Amazon Kinesis vs Starburst Galaxy comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Starburst are both solutions in the Streaming Analytics category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.3, while Starburst is ranked #8 with an average rating of 9.5. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 4.0% mindshare in SA, compared to Starburst’s 1.7% mindshare. Additionally, 90% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Starburst users who would recommend it.

Amazon Kinesis

Read 29 Amazon Kinesis reviews

3,300 Views
3,300 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Starburst Galaxy

Read 11 Starburst Galaxy reviews

1,953 Views
918 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon Kinesis

Starburst Galaxy

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon Kinesis and Starburst Galaxy based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Streaming Analytics solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Kinesis vs. Starburst Galaxy Report (Updated: August 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Kinesis vs. Starburst Galaxy

August 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 909,725 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Kinesis

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

11th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Starburst Galaxy

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

8th

Average Rating

9.4

Reviews Sentiment

2.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Science Platforms (7th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon Kinesis is 4.0%, down from 7.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Starburst Galaxy is 1.7%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Starburst Galaxy	1.7%
Amazon Kinesis	4.0%
Other	94.3%

Streaming Analytics

Featured Reviews

reviewer1480695

Director of Software Development at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Has enabled real-time processing of critical event streams with seamless cloud integration

We are contemplating moving away from Amazon Kinesis primarily because of the cost. It is very useful, but if we write our own analytics and data processing pipeline, it would be much cheaper for us. The cost is a primary hindrance. That's why we are not using it widely. For our critical pipeline we are using it, but after that we are putting it in an S3 bucket. Other pipelines directly put the events in an S3 bucket and then process from there. There is no lack of functions in Amazon Kinesis. Functionality-wise, we feel it's complete. The cost aspect is what we are really concerned about.

Read full review

Niketan Kumar

Advisory Solutions Architect at Dell Technologies

Unified data querying has accelerated petabyte-scale analytics and simplified dashboard delivery

Starburst Galaxy offers me several best features, which include very fast querying results, automatic indexing of data for long tables, a cost-based optimizer which reduces the time to query large tables, and an agentic feature that lets me talk to my data.I find myself relying most on querying from different databases as well as automatic indexing in my day-to-day work, as I am a data science architect who needs to get the queries in a very short period of time. Starburst Galaxy serves the best purpose for me because if my SLAs are not met with my customers, they will raise a case, and I have tried many other tools, but Starburst Galaxy fits the best. Starburst Galaxy has positively impacted my organization since we were struggling with Denodo and Dremio, which had their own features but were not helpful in querying large amounts of data, especially semi-structured or unstructured data. Starburst Galaxy addresses this with many YAML files and manifest files for automated maintenance, and it helps reduce the small file problem in different HDFS systems. Additionally, Starburst Galaxy has an MCP server that connects to various agentic pipelines, reducing the time to market for data consumption.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"We have been able to drop our costs for ingesting data by about 60 to 70%."

"One of the best features of Amazon Kinesis is the multi-partition."

"Kinesis replaced a whole tier of servers, so we didn't need to have a server to catch the data and then send the data somewhere else, because Kinesis was the input port for very large amounts of data."

"Amazon Kinesis is easy to get started with, provides good documentation, and has a multilang daemon interface that makes it programming-language agnostic."

"Kinesis has the best of Amazon: data streaming, building processes, data analytics, data in real-time are very good."

"We have seen a return on our investment with Amazon Kinesis, as we are able to process data without any issue and it is our solution for ingesting data in other databases, such as Snowflake."

"I find almost all features valuable, especially the timing and fast pace movement."

"I find data Firehose and data streams are much more intelligent than other streaming solutions."

More Amazon Kinesis pros

"The most fundamental feature is the query engine, which is much faster than any of the competitors; Starburst is able to finish most queries within 10 seconds, which is especially important for many non-technical employees."

"Starburst Galaxy serves the best purpose for me because if my SLAs are not met with my customers, they will raise a case, and I have tried many other tools, but Starburst Galaxy fits the best."

"Starburst Galaxy serves as our primary SQL-based data processing engine, a strategic decision driven by its seamless integration with our AWS cloud infrastructure and its ability to deliver high performance with low-latency responses."

"I use Starburst as a cost-efficient hosted option for Trino for data integration and ad-hoc analysis across a broad range of data sources."

"Starburst Galaxy has significantly improved our data architecture flexibility and performance management by solving cross-database query challenges and enabling us to utilize iceberg tables externally across our entire data ecosystem."

"Starburst Galaxy has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to rethink the strategy for data and architect data differently; instead of having multiple data marts and siloed data marts, we have a unified vision, and that is how it is changing."

"Starburst on Trino, combined with our SQL-native data transformation tool SQLMesh, has delivered anywhere from a two to five times improvement in compute performance across our transformation DAG."

"Starburst has provided us with virtually guaranteed performance on complex queries across datasets that are in the tens of gigabytes which complete in seconds."

More Starburst Galaxy pros

Cons

"It would be beneficial if Amazon Kinesis provided document based support on the internet to be able to read the data from the Kinesis site."

"Kinesis can be expensive, especially when dealing with large volumes of data."

"There are some kind of hard limits on Amazon Kinesis, and if you hit that, then you will get the throughput exceed error."

"We were charged high costs for the solution’s enhanced fan-out feature."

"The price is not much cheaper. So, there is room for improvement in the pricing."

"The technical support could be improved. They tend to send you back to the documentation."

"There are certain shortcomings in the machine learning capacity offered by the product, making it an area where improvements are required."

"The solution has a two-minute maximum time delay for live streaming, which could be reduced."

More Amazon Kinesis cons

"Multi-tenancy could be improved. In order to have multiple environments for SSO, we maintain multiple tenants that are connected to different AWS accounts via the Marketplace."

"Cluster startup time is another pain point, typically 3 to 5 minutes, which is not the worst with proper planning but can be annoying for ad-hoc work."

"I think there are areas of improvement with respect to AI adaptability, and also in general, the amount of connectors working with other tools are areas where it can be expanded."

"I would like to see better alerting integrations for failures and errors in scheduled tasks and maintenance jobs."

"Cluster startup time can be slow, sometimes taking over a minute."

"The most persistent issue is the cluster spin-up time."

"As a hosted option, I wish I had more control over the cluster configuration, specifically regarding some of the more advanced options."

"Starburst Galaxy can be improved by discovering unstructured data and building in streaming ingestion because we are currently using Kafka for that purpose."

More Starburst Galaxy cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Under $1,000 per month."

"The tool's pricing is cheap."

"The fee is based on the number of hours the service is running."

"I think for us, with Amazon Kinesis, if we have to set up our own Kafka or cluster, it will be very time-consuming. If one considers the aforementioned aspect, Amazon Kinesis is a cheap tool."

"The pricing depends on the use cases and the level of usage. If you wanted to use Kinesis for different use cases, there's definitely a cheaper base cost involved. However, it's not entirely cheap, as different use cases might require different levels of Kinesis usage."

"The tool's entry price is cheap. However, pricing increases with data volume."

"I rate the product price a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."

"The product falls on a bit of an expensive side."

More Amazon Kinesis pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Outsourcing Company

Financial Services Firm

28%

Computer Software Company

11%

Construction Company

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	10

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	3

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Kinesis?

Amazon Kinesis and Lambda pricing is competitive, but we noticed that scaling and large volumes could potentially increase costs significantly.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon Kinesis?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Amazon Kinesis?

We use Amazon Kinesis for stream processing. We get events from on-premise devices to the cloud. We get many device events and we have to process these events that are coming from the devices. To p...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Starburst Galaxy?

I recommend experimenting with different cluster sizes to determine what works best for your particular use case.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Starburst Galaxy?

Starburst Galaxy can be improved by discovering unstructured data and building in streaming ingestion because we are currently using Kafka for that purpose. We rely on third-party tools for ingesti...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Starburst Galaxy?

My main use case for Starburst Galaxy is querying petabytes of data across vast data sources, and I use a federated query engine to join data sources from different databases and then join them usi...

See all answers

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Compared 21% of the time

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Compared 10% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Kinesis

August 2026

Download Amazon Kinesis product report

Buyer's Guide

Starburst Galaxy

July 2026

Download Starburst Galaxy product report

Also Known As

Amazon AWS Kinesis, AWS Kinesis, Kinesis

No data available

Overview

Amazon Kinesis provides real-time data streaming with seamless AWS integration, ideal for analytics, data transformation, and external customer feeds. It offers cost-effective data management with high throughput and low latency, supporting multiple programming languages.

Amazon Kinesis enables organizations to manage real-time data streams efficiently. Its integration with AWS ensures seamless setup and operation, while features like auto-scaling and fault tolerance make it reliable for diverse data sources such as IoT devices and server logs. The platform's ability to handle large-scale event-driven systems and dynamic workloads makes it suitable for complex streaming architectures. Despite some challenges with costs and setup complexity, Kinesis remains a popular choice for its efficient data management and processing capabilities.

What are the key features of Amazon Kinesis?

Real-time Data Streaming: Enables live data processing and analytics.
Seamless AWS Integration: Ensures smooth operation with AWS services.
High Throughput: Consistent 2Mbps rate supports large volumes of data.
Auto-scaling: Automatically adjusts to data load.
Fault Tolerance: Maintains system reliability and data integrity.
Lambda Function Processing: Processes data efficiently using Lambda.

What benefits or ROI should users expect?

Scalable Data Management: Handles data influx effortlessly.
Efficiency: Streamlines data flows without impacting performance.
Cost-effectiveness: Delivers value for budget-conscious users.
Low Latency: Provides real-time insights and reactions.
Multi-language Support: Accommodates various development needs.

In industries such as IoT, finance, and entertainment, Amazon Kinesis facilitates the real-time ingestion and processing of data streams. It connects seamlessly to data lakes and warehouses, enabling businesses to harness data-driven insights without performance loss. This capability is essential for managing dynamic workloads and large-scale event systems. By supporting tools like KDS, Firehose, and Video Streams, Kinesis empowers organizations to respond quickly to changing data environments, enhancing operational effectiveness across different sectors.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Starburst Galaxy offers rapid query speeds and robust cluster management, enhancing data engineering efficiency while supporting AWS integrations and cross-database functionality. Users benefit from its advanced data integration and federated querying capabilities.

Starburst Galaxy stands out with a compute-focused architecture that excels in facilitating seamless data integration. Technological innovations like autoscaling clusters and automated metadata management optimize operations in multi-tenant environments. With a keen emphasis on compatibility, the platform provides support for AWS Glue and enables federated querying across S3, Snowflake, and Redshift. This adaptability ensures comprehensive ETL processes and enhances analytics through querying SQL Server, Google Sheets, and blob stores. While noted for its robust capabilities, users seek improvements in cluster startup times, Tableau and AI support, and desire infrastructure-as-code enhancements.

What are Starburst Galaxy's key features?

Rapid Query Speeds: Enhances data processing with quick responses.
Cluster Autoscaling: Optimizes resource allocation for varying workloads.
Federated Querying: Cross-database functionality for seamless integration.
Compute-Focused Architecture: Ensures efficiency and scalability.
Automated Metadata Management: Streamlines data handling processes.
AWS Integration: Broad compatibility with AWS services.

What benefits should users evaluate in reviews?

Data Engineering Efficiency: Reduces operating expenses and improves productivity.
Cost Reduction: Highlights lower storage costs with efficient data handling.
Seamless Integration: Enables robust data integration across various platforms.
Cluster Management: Supports diverse workloads with advanced management tools.

In industries focusing on large-scale data efforts, Starburst Galaxy plays an essential role in connecting data sources like Amazon S3 and RDS, streamlining tasks in data engineering and ad-hoc analysis across complex environments. Teams leverage its cross-database querying to boost AWS analytics, with features tailored for sectors needing agile data solutions, from ETL pipelines to secure data federation.

Starburst

Sample Customers

Zillow, Netflix, Sonos

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Kinesis vs. Starburst Galaxy

August 2026

Free Report: Amazon Kinesis vs. Starburst Galaxy

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