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 | 4 |
| 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
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 plays in the premium end of the query-engine and data-lake analytics space, going after enterprises already committed to a multi-cloud or lakehouse strategy rather than budget-conscious startups. They're competing with the likes of Trino-as-a-service alternatives and Databricks/Snowflake on capability, not on being the cheap option. Astronomer: Astronomer sits in the premium band of the managed-Airflow space — this isn't a scrappy open-source wrapper, it's the commercial layer for teams already committed to Airflow at scale. They're not competing on sticker price; they're competing for enterprises that want a vendor to own the operational headache of running Airflow reliably.
Still deciding? See the best Starburst alternatives or the best Astronomer alternatives, ranked with verified pricing.
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