OpenLake vs Starburst Galaxy
OpenLake
openlake.co
Starburst Galaxy
starburst.ioSide by side
| Figure | OpenLake | Starburst Galaxy |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 4 |
| Spec score · Data Lakehouse Platforms | 7.6 (#10) | 7.4 (#13) |
| Intended users | The platform is aimed at analysts, engineers, and administrators, with the maker highlighting regulated, sovereign, classified, and multi-account organizations. | Starburst recommends Galaxy for organizations that do not yet have resources to manage complex data clusters. |
| Product | OpenLake bundles open-source data lakehouse components into a managed platform deployed inside the customer's cloud account. | Starburst Galaxy is a fully managed, cloud hosted analytics platform built on Trino for querying data across sources without moving it. |
| Security | OpenLake describes end-to-end SSO with enforced MFA, role-based access, managed secrets, network isolation, and administrative audit logs. | Galaxy supports fine-grained RBAC and ABAC, end-to-end encryption, AI-powered data classification, and private connectivity; Starburst describes it as SOC 2 Type II certified and HIPAA-ready. |
Plans
Starburst Galaxy
- FreeFree
- ProPriced on request
- EnterprisePriced on request
- Mission-CriticalPriced on request
In their own words
OpenLake
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 Galaxy
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.