Bauplan vs Starburst Galaxy

Bauplan is a data lakehouse for running Python and SQL pipelines directly on Apache Iceberg tables in a user's object storage, without managing servers or clusters. It uses serverless execution for Python pipelines and supports Python, SQL, and mixed workloads on the same tables. Data branches, isolated runs, atomic publishes, and rollback are intended to safeguard changes to production data. Bauplan also describes workflows where AI agents build pipelines, explore data, and manage a lakehouse through its MCP Server and Skills. Integrations listed include Airflow, Prefect, Dagster, Temporal, DBOS, Jupyter, Marimo, Streamlit, Snowflake, BigQuery, Metabase, Superset, Fivetran, and Airbyte. Bauplan says customer data stays in the customer's S3 bucket and offers PrivateLink or bring-your-own-cloud options. Its free Sandbox uses a shared environment where all data is public, which the company recommends for toy projects and demos rather than company data. Dedicated costs $700 a month after the first 14 days free and includes a dedicated private instance, data in the customer's S3, 10GB memory, and unlimited queries, users, and agents. Enterprise pricing is custom. Bauplan states that it is SOC 2 Type II compliant.

Starburst Galaxy is a managed cloud analytics platform built on Trino. It lets teams query data across sources in one SQL query without copying it, with availability on AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Starburst lists more than 50 data sources, including Amazon S3, Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery and Azure Blob. Galaxy can stream from Kafka or load CSV, JSON and AVRO files into Iceberg. Its LakeOps service automates Iceberg table compaction, snapshot expiry and orphan-file removal; AIDA converts natural-language questions into governed insights through a customizable interface or MCP. Security provisions include fine-grained RBAC and ABAC, encryption, data classification and private connectivity. Starburst describes Galaxy as SOC 2 Type II certified and HIPAA-ready. A free plan allows up to three clusters for ad hoc queries in standard execution mode. Usage charges vary by plan and cover items such as compute, ingestion and private-link data transfer. A 30-day trial includes Enterprise features and $500 in compute resources. Starburst recommends Galaxy for organizations without resources to manage complex data clusters.