Datastrato Iceberg Lakehouse Platform vs Starburst Data Platform

Datastrato Iceberg Lakehouse Platform is a federated metadata catalog for connecting data sources and governing access across clients. Built on Apache Gravitino and Iceberg REST Catalog, it provides a standards-compliant REST catalog with metadata caching and table maintenance for production lakehouses. It can register Iceberg, Hive, Glue, relational databases, Kafka, filesets, and models in place without copying metadata. Spark, Flink, Trino, and Dremio are named Iceberg catalog clients, and the same namespace resolves across BigQuery. Governance includes catalog-level role-based access, row filtering, column masking, tag-based policies, and auditing across engines and agents. S3, GCS, and ADLS are supported with short-lived scoped credentials per principal. Agents can use an MCP metadata interface and GVFS under the same access controls. Per-table compaction, snapshot expiry, and orphan cleanup jobs can be sent to Airflow, Kubernetes, EMR, or Databricks. Enterprise is installed with a Helm chart in Kubernetes and activated by license key. Pricing is on request; the commercial distribution includes support with a defined response commitment and maintained release line.

Starburst Data Platform is built on Trino and Apache Iceberg to provide governed access to distributed data across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. It can query data across 50+ sources in one SQL statement without copying it. Connectors span data lakes, warehouses, streaming systems, relational databases, and other sources, with features including parallelism, table statistics, dynamic filtering, and pushdown. Starburst Galaxy is available on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Galaxy controls include SSO, SCIM, service principals, role- and attribute-based access control, row filters, column masking, and end-to-end encryption. Starburst says Galaxy does not store customer data. Its free tier includes up to three clusters for ad hoc queries. The 30-day trial includes $500 in Galaxy compute resources and Enterprise features, then downgrades to the free tier. Paid plans start at $0.50 per credit; the listed Enterprise and Mission-Critical tiers start at $0.75 and $1.00 per credit. The Galaxy security page lists a 99.5% uptime SLA, 24/7 expert support, and a 30-minute response time.