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Amazon SageMaker 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

Amazon SageMaker
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
4th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
AI Development Platforms (5th)
Starburst Galaxy
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
7th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
2.6
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Data Science Platforms category, the mindshare of Amazon SageMaker is 3.2%, down from 5.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Starburst Galaxy is 1.5%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Science Platforms Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon SageMaker3.2%
Starburst Galaxy1.5%
Other95.3%
Data Science Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

NeerajPokala - PeerSpot reviewer
Machine Learning Engineer at Macquarie Group
Automation has transformed document review and reduces manual effort in financial workflows
There will be many features in Amazon SageMaker itself, but we don't know whether the feature is there or not, particularly the documentation part. Whatever the new releases will be, they will not post very fast. It is very easy to deploy Amazon SageMaker. The documentation is also very good. It is good because we are able to collaborate with our notebooks. At a time we can develop simultaneously and work on different use cases in the same notebook itself.
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

"SageMaker supports building, training, and deploying AI models from scratch, which is crucial for my ML project."
"The tool makes our ML model development a bit more efficient because everything is in one environment."
"They are doing a good job of evolving."
"SageMaker offers functionalities like Jupyter Notebooks for development, built-in algorithms, model tuning, and options to deploy models on managed infrastructure."
"They offer insights into everyone making calls in my organization."
"The superb thing that SageMaker brings is that it wraps everything well. It's got the deployment, the whole framework."
"The evolution from SageMaker Classic to SageMaker Studio, particularly the UI part of Studio, is commendable."
"I recommend SageMaker for ML projects if you need to build models from scratch."
"Starburst Galaxy has improved our organization by unifying access to all major data sources, reducing the need for complex ETL processes."
"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 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."
"The main positive impact Starburst Galaxy has made is making data more accessible for analytics and reporting."
"Starburst has provided us with virtually guaranteed performance on complex queries across datasets that are in the tens of gigabytes which complete in seconds."
"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 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."
 

Cons

"The main challenge with Amazon SageMaker is the integrations."
"The pricing is complicated as it is based on what kind of machines you are using, the type of storage, and the kind of computation."
"For any cloud provider, the cost has to be substantially reduced, especially in the case of Amazon SageMaker, which is extremely expensive for huge workloads."
"They could add features such as managing environments, experiment management across those environments, and the integration with training datasets as you go through those experiments."
"The user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) of SageMaker and AWS, in general, need improvement as they are not intuitive and require substantial time to learn how to use specific services."
"The documentation must be made clearer and more user-friendly."
"The payment and monitoring metrics are a bit confusing not only for Amazon SageMaker but also for the range of other products that fall under AWS, especially for a new user of the product."
"The pricing of the solution is an issue...In SageMaker, monitoring could be improved by supporting more data types other than JSON and CSV."
"I would like Starburst to leverage AI to improve usability. Data lakes are complicated and difficult for users to explore."
"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 to see better alerting integrations for failures and errors in scheduled tasks and maintenance jobs."
"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."
"As a hosted option, I wish I had more control over the cluster configuration, specifically regarding some of the more advanced options."
"There is still room for improved usability and diagnostics, especially for users who are not platform specialists."
"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."
"<p>Starburst Galaxy can be improved by discovering unstructured data and building in streaming ingestion because we are currently using Kafka for that purpose.</p>"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is relatively cheaper."
"Databricks solution is less costly than Amazon SageMaker."
"The support costs are 10% of the Amazon fees and it comes by default."
"The pricing is comparable."
"The tool's pricing is reasonable."
"The product is expensive."
"I would rate the solution's price a ten out of ten since it is very high."
"You don't pay for Sagemaker. You only pay for the compute instances in your storage."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
29%
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 Business13
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise18
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

How would you compare Databricks vs Amazon SageMaker?
We researched AWS SageMaker, but in the end, we chose Databricks. Databricks is a Unified Analytics Platform designed to accelerate innovation projects. It is based on Spark so it is very fast. It...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon SageMaker?
If you manage it effectively, their pricing is reasonable. It's similar to anything in the cloud; if you don't manage it properly, it can be expensive, but if you do, it's fine.
What needs improvement with Amazon SageMaker?
It takes some work. We need to refer to the documentation. The documentation is good regarding what other providers we are able to connect with. Out of five, I can say 3.5.
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....
 

Also Known As

AWS SageMaker, SageMaker
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

DigitalGlobe, Thomson Reuters Center for AI and Cognitive Computing, Hotels.com, GE Healthcare, Tinder, Intuit
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Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon SageMaker vs. Starburst Galaxy and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.