Starburst vs Astronomer Pricing (2026)
How do these two stack up on price? Here's what each one costs, what you get, and where the value sits.
| Starburst | Astronomer | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | Custom | Custom |
| Number of plans | 4 | 5 |
| Free plan | — | |
| Free trial | ||
| Pricing model | usage-based | usage-based |
Free
- Create and run up to 3 clusters
- Access to standard cluster execution mode for ad hoc queries
Pro
- Flexible cluster execution modes
- Streaming Ingest
- Advanced cluster management
Enterprise
Popular- 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
- Elite support and ticketing
- Advanced governance integrations
- Lakehouse security and compliance tools
- Highest uptime guarantees
- AIDA (token usage billed separately)
Developer
- AI-powered Dag authoring & debugging
- Flexible, scale-to-zero compute
- Hibernating deployments
- API access
- Deployment rollbacks
Team
- End-to-end observability & data quality
- Network isolation with Dedicated clusters
- High availability deployments
- Audit logging (7-day retention)
- 24x5 support availability
Business
- SSO enforcement
- CI/CD enforcement
- Audit logging (90-day retention)
- 24x7 support availability (1 hour SLA)
Enterprise
- Remote execution agents
- Cross-region Disaster Recovery (add-on)
- Custom RBAC
- SCIM provisioning
- IP access list
- Organization dashboards
Astro Private Cloud
- Manage deployments across multiple clusters and regions
- Air-gapped deployment support
- Enterprise SSO integration
- Deployment isolation
- Dynamic resources management
- In-place Airflow upgrades
- Houston API access
- Professional services installation assistance
- 24/7 committer-led support
Starburst vs Astronomer FAQ
- Which one is cheaper?
- One or both use custom pricing, so it depends on your specific needs.
- Can I use either one for free?
- Starburst has a free plan. Astronomer doesn't — though they do offer a free trial.
- How do they charge?
- Both use a usage-based model, so the comparison is straightforward — it comes down to features and limits at each price point.
- Which one is a better deal?
- Depends on what you need. Starburst: Starburst isn't fighting on sticker price — the credit cost actually increases as you climb tiers, which is unusual and signals they're positioning as a premium, enterprise-grade Trino distribution rather than a budget query engine. They're chasing large data teams already committed to a multi-cloud or lakehouse strategy who'll pay more for reliability and support rather than startups hunting for the cheapest compute. Astronomer: Astronomer is positioning as the managed Airflow premium — not the cheapest way to run pipelines, but cheaper than building and maintaining your own Airflow infrastructure at scale. They're going after data engineering teams already bought into Airflow who want to offload ops, competing with MWAA and Cloud Composer on convenience and Airflow fidelity.
Still deciding? See the best Starburst alternatives or the best Astronomer alternatives, ranked with verified pricing.
Keep tabs on both.
We'll monitor pricing changes for Starburst and Astronomer and let you know when something moves.