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IBM Streams vs Starburst Galaxy comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

IBM Streams
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
24th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
5
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
11
Ranking in other categories
Data Science Platforms (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of IBM Streams is 2.2%, up from 0.9% 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
ProductMindshare (%)
Starburst Galaxy1.7%
IBM Streams2.2%
Other96.1%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

Ahmed_Emad - PeerSpot reviewer
Territory Sales Leader at Sumerge
A solution for data pipelines but has connector limitations
We have used Kafka for seven years. IBM streams gives you many OOTB features that can boost the time-to-market, especially when it comes to reporting and monitoring for example. Confluent is recognized as one of the leaders in this space and the main reason for this is related to the complete vision of the platform also the large number of connectors. This gives the edge and competitive advatnage.
NK
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Easy development and deployment, Java implementation features, and the real time analyser and alarm function are the most valuable features for us."
"The product has enabled us to create solutions to client problems that would have either been impossible or very expensive/difficult using other technologies."
"As a result, the TELCO company was able to cut down the time it took to respond to customer needs and there were fewer complaints."
"The OEM Solution (Excel-medical.com) running on top of IBM Streams provides real-time clinical algorithms that can give better insight into the patient's acuity, thus cutting off time to discharge patients and inversely making sure that sick patients don't get discharged until ready."
"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."
"I am now able to answer questions in a couple of minutes that would otherwise take hours or days of time for my data engineering teams."
"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 is becoming a cornerstone of our data platform, empowering us to make smarter and faster decisions across the organization."
"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."
"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 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 has provided us with virtually guaranteed performance on complex queries across datasets that are in the tens of gigabytes which complete in seconds."
 

Cons

"The development IDE sometimes crashes and freezes."
"The price and versatility of this product need to improve - it is not inexpensive."
"We had some stability issues where we used embedded Zookeeper in production."
"I’d like to see a tool kit specifically targeted at incremental machine learning. It’s already great for scoring previously trained models, but dynamically updating models is currently more of a 'grow your own' kind of thing."
"I would like Starburst to leverage AI to improve usability. Data lakes are complicated and difficult for users to explore."
"As a hosted option, I wish I had more control over the cluster configuration, specifically regarding some of the more advanced options."
"The most persistent issue is the cluster spin-up time."
"Cluster startup time can be slow, sometimes taking over a minute."
"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."
"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."
"Starburst Galaxy can be improved by discovering unstructured data and building in streaming ingestion because we are currently using Kafka for that purpose."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Government
20%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Construction Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Computer Software Company
11%
Construction Company
7%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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.
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...
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...
 

Also Known As

IBM InfoSphere Streams
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Globo TV, All England Lawn Tennis Club, CenterPoint Energy, Consolidated Communications Holdings, Darwin Ecosystem, Emory University Hospital, ICICI Securities, Irish Centre for Fetal and Neonatal Translational Research (INFANT), Living Roads, Mobileum, Optibus, Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform (SOSCIP), University of Alberta, University of Montana, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Wimbledon 2015
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Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Streams vs. Starburst Galaxy and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.