| Spec score · Analytics Databases | 9.0 (#3) | 8.5 (#6) |
| Spec score · OLAP Databases | 9.0 (#3) | 8.5 (#6) |
| Spec score · Analytical Data Store Software | 9.0 (#4) | 8.5 (#6) |
| Deployment | Druid can run on commodity hardware in *NIX environments and is designed to run in AWS, GCP, Azure, and other cloud environments. | Kylin provides a web UI and can be deployed with query, job, or all server modes. |
| License | Apache Druid and its documentation are licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. | The project homepage states that Apache Kylin is distributed under the Apache License v2. |
| Query performance | The project says Druid can execute OLAP queries in milliseconds over datasets with billions to trillions of rows. | The product site describes sub-second queries using pre-calculation technology and support for large-scale, high-concurrency analytics. |
| Streaming | Native Apache Kafka and Amazon Kinesis integrations provide query-on-arrival, ingestion at millions of events per second, low latency, and guaranteed consistency. | Kylin supports Apache Kafka as a streaming data source and fusion models for streaming and batch analysis. |
| Support | The project directs users to its community network for help using Druid. | The project directs users to its user mailing list and Apache Kylin JIRA for questions and issues. |
Plans
In their own words
Apache Druid
Apache Druid is a free, open-source analytics database for querying streaming and batch data. It is designed to return OLAP queries in milliseconds, including on high-cardinality datasets with billions to trillions of rows. The project describes applications ranging from hundreds to 100,000 queries per second. Native Apache Kafka and Amazon Kinesis integrations support low-latency ingestion and querying as data arrives. Druid organizes ingested data into columnar, time-indexed, encoded and compressed storage. Queries can use Druid SQL or JSON-over-HTTP, and joins are available during ingestion or at query time. Its web console can load data, manage datasources and tasks, show server status and run queries. Extensions connect to storage, databases and formats including S3, HDFS, Azure, PostgreSQL, Avro, ORC and Parquet. Druid can be self-hosted on Linux, macOS and other Unix-like systems; Windows is not supported. The local quickstart needs at least 6 GiB of RAM and Java 17. Production security controls require configuration.
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.