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 7.3, while Starburst is ranked #17 with an average rating of 10.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 6.5% mindshare in SA, compared to Starburst’s 1.2% mindshare. Additionally, 92% 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 12 Amazon MSK reviews

3,035 Views
2,974 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Starburst Galaxy

Read 7 Starburst Galaxy reviews

549 Views
395 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: August 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon MSK vs. Starburst Galaxy

August 2025

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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

7.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Starburst Galaxy

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

17th

Average Rating

9.8

Reviews Sentiment

1.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Science Platforms (13th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Amazon MSK is 6.5%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Starburst Galaxy is 1.2%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Streaming Analytics

Featured Reviews

FNU AKSHANSH

Senior Data Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

Streamlines our processes, and we don't need to configure any VPCs; it's automatic

We don't have many use cases involving ingesting large amounts of data and scaling up and down. We have a clear understanding of our data volume, which remains relatively constant throughout the week. While we're aware of other features Amazon MSK offers, we feel confident in our current setup. If our requirements change significantly in the future, we'll reassess our needs and consider adopting Amazon MSK.

Read full review

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.

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

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

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

"MSK has a private network that's an out-of-box feature."

"Amazon MSK has good integration because our team has been undergoing significant changes. Coupling it with MSK within AWS is helpful. We don't have to set up additionals or monitor external environments. This"

"Amazon MSK's separation of concerns and ease of creating and deploying new features are highly valuable. It just requires to assign them to the topic, and then anyone who needs to consume these messages can do so directly from Amazon MSK. This separation of concerns makes it very convenient, especially for new feature development, as developers can easily access the messages they need without having to deal with complex server communications or protocol setups."

"The solution's technical support was helpful."

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

"It offers good stability."

More Amazon MSK pros

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

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

"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."

Cons

"The product's schema support needs enhancement. It will help enhance integration with many kinds of languages of programming languages, especially for environments using languages like .NET."

"It does not autoscale. Because if you do keep it manually when you add a note to the cluster and then you register it, then it is scalable, but the fact that you have to go and do it, I think, makes it, again, a bit of some operational overhead when managing the cluster."

"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."

"The configuration seems a little complex and the documentation on the product is not available."

"It should be more flexible, integration-wise."

"Horizontal scale-out is actually not easy, making it an area where improvements are required."

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

"One of the reasons why we prefer Kafka is because the support is a little bit difficult to manage with Amazon MSK."

More Amazon MSK cons

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

"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."

"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

15%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

32%

Computer Software Company

15%

University

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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?

I'm not sure exactly what benefit we have because we are using multiple AWS tools. We have AWS DMS, which is also the same as Amazon MSK, and we have Fivetran, which is a third-party website provid...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Amazon MSK?

We are currently using Amazon MSK to transfer data from our PostgreSQL database to our DynamoDB, acting as a mediator between those two databases for migration purposes. Our data is in an on-premis...

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 31% of the time

Confluent vs Amazon MSK

Compared 18% of the time

Apache Flink vs Amazon MSK

Compared 14% of the time

Google Cloud Dataflow vs Amazon MSK

Compared 8% of the time

Amazon Kinesis vs Amazon MSK

Compared 7% of the time

More Amazon MSK Competitors

Starburst Enterprise vs Starburst Galaxy

Compared 43% of the time

Databricks vs Starburst Galaxy

Compared 25% of the time

Dremio vs Starburst Galaxy

Compared 13% of the time

Dataiku vs Starburst Galaxy

Compared 11% of the time

Alteryx vs Starburst Galaxy

Compared 8% of the time

More Starburst Galaxy Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon MSK

August 2025

Download Amazon MSK product report

Buyer's Guide

Data Science Platforms

August 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

August 2025

Free Report: Amazon MSK vs. Starburst Galaxy

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon MSK vs. Starburst Galaxy and other solutions. Updated: August 2025.

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We monitor all Streaming Analytics reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.