Starburst

Starburst is an enterprise intelligence platform built on Trino and Iceberg, offering an open federated lakehouse that queries data across hybrid environments, available as a managed service on major clouds or as self-managed Starburst Enterprise for private cloud, hybrid and on-premises deployment.

Federation is the core idea and it inverts the usual approach. The conventional answer to scattered data is to copy everything into a central warehouse, which means building and maintaining pipelines, accepting that the copy is always somewhat stale, and paying to store the same data twice. Querying it where it already lives removes the pipeline and the duplication, at the cost of query performance depending on systems the platform does not control.

No lock-in and no replatforming is stated explicitly and it is credible here rather than rhetorical, because the foundations are open source: Trino as the query engine and Iceberg as the table format are both projects a customer could run without Starburst. That is a materially different position from a proprietary warehouse where the data format itself is the lock-in.

Pricing is credit-based and published, which is unusual at this end of the market. The free tier costs nothing forever with up to three clusters and standard execution for ad hoc queries, then tiers start at 0.50 dollars per credit adding flexible execution modes, streaming ingest and advanced cluster management, 0.75 dollars per credit with early access features, and 1.00 dollars per credit with compliance tooling and the highest uptime guarantees. AIDA, the conversational analytics layer, bills token usage separately.