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Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio 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

Microsoft Azure Machine Lea...
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
9th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
62
Ranking in other categories
AI Development Platforms (6th)
Starburst Galaxy
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
7th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
2.5
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Data Science Platforms category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio is 2.7%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Starburst Galaxy is 1.5%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Science Platforms Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Starburst Galaxy1.5%
Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio2.7%
Other95.8%
Data Science Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2722962 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Scientist
Platform accelerates model development, enhances collaboration, and offers efficient deployment
The best features Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio offers include deep integration with Python notebooks and Azure Data Lake, which allows me to import external data, and through the pipeline, I can build my models, performing what is called data injection for my model building, making that deep integration quite interesting to use. Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio is a powerful platform for those already in the Azure ecosystem because it allows for scalability and provides a good environment for reproducibility, as well as collaboration tools, all designed and packaged in one place, which makes it outstanding. Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio has positively impacted my organization by reducing our project delivery times and increasing the pace at which we work, allowing us to focus on other more important tasks. Using Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio has reduced our model development time from approximately four hours to about two hours.
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

"It's a great option if you are fairly new and don't want to write too much code."
"Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio is a good solution that I would recommend to others, but I would like to see more support and more information available for developers."
"I find Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio advantageous because it allows integration with Titan Scratch and offers an easy-to-use drag-and-drop menu for developing machine learning models."
"The notebook feature allows you to write inquiries and create dashboards. These dashboards can integrate with multiple databases, such as Excel, HANA, or SQL Server."
"The solution is integrated with our Microsoft Azure tenant, and we don't have to go anywhere else outside the tenant."
"Regarding the technical support for the solution, I find the documentation provided comprehensive and helpful."
"It's easy to deploy. It has many features which help the person avoid delving into more technical things."
"It is very easy to test different kinds of machine-learning algorithms with different parameters. You choose the algorithm, drag and drop to the workspace, and plug the dataset into this component."
"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 improved our organization by unifying access to all major data sources, reducing the need for complex ETL processes."
"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 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 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 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."
 

Cons

"The stability is questionable, given that Microsoft will be retiring the classic version of this product in 2024, and it's unclear how this will affect projects created on the classic version."
"It is not easy. It is a complex solution. It takes some time to get exposed to all the concepts. We're trying to have a CI/CD pipeline to deploy a machine learning model using negative actions. It was not easy. The components that we're using might have something to do with this."
"In terms of improvement, I'd like to have more ability to understand the detailed impact of the variables on the model and their interactions."
"In the future, I would like to see more AI consultation like image and video classification, and improvement in the presentation of data."
"In terms of improvement, I'd like to have more ability to construct and understand the detailed impact of the variables on the model. Their algorithms are very powerful and they explain overall the net contribution of each of the variables to the solution. In terms of being able to say to people "If you did this, you'll get this much more improvement" it wasn't great."
"While ML Studio does give you the ability to run a lot of transformations, it struggles when the transformations are a bit more complex, when your entire process is transformation-heavy."
"The data cleaning functionality is something that could be better and needs to be improved."
"Performance is very poor."
"Starburst Galaxy can be improved by discovering unstructured data and building in streaming ingestion because we are currently using Kafka for that purpose."
"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."
"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."
"The most persistent issue is the cluster spin-up time."
"Cluster startup time can be slow, sometimes taking over a minute."
"I would like to see better alerting integrations for failures and errors in scheduled tasks and maintenance jobs."
"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 would like Starburst to leverage AI to improve usability. Data lakes are complicated and difficult for users to explore."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"On a scale from one to ten, with ten being overpriced, I would rate the price of this solution at six."
"To use MLS is fairly cheap. Even the paid account is something like $20/month, unless you are provisioning large numbers of VMs for a Hadoop cluster. The main MS makes money with this solution is forcing the user to deploy their model on REST API, and being charged each time the API is accessed. There are several pricing tiers for the API. If you do not use the API, then value of MLS is to create rapid experiments ($20/month). The resulting model is not exportable to use, thus you’ll have to recreate the algorithms in either R or Python, which is what I did. MLS results gave me a direction to work with, the actual work is mostly done in R and Python outside of MLS."
"I rate the product price as a nine on a scale of one to ten, where ten means it is very expensive."
"There is a lack of certainty with the solution's pricing."
"The platform's price is low."
"ML Studio's pricing becomes a numbers game."
"The product is not that expensive."
"The licensing cost is very cheap. It's less than $50 a month."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Construction Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Performing Arts
7%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Computer Software Company
11%
Construction Company
7%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business23
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise32
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

Which do you prefer - Databricks or Azure Machine Learning Studio?
Databricks gives you the option of working with several different languages, such as SQL, R, Scala, Apache Spark, or Python. It offers many different cluster choices and excellent integration with ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio?
The pricing for Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio is reasonable since it's pay as you go, meaning it won't cost excessively unless specific resources are used.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio?
The initial setup can be a bit challenging for someone new, as the learning curve can be steep, but once I master the platform, I find it quite manageable. I would love to see the integration of a ...
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

Azure Machine Learning, MS Azure Machine Learning Studio
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Walgreens Boots Alliance, Schneider Electric, BP
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio vs. Starburst Galaxy and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.