Amazon MSK vs Starburst Galaxy comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Starburst are both solutions in the Streaming Analytics category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #6 with an average rating of 7.2, while Starburst is ranked #12 with an average rating of 9.7. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 5.9% mindshare in SA, compared to Starburst’s 1.3% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Starburst users who would recommend it.

Amazon MSK

Read 14 Amazon MSK reviews

2,530 Views
2,479 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Starburst Galaxy

Read 9 Starburst Galaxy reviews

616 Views
437 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon MSK

Starburst Galaxy

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon MSK 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 MSK vs. Starburst Galaxy Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon MSK vs. Starburst Galaxy

September 2025

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Helped 869,202 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 MSK

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

6th

Average Rating

7.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Starburst Galaxy

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

12th

Average Rating

9.8

Reviews Sentiment

1.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Science Platforms (9th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon MSK is 5.9%, down from 9.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Starburst Galaxy is 1.3%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Streaming Analytics Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Amazon MSK	5.9%
Starburst Galaxy	1.3%
Other	92.8%

Streaming Analytics

Featured Reviews

SYED SHAAZ

Co-Founder & CTO at Photios AI

Improved data streaming and integration challenges prompt search for alternatives

The integration capabilities of Amazon MSK are not very flexible. If you have your own self-managed Kafka, that helps significantly because you can set up configurations. We are considering self-managed Kafka since our product is only one year old. The Kafka integrations are fine, but the configurations are an issue. The only issue with Amazon MSK that we are facing is the configurations. There are preset configurations and limited configurations that we can set for our unique use case. The product could improve by allowing us to set different configurations. I would also like to see Amazon MSK improve in the area of connectors. We are considering Confluent Cloud because they have many more connectors. They have KSQL DB and governance features. It is slightly costlier, but Confluent offers more flexibility with their connectors.

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Stephen-Howard

Sr Director, Technology at Spreetail

Federated querying delivers integrated data at record speed and reduces processing time

The biggest win has been the ability to combine data from multiple sources and deliver it to the business at record speed. This capability has allowed us to query directly through Starburst Galaxy, enabling teams to access integrated data that would otherwise be hard to pull together. This has reduced both our ETL processing time and storage costs. We are answering questions that would have been hard, if not impossible, to answer previously because the data came from disparate, disconnected sources.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It offers good stability."

"Amazon MSK has contributed positively to our real-time analytics capabilities because Fortis's dashboards have dashboard health that needs to be maintained, user logs that need to be maintained, and usage tracking."

"The most valuable feature of Amazon MSK is the integration."

"Overall, it is very cost-effective based on the workflow."

"Amazon MSK's scalability is very good."

"Amazon MSK has significantly improved our organization by building seamless integration between systems."

"It provides installations, scaling, and other functionalities straight out of the box."

More Amazon MSK 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 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 Galaxy has improved our organization by unifying access to all major data sources, reducing the need for complex ETL processes."

"Starburst Galaxy is becoming a cornerstone of our data platform, empowering us to make smarter and faster decisions across the organization."

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

"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."

"Starburst Galaxy has improved our organization by unifying access to all major data sources, reducing the need for complex ETL processes."

Cons

"Amazon MSK could improve on the features they offer. They are still lagging behind Confluence."

"The only issue with Amazon MSK that we are facing is the configurations. There are preset configurations and limited configurations that we can set for our unique use case."

"The cost of using Amazon MSK is high, which is a significant disadvantage, as the increase in cloud costs by 50% to 60% does not justify the savings."

"We need to create connectors in Amazon MSK, but there are no default connectors in AWS for that purpose."

"In my opinion, there are areas in Amazon MSK that could be improved, particularly in terms of configuration. Initially setting it up and getting it connected was quite challenging. The naming conventions for policies were updated by AWS, and some were undocumented, leading to confusion with outdated materials. It took us weeks of trial and error before discovering new methods through hidden tutorials and official documentation."

"It would be really helpful if Amazon MSK could provide a single installation that covers all the servers."

"The downside of Amazon MSK is that when I needed to make a small change in the MSK configuration, it wasn't possible. I had to remove and drop all the clusters and recreate them again, which is complicated in a production environment."

"The cost of using Amazon MSK is high, which is a significant disadvantage, as the increase in cloud costs by 50% to 60% does not justify the savings."

More Amazon MSK cons

"I would like Starburst to leverage AI to improve usability. Data lakes are complicated and difficult for users to explore."

"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."

"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 can be slow, sometimes taking over a minute."

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

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When you create a complete enterprise-driven architecture that is deployable on an enterprise scale, I would say that the prices of Amazon MSK and Confluent Platform become comparable."

"The platform has better pricing than one of its competitors."

"The price of Amazon MSK is less than some competitor solutions, such as Confluence."

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

29%

Computer Software Company

14%

Government

Consumer Goods Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	4

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	1

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon MSK?

Amazon MSK has significantly improved our organization by building seamless integration between systems.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon MSK?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Amazon MSK?

We are recently working with Amazon MSK at Fortis, where we have multiple dashboards in our revenue intelligence platform. We are streaming data from different apps into those dashboards. The data ...

See all answers

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

You pay for cluster uptime. It is important to be aggressive about autoscaling, as a single worker will get you a long way. I recommend never connecting a BI tool to your Galaxy cluster. Instead, w...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Starburst Galaxy?

As a hosted option, I wish I had more control over the cluster configuration, specifically regarding some of the more advanced options. Trino is extremely flexible and powerful, but some of this fu...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Starburst Galaxy?

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. It is surprisingly useful to query SQL Server, a Google Sh...

See all answers

Comparisons

Azure Stream Analytics vs Amazon MSK

Compared 34% of the time

Apache Flink vs Amazon MSK

Compared 17% of the time

Confluent vs Amazon MSK

Compared 16% of the time

Amazon Kinesis vs Amazon MSK

Compared 7% of the time

Apache Pulsar vs Amazon MSK

Compared 7% of the time

More Amazon MSK Competitors

Starburst Enterprise vs Starburst Galaxy

Compared 52% of the time

Databricks vs Starburst Galaxy

Compared 29% of the time

Dremio vs Starburst Galaxy

Compared 19% of the time

More Starburst Galaxy Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon MSK

October 2025

Download Amazon MSK product report

Buyer's Guide

Starburst Galaxy

September 2025

Download Starburst Galaxy product report

Also Known As

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka

No data available

Overview

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) is a fully managed service that enables you to build and run applications that use Apache Kafka to process streaming data. Amazon MSK provides the control-plane operations, such as those for creating, updating, and deleting clusters.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Starburst Galaxy offers advanced analytics solutions tailored for big data environments. It is renowned for its scalability and flexibility, enabling data-driven decisions.

Starburst Galaxy provides an efficient platform for conducting complex data analysis across multiple datasets. Its architecture facilitates seamless integration with existing data infrastructure, allowing organizations to harness the value of their data efficiently. Users appreciate its ability to perform intricate queries without the need for extensive data movement, fostering a more agile approach to data management and analysis.

What features make Starburst Galaxy unique?

Advanced Query Engine: Optimizes data processing to handle complex analytics efficiently.
Scalability: Easily adapts to growing data needs without compromising performance.
Integration Capabilities: Seamlessly connects with existing data systems for streamlined operations.

What benefits and ROI should users look for?

Cost Efficiency: Reduces storage and compute costs by optimizing queries and minimizing data movement.
Improved Decision-Making: Empowers users with quick access to critical insights for strategic planning.
Enhanced Performance: Delivers faster query responses, boosting productivity and time-to-value.

Starburst Galaxy is instrumental in industries such as finance, healthcare, and e-commerce, where large-scale data analysis is crucial. Organizations in these fields implement its features to accelerate data processing and gain a competitive advantage, turning vast amounts of information into actionable insights that drive industry-specific innovations.

Starburst

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Amazon MSK vs. Starburst Galaxy

September 2025

Free Report: Amazon MSK vs. Starburst Galaxy

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