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  »  Platform  »  Compare  »  What is Dremio

A complete comparison of Starburst and Dremio

Discover how Starburst and Dremio compare across platform access, scalability, simplicity, and optionality, including real customer reviews and G2 Crowd ratings.

GigaOm Radar report

What is Starburst?

Starburst brings the power and performance of data warehouses to your modern data lake, offering a full-featured data lake analytics platform built on open-source Trino – the MPP SQL query engine used by some of the largest internet companies. The Starburst platform enables teams to discover, govern, organize, analyze, and consume data with self-service analytics in on-premises, hybrid, or cloud-centric data architectures. Starburst is used for both interactive ad-hoc analytics, as well as long-running workloads like batch and ETL/ELT.

What is Dremio?

Dremio is a data lakehouse platform providing self-service SQL analytics, data warehouse performance and functionality, and data lake flexibility. As the original creators of Apache Arrow, Dremio supports ad-hoc and interactive analytics for data engineering and data science use case.

Fortune 100 Financial Services Organization

 

“When comparing Starburst and Dremio, we found that Starburst surpassed Dremio with 2.5X greater performance. Starburst also invests in more and higher quality out-of-the-box connectivity that unlocks Data Federation, which is key for us to achieve scalability at a lower TCO.” 

– Anonymous, SVP of Big Data Capabilities

7bridges

 

“We chose Galaxy because of the flexibility it offers to connect to so many different types of tools and data sources. Galaxy allows us to use Lakehouse tables for both transformations and reporting, and on top of that, Galaxy provides access to multiple data formats. This ensures that we can stay flexible and iterate quickly as the Lakehouse technology evolves.”

– Simon Thelin, Lead Data Engineer, 7bridges

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Gaming Technology Company

 

“When evaluating Starburst and Dremio, the underlying zero migration risk was a big differentiator with Starburst, and there’s a greater sense of confidence knowing the platform is built and operated by Trino experts. Other criteria, such as scalability, concurrency, and a seamless Tableau integration, also made Starburst the right choice for us.”

— Anonymous, Director of Engineering

Zalando

 

“The decision to deploy Starburst Enterprise was made simpler because it has proven to be a reliable, fast, and stable query engine for S3 data lakes.”

— Alberto Miorin, Engineering Lead

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Leading Multinational Bank

 

“We chose Starburst over Dremio because Starburst is the only platform that meets our requirements within areas such as Credential pass-through, RBAC, and user impersonation on Teradata. More importantly, Starburst has proven to provide us with the best performance for federated queries and data lake analytics, so we can make faster decisions on all of our data.”

– Anonymous, Head of Data

Starburst is a Leader in Enterprise Big Data Analytics

Don’t take our word for it. Starburst is named #1 for Quality of Support and Ease of Use in G2 Crowd’s Grid Report based on real customer reviews. Additionally, customers said Starburst beat out Dremio in all of these categories: 

  • Meets Requirements
  • Ease of Use
  • Ease of Admin
  • Quality of Support
  • Data Visualization
  • Multi-Source Analysis 
G2 Comparison Report

Simplicity

Going beyond key platform governance and management capabilities, a modern data analytics platform empowers data teams to increase productivity without adding complexity, allow you to use a range of existing investments in just a few clicks, and allow you to build data products, no matter where the data lives, once and scale usage and adoption across the organization – creating a trusted single version of the truth.

Starburst

Dremio

Automated AWS compute plane set-up

Automated AWS compute plane set-up

Pre-deployed and managed by Starburst

Manual, installed and managed by customer

Data team productivity

Data team productivity

Starburst Gravity:

  • Universal data search
  • Schema discovery
  • Data product creation
  • Attribute-based access control (“tags”)

  • Semantic layer
  • Dremio Spaces
  • Lineage

Limited cross cloud/cross region support for governance and discoverability

Data catalog (Fully managed SaaS)

Data catalog (Fully managed SaaS)

Starburst Galaxy

AWS Glue, Hive Metastore or Starburst Gravity Catalog, JDBC and REST-based Iceberg catalog – Nessie (Starburst Enterprise only)

Dremio Cloud

Arctic catalog or AWS Glue. Does not support JDBC catalogs for Iceberg implementations

Data products

Data products

Starburst Data Products

Dremio Spaces

Access

True data access empowers organizations with the ability to use all their data no matter where it lives while having confidence in the security and governance controls. True access is about meeting business needs on time while adhering to regulatory data sovereignty requirements. Your modern data lake analytics platform / lakehouse should free your data sources for analytics purposes, not confine them in just another way.

Starburst

Dremio

Data Connectivity (Fully managed SaaS)

Data Connectivity (Fully managed SaaS)

Starburst Galaxy – 18+ sourcesAmazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Synapse, Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage, Snowflake, Apache Druid, Apache Pinot, Elasticsearch, Google Sheets, MariaDB, MongoDB, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and Tabular and 3 coming soonAzure CosmosDB, ClickHouse, and SingleStore

Dremio Cloud – 7+ sourcesAmazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and Snowflake

Data Connectivity (Self managed software)

Data Connectivity (Self managed software)

Starburst Enterprise

Connect and query 50+ data sources

Dremio Software

Connect and query 17+ data sources

Dell Data Virtualization (ECS) Integration

Dell Data Virtualization (ECS) Integration

Full integration

Connector optimization

Connector optimization

Many connectors are optimized with capabilities including parallelism, cached views, and more

Some connectors benefit from advanced relational pushdown only

Cross-region/cross-region querying

Cross-region/cross-region querying

Requires separate Dremio instances to be deployed and self-managed in each region separately

Multi-cloud data catalog and searchability

Multi-cloud data catalog and searchability

Multi-cloud data catalog and searchability

Multiple cloud regions across AWS, Azure, and GCP (Fully managed SaaS)

Multiple cloud regions across AWS, Azure, and GCP (Fully managed SaaS)

Starburst Galaxy

offers 25+ regions across AWS, Azure, and GCP

Dremio Cloud

5 regions with AWS

Access Control

Access Control

RBAC, ABAC, row-level filters, column masking, time-based policies

RBAC, row-level filters, column masking. Access control and governance limited to a single region

Security Integrations (Self managed software)

Security Integrations (Self managed software)

Immuta, Privacera, Apache Ranger

Apache Ranger

Client tools integrations (Fully managed SaaS)

Client tools integrations (Fully managed SaaS)

9 client toolsdbt, Hex, Looker, Metabase, Microsoft Power BI, Amazon QuickSight, Tableau, ThoughtSpot, Zing Data

18 client toolsdbt (preview), Hex, Looker, Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, ThoughtSpot, Alteryx Designer, Apache Superset, Astrato, DBeaver, Dbvisualizer, Deepnote, Domo, Microsoft Excel PowerPivot, Preset, Python, Qlik, SAP Business Objects

Data sovereignty

Data sovereignty

Starburst Stargate

Scalability

Internet scale matters in an internet powered world but not every workload needs that power and performance. A modern data lake analytics platform puts the control in your hands to ensure high performance scalability is available at a click of a button or automatically when you need it most while optimizing price-to-performance for all analytics workloads.

Starburst

Dremio

Interactive query performance

Interactive query performance

Choose between Standard and Warp Speed clusters on both software and SaaS offerings

Choose between basic and enhanced – Data Reflections (SaaS) and C3 (Software)

Batch query support

Batch query support

Fault-tolerant execution (FTE) providing just right clusters for all queries

With a single cluster

Autoscaling

Autoscaling

AWS Edition only

High complexity & high concurrency support

High complexity & high concurrency support

Scalable performance up to and beyond 100 concurrent queries

Scalability issues supporting concurrency with larger cluster sizes

Optionality

Open file and table formats are table stakes in providing optionality. A modern data lake analytics platform goes beyond the fundamentals to ensure your business has full control over your data by accessing data it lives digitally and physically, by allowing choice in cloud providers, security, and BI tools, and ensuring support is available if and when your teams need it most.

Starburst

Dremio

Fully managed SaaS product

Fully managed SaaS product

Starburst Galaxy:

Fully-managed SaaS data lake analytics platform Available on AWS, Azure and GCP with 25+ regions supported. Compute can be provisioned across clouds and regions. Offers truly free instances and no costs when not running queries.

Dremio Cloud (“Sonar”):

SaaS-based GUI. Compute deployed in customer’s own cloud account Dremio Cloud is supported on AWS in 5+ cloud regions. Compute can only be provisioned in the region selected at setup, customers may incur costs even when not writing queries.

OSS Query Engine

OSS Query Engine

OSS Trino formerly known as PrestoSQL

Sonar, proprietary query engine

Self-managed product deployment

Self-managed product deployment

Starburst Enterprise:

  • RHEL
  • K8s
    • EKS
    • GKE
    • AKS
    • OpenShift
    • Rancher

Dremio Software:

  • RHEL
  • SLES 12 SP2+ (tarball)
  • Ubuntu 14.04+ (tarball)
  • Debian 7+ (tarball)
  • K8s

File formats

File formats

5 supported AVRO, CSV, JSON, ORC, Parquet
5 supported AVRO, CSV, JSON, ORC, Parquet

Table formats

Table formats

4 supported Apache Iceberg, Apache Hudi, Delta Lake, Hive
2 supported Apache Iceberg (managed in preview), Delta Lake

Enterprise grade support

Enterprise grade support

24 x 7 for Sev 1

9 x 6 Sev 2+

8 x 5 only

Contact us

Access and analyze your data with elastic scale and high performance your business demands 

Contact Us

Some additional exploration

What is Dremio used for?

Similar to Starburst, Dremio is used to run interactive and ad-hoc analytics on federated data. However, with Starburst, you can access more data sources, cross-cloud and cross-region analytics, internet scale performance, universal search and discovery, enterprise-grade support SLAs, and more.

What kind of tool is Dremio?

Dremio and Starburst offer an open data lakehouse platform that provides self-service SQL analytics, data warehouse performance and functionality, and data lake flexibility across your data. However, with Starburst, you gain a similar experience across AWS, Azure, and GCP, more data sources for federated data products, and a highly performant MPP SQL query engine with optimized open-source Trino.

Is Dremio an ETL tool?

Similar to Starburst, Dremio supports a wide range of data types for analysis. Some of the data types that can be analyzed include:

  • Numeric data types such as DECIMAL, INT, BIGINT, FLOAT, and DOUBLE
  • String and binary data types, such as VARCHAR and VARBINARY
  • Boolean data type BOOLEAN
  • Date and time data types such as DATE
  • Semi-structured data types like LIST and STRUCT, as well as data type mappings for external sources, time zone support, and coercions support

However, Starburst can support additional types via plugins. Connectors to data sources are not required to support all Trino data types described. If there are data types similar to Trino’s that are used on the data source, the connector may map the Trino and remote data types to each other as needed.

More resources

Analyst Report

GigaOm

GigaOm Radar for Data Lakes and Lakehouses

Market Report

Gartner

Market Guide for Analytics Query Accelerators

Analyst Report

Concurrency Labs

Concurrency Labs: Querying 15 Billion Records

Customer Success Story

Doxo

Enhanced agility, materialized views, and efficient database analytics

Start Free with
Starburst Galaxy

Up to $500 in usage credits included

  • Query your data lake fast with Starburst's best-in-class MPP SQL query engine
  • Get up and running in less than 5 minutes
  • Easily deploy clusters in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud
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