Apache Druid vs RisingWave
Apache Druid
druid.apache.org
RisingWave
risingwave.comSide by side
| Figure | Apache Druid | RisingWave |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $0.23/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 3 |
| Spec score · Stream Analytics Software | 9.0 (#2) | 8.0 (#13) |
| Spec score · Streaming Analytics Software | 9.0 (#2) | 8.1 (#6) |
| Spec score · Analytics Data | 9.0 (#3) | 8.1 (#13) |
| Deployment | Druid can run on commodity hardware in *NIX environments and is designed to run in AWS, GCP, Azure, and other cloud environments. | Self-managed deployments support Docker, Kubernetes with Helm charts, cloud VMs, and on-premises bare-metal servers. |
| Security | Security features include TLS, authentication, and authorization, but they are disabled by default and the documentation says to configure them for production. | RisingWave security guidance covers TLS/SSL in transit, S3 encryption at rest, certificate or password authentication, role-based grants, and SQL-based data masking. |
| Support | The project directs users to its community network for help using Druid. | RisingWave offers standard support on Basic, premium 24x7 support as an option on Pro, and premium support with SLA and quarterly success reviews for self-managed deployments. |
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.
RisingWave
RisingWave is a distributed SQL platform for ingesting, transforming, and serving real-time data. Its SQL interface is wire-compatible with PostgreSQL, so PostgreSQL clients, drivers, and tools can connect. New events incrementally refresh materialized views. Barrier-based checkpointing and consistent snapshots support exactly-once processing, while data is persisted in S3-compatible object storage and connector offsets are checkpointed for delivery durability. RisingWave lists 31+ native connectors, including Kafka, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Iceberg, Snowflake, BigQuery, S3, Redis, and Elasticsearch. Self-managed deployments are Apache 2.0 open source, with Docker, Kubernetes, cloud VM, and on-premises options. The hosted Basic plan is $0.23 a month, pay-as-you-go, limited to 64 cores and available in select regions; a free plan and 7-day trial are also listed. Basic includes standard support. Premium 24x7 support can be purchased with Pro, while self-managed deployments offer premium support with an SLA and quarterly success reviews. Listed platforms include API, Linux, macOS, self-hosted, and web.