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Aiven Platform vs Starburst Galaxy comparison

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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

Aiven Platform
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
15th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Starburst Galaxy
Ranking in Streaming Analytics
8th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
2.6
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Data Science Platforms (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of Aiven Platform is 2.2%, up from 1.7% 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%
Aiven Platform2.2%
Other96.1%
Streaming Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

Abdulmunafz Mct - PeerSpot reviewer
Full Stack Developer at Sri Krishna Arts and Science
Managed cloud databases have reduced operational effort and now support faster feature delivery
Aiven Platform could be improved by offering more detailed monitoring and analytics, additional customization plan options, enhanced cost operation insights, and more comprehensive data for advanced use cases. On a day-to-day basis, I highlight the need for improving dashboard navigation by providing clear cost visibility. There are navigational complexities that exist. If you can provide clear cost visibility, it will help reduce friction and improve the user experience. Regarding Aiven Platform's AI capabilities, I think it could improve by providing more granular role-based access control, enhancing audit logging, clearer compliance reporting, and more centralized policy management for governance and security.
Pedromachado Ventura - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Analyst at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
Unified SQL layer has streamlined access to distributed historical data for analytics and reporting
One area that I think could be improved is the experience when performance issues occur. When a query is slow, it is not always immediately obvious to me whether the bottleneck comes from Starburst Galaxy itself, the underlying data source, the query design, or the reporting tool. Better visibility into query performance and easier diagnostics for non-administrators would be useful. Another potential improvement would be enhancing the experience with BI tools to make it more seamless. I work a lot with Power BI, and when you are working with larger data sets, performance can sometimes depend on several different layers. Having more visibility into what is happening between the BI tool, Starburst Galaxy, and the underlying source would be helpful. I also think onboarding could be a little more accessible for analysts. There is good technical documentation, but sometimes I just need to understand the best way to approach a common use case without diving too deep into the platform architecture. The main improvement would be troubleshooting. I have not used the AI capabilities extensively, so I cannot give a detailed assessment. I am not sure if my organization has the full capabilities of Starburst Galaxy, but I think adding AI on top of the data layer is interesting, especially if it can help users discover data, understand data sets, and interact with them more naturally. For governance and security, one of the strengths of Starburst Galaxy is that you can centralize access to data while still controlling what different users are allowed to see. Role-based access, fine-grained permissions, and data masking are important because giving people easier access to data should not mean giving everyone access to everything. I think that is even more important than any AI capabilities that are introduced. If you do introduce AI, I think it should respect exactly the same data permissions and governance rules as the user that is accessing the data.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"One of the most valuable features of Aiven Platform is that it handles the upgrades for us seamlessly, saving us time that would be spent on routine upgrades."
"Aiven Platform can help the organization accelerate AI adoption while improving governance and security compliance, reduce manual work, improve access to enterprise knowledge, and provide more control for the AI development procedure."
"What I like best about the tool is that the process for the services is faster compared to other methods. It's easier to use because Aiven for Apache Kafka handles the maintenance, so we have less to manage. We only use Kafka to manage its connectivity."
"Aiven Platform delivers highly accurate and reliable outputs with consistent performance, and its managed services, monitoring, and high availability features help to ensure data integrity and minimize downtime, highlighting the accuracy and reliability of the output."
"Based on my experience with Aiven Platform, the best feature it offers is Apache Kafka, which is top-notch and one of the best services I have used."
"The performance of Aiven Platform is quite good, as I have not seen any downtime, and it is very reliable, with backups in place, allowing me to fetch data without experiencing any high latency, even as a free tier user."
"Aiven Platform's cloud flexibility helps my team substantially through seamless migration from one cloud to another, and it provides 99.99% uptime."
"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 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 is becoming a cornerstone of our data platform, empowering us to make smarter and faster decisions across the organization."
"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 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 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 has provided us with virtually guaranteed performance on complex queries across datasets that are in the tens of gigabytes which complete in seconds."
 

Cons

"I would really like to see Aiven Platform add a user interface for database backups, as this would eliminate the need for a third-party solution."
"One challenge we face is when we want to update the version, for example, from 3.6 to 3.7. It will spawn new nodes, and then there's rebalancing and syncing from other brokers. There's high CPU usage during this process, so the solution can't be used for a while, causing some downtime in our services. To tackle this challenge, we schedule maintenance updates during low-traffic periods when there's less risk and fewer users use the services."
"Aiven Platform would be further improved by expanding integration with enterprise applications, improving AI responses, accuracy, context awareness, providing more detailed analytics, and simplifying configuration and deployment."
"Regarding needed improvements, I find the support and documentation a bit lacking in detail, and sometimes it takes long to get replies when I need support, which can be a challenge."
"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."
"I would like to see better alerting integrations for failures and errors in scheduled tasks and maintenance jobs."
"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."
"Cluster startup time can be slow, sometimes taking over a minute."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
15%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Construction Company
8%
Wholesaler/Distributor
8%
Financial Services Firm
30%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Aiven for Apache Kafka?
Aiven Platform would be further improved by expanding integration with enterprise applications, improving AI responses, accuracy, context awareness, providing more detailed analytics, and simplifyi...
What is your primary use case for Aiven for Apache Kafka?
My main use case for Aiven Platform is to help the organization adopt AI securely, build AI-powered solutions, retrieve trusted information using RAG, and manage AI governance and compliance. Aiven...
What advice do you have for others considering Aiven for Apache Kafka?
My advice to others looking into using Aiven Platform is to first check the integration documents, assess the risk compliance issues for their requirements, manage pricing, and then make a decision...
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?
One area that I think could be improved is the experience when performance issues occur. When a query is slow, it is not always immediately obvious to me whether the bottleneck comes from Starburst...
What is your primary use case for Starburst Galaxy?
I have mainly used Starburst Galaxy as a query and access layer for analytical data, as my current work involves dealing with data stored across different platforms, including Hive and SingleStore....
 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Aiven Platform vs. Starburst Galaxy and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.