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Redpanda 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

Redpanda
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
14th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
6
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 (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Redpanda is 2.0%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Starburst Galaxy is 1.7%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Starburst Galaxy1.7%
Redpanda2.0%
Other96.3%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

ArpitShah - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Analyst at CLSA
Event streaming has simplified video data cleanup and now powers real-time analytics
One area for improvement is providing more examples. For instance, Redpanda could be more useful as a sink where you get the data and can directly push to S3. While this is possible through the API, there are better and faster ways to do it. You can make a million API calls and accomplish the task in one and a half hours, but the same thing can be done in ten minutes through other methods. These faster approaches are not documented in obvious places. You have to find information scattered across various blogs. Redpanda should collect all the good blogs and best practices and put them in their documentation. This is more about knowledge management and making it easy for users to understand the product for complex use cases. For simple use cases, it is straightforward. We all use the basic pipe functionality. However, providing more examples would be useful. For example, integration with AWS and the AWS ecosystem would be cool.
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

"Redpanda is developer-friendly, and we need to do much less configuration because Redpanda provides out-of-the-box configuration for us."
"The performance is superb, and the value we are getting for the money we pay is great."
"Redpanda was simple and fast, so we went with Redpanda and it just works."
"I would recommend Redpanda to others because it's easy to set up, consumes less resources, and is stable compared to other tools."
"Aside from its lightweight design, Redpanda is essentially a clone of Kafka with all the good features of Kafka, with the only difference being that Kafka needs too many resources while Redpanda is a very good, lightweight, and very fast database."
"What makes Redpanda superior is its performance since it's written in C++, which is pretty much the standard for high-performance applications."
"The cost savings have been significant."
"I tested it with ten-plus nodes, and it's highly scalable."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"Starburst Galaxy is becoming a cornerstone of our data platform, empowering us to make smarter and faster decisions across the organization."
"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 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."
 

Cons

"Recently, for the documentation, they've built their own AI chatbot, which is focused on giving you answers based on their documentation. While using that, I did not find it to be very good."
"In Redpanda, the areas that have room for improvement are in the clustering part."
"When it comes to self-hosting, their documentation could be improved."
"One area for improvement is providing more examples."
"I think Redpanda is overall very good for us, and I am uncertain whether Redpanda can scale to very large companies as we are a medium-sized startup."
"The command-line tools need to be improved. To quickly check the status of the topics and all."
"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."
"As a hosted option, I wish I had more control over the cluster configuration, specifically regarding some of the more advanced options."
"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."
"The most persistent issue is the cluster spin-up time."
"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."
"I would like to see better alerting integrations for failures and errors in scheduled tasks and maintenance jobs."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's free. Everybody can use it, only support is paid."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
29%
Computer Software Company
12%
Construction Company
7%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Redpanda?
In terms of pricing, Redpanda is free. We do not have to pay anything. It is not open source, but it is free.
What needs improvement with Redpanda?
In Redpanda, the areas that have room for improvement are in the clustering part. Setting up clustering initially is very easy. However, if you are removing a node and attaching another node, signi...
What is your primary use case for Redpanda?
Redpanda serves two primary purposes for our organization. First, we use it as a drop-in replacement for Kafka. Second, we utilize it for streaming analytics. We do not use Redpanda for IoT data st...
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Redpanda vs. Starburst Galaxy and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,988 professionals have used our research since 2012.