Airbyte vs Starburst Pricing (2026)

How do these two stack up on price? Here's what each one costs, what you get, and where the value sits.

Airbyte pricing Starburst pricing
Starts at $20/mo $0/mo
Number of plans 4 4
Free plan —
Free trial
Pricing model hybrid usage-based

Price is one row. To weigh the features too, use our feature comparison template →

Standard

$20/mo
  • Fully managed cloud hosting
  • Volume-based pricing
  • Deploy quickly

Plus

Popular
$189/mo
  • All the features in Standard
  • SSO
  • Field renaming
  • 15-minute syncs

Pro

Custom
  • Fully managed cloud hosting
  • Capacity-based pricing
  • Multiple Workspaces
  • SSO, RBAC
  • Up to 5-minute sync frequency
  • Custom mappings

Enterprise Flex

Custom
  • Sovereign data movement inside your own boundary
  • Available on-premises and multi-region
  • Hybrid deployment with Airbyte managed control plane
  • All the features of Airbyte Pro

Free

$0/mo
  • Create and run up to 3 clusters
  • Access to standard cluster execution mode for ad hoc queries

Pro

$0/mo
  • Flexible cluster execution modes
  • Streaming Ingest
  • Advanced cluster management

Enterprise

Popular
$0/mo
  • Advanced autoscaling features
  • Fine-grained access controls (ABAC, SCIM)
  • AWS PrivateLink for data sources
  • Early access to features (Private Preview)
  • AIDA (token usage billed separately)

Mission-Critical

$1/mo
  • Elite support and ticketing
  • Advanced governance integrations
  • Lakehouse security and compliance tools
  • Highest uptime guarantees
  • AIDA (token usage billed separately)

Airbyte vs Starburst FAQ

Which one is cheaper?
Starburst is the cheaper option, starting at $0/mo vs $20/mo for Airbyte.
Can I use either one for free?
Starburst has a free plan. Airbyte doesn't — though they do offer a free trial.
How do they charge?
Different approach here. Airbyte uses hybrid pricing, while Starburst goes with usage-based. That changes the math depending on your team size and usage.
Which one is a better deal?
Depends on what you need. Airbyte: Airbyte sits cheap-to-mid at the entry tier compared to Fivetran or Stitch, using that $20 price to hook teams who'd otherwise build custom ELT scripts, then makes its real money once usage scales into Pro/Enterprise territory. They're clearly chasing the open-source-to-commercial pipeline: win developers on cost and connector breadth, then convert them as data volume grows past what self-serve pricing can handle. Starburst: Sitting in the middle of the modern data lakehouse/query engine space, Starburst isn't trying to be the bargain-bin option — the tiered jump to Mission-Critical signals they're chasing large enterprises with complex, high-stakes data infrastructure, while still keeping a free tier to hook smaller teams and individual engineers early.

Still deciding? See the best Airbyte alternatives or the best Starburst alternatives, ranked with verified pricing.

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