OpenLake vs Starburst Data Platform

OpenLake is a managed data lakehouse platform deployed in a customer’s cloud account, with API, self-hosted, and web access. It combines Trino, Apache Spark, Apache Iceberg, Apache Polaris, Apache Superset, PostgreSQL, Neo4j, Elasticsearch, and Polars. Its browser SQL workbench uses Trino and can draft queries from natural-language prompts grounded in readable catalogs. Teams can schedule and monitor ETL jobs written in Spark, Polars, Python, or Bash, including work on temporary Spark clusters. Analysts can launch preconfigured cloud workstations through a browser or native client over a secure tunnel without public exposure. OpenLake connects Tableau, Power BI, databases, APIs, S3 feeds, and files. It describes SSO with enforced MFA, role-based permissions, managed secrets, network isolation, and audit logs. Deployments can use customer-owned buckets, open Iceberg tables, streaming ingestion, governance catalogs, and offline artifacts in networks without internet egress. AI cataloging, natural-language querying, and incident-triage proposals are included. Pricing is on request.

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.