Qubole vs Starburst Galaxy

Qubole is a cloud data lake platform for data engineering, data management, streaming analysis, machine learning, data exploration, and ad-hoc analytics. It lists support for AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, alongside Apache Spark, Presto, Hive/Hadoop, TensorFlow, and Airflow. Workbench lets users author, save, template, and share reports and queries, with optimized Presto SQL, Tableau and Looker integrations, and Git integration. The Assisted Pipeline Builder combines batch or streaming sources into streaming pipelines using fault-tolerant infrastructure. Qubole says it provisions, manages, and optimizes cloud resources, including workload-aware autoscaling and real-time spot buying. Security controls include encryption, role-based access, and integration with cloud IAM, Active Directory, and LDAP. The service states a 99.9% availability commitment, excluding scheduled and communicated maintenance. A 30-day full-featured trial is listed. Enterprise Edition is priced on request, billed per QCU per hr, and requires an annual contract; On-Demand is priced on request, billed per QCU per hr. Both exclude user fees; On-Demand lists them as $108 per user per month.

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.