No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

KNIME Business Hub vs Starburst Galaxy comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

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

KNIME Business Hub
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
63
Ranking in other categories
Data Mining (2nd)
Starburst Galaxy
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
7th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
2.5
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Streaming Analytics (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Data Science Platforms category, the mindshare of KNIME Business Hub is 4.5%, down from 12.0% 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 (%)
KNIME Business Hub4.5%
Starburst Galaxy1.5%
Other94.0%
Data Science Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

NataliaRaffo - PeerSpot reviewer
Co Founder & Chief Data Officer Cdo at NTT DATA
Workflow automation has accelerated advanced analytics and machine learning delivery
Sometimes it is a little bit difficult to use some nodes when we have many large-scale data, for example, CSV files with a large amount of data. It is sometimes difficult to try to import the data in KNIME Business Hub nodes because I think that some features that are in the CSV in text, for example, large text, is difficult for KNIME Business Hub to import these fields. I don't know why, but it is very difficult. We need to try to use different nodes for importing the data, such as File Reader and CSV Reader. However, I think that it is always the features that have much text, it is difficult for KNIME Business Hub to understand and import this information. I don't know why, or maybe I don't know if we don't know what the better option is to configure the node to import all the CSV or the data set. However, we have always had this problem. In some nodes, sometimes it is the same because sometimes, for example, I have a CSV and in my CSV, I have a feature that is, for example, a date. When I import this data set in the File Reader node, I have problems with this field because it is a date, but the problem is that it imports it as text, for example. We try to use their nodes that convert text to date, but sometimes it is difficult, and it is not immediate to transform the text into a date. So we needed to convert the text into a date in the CSV, and then import it again in the KNIME Business Hub node and try to have a good read of this field. I know that KNIME Business Hub has some nodes to convert text to date and others, but sometimes it is difficult to use these nodes. I don't know why. Maybe it needs a specific format for the date and we need to transform our feature in this option. So sometimes it is a large process to convert these features. However, sometimes we need to investigate and search for other nodes, and try with other nodes to import these cases.
NK
Advisory Solutions Architect at Dell Technologies
Unified data querying has accelerated petabyte-scale analytics and simplified dashboard delivery
Starburst Galaxy offers me several best features, which include very fast querying results, automatic indexing of data for long tables, a cost-based optimizer which reduces the time to query large tables, and an agentic feature that lets me talk to my data.I find myself relying most on querying from different databases as well as automatic indexing in my day-to-day work, as I am a data science architect who needs to get the queries in a very short period of time. 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 has positively impacted my organization since we were struggling with Denodo and Dremio, which had their own features but were not helpful in querying large amounts of data, especially semi-structured or unstructured data. Starburst Galaxy addresses this with many YAML files and manifest files for automated maintenance, and it helps reduce the small file problem in different HDFS systems. Additionally, Starburst Galaxy has an MCP server that connects to various agentic pipelines, reducing the time to market for data consumption.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I would rate the stability of KNIME a ten out of ten."
"I was able to apply basic algorithms through just dragging and dropping."
"Usability and organizing workflows in a very neat manner, controlling workflow through variables is something amazing."
"From a user-friendliness perspective, it's a great tool."
"Clear view of the data at every step of ETL process enables changing the flow as needed."
"It's a very powerful and simple tool to use."
"The tool's analytic capabilities are good."
"This open-source product can compete with category leaders in ELT software."
"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 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 has improved our organization by unifying access to all major data sources, reducing the need for complex ETL processes."
"Starburst Galaxy has significantly improved our data architecture flexibility and performance management by solving cross-database query challenges and enabling us to utilize iceberg tables externally across our entire data ecosystem."
"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."
"Starburst Galaxy is becoming a cornerstone of our data platform, empowering us to make smarter and faster decisions across the organization."
"The most fundamental feature is the query engine, which is much faster than any of the competitors; Starburst is able to finish most queries within 10 seconds, which is especially important for many non-technical employees."
"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

"System resource usage. Knime will occupy total system RAM size and other applications will hang."
"Scalability is limited to a desktop application."
"The documentation is lacking and it could be better."
"I feel the query performance is slower than my old code."
"Not just for KNIME, but generally for software and analyzing data, I would welcome facilities for analyzing different sorts of scale data like Likert scales, Thurstone scales, magnitude ratio scales, and Guttman scales, which I don't use myself."
"In my environment, I need to access a lot of servers with different characteristics and access methods. Some of my servers have to be accessed using proxy which is not supported by KNIME, so I still need to create the middleware to supply the source of my KNIME configurations."
"In the last update, KNIME started hiding a lot of the nodes. It doesn't mean hiding, but you need to know what you're looking for. Before that, you had just a tree that you could click, and you could get an overview of what kind of nodes do I have. Right now, it's like you need to know which node you need, and then you can start typing, but it's actually more difficult to find them."
"Both RapidMiner and KNIME should be made easier to use in the field of deep learning."
"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."
"As a hosted option, I wish I had more control over the cluster configuration, specifically regarding some of the more advanced options."
"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."
"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."
"I would like Starburst to leverage AI to improve usability. Data lakes are complicated and difficult for users to explore."
"Cluster startup time can be slow, sometimes taking over a minute."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"KNIME assets are stand alone, as the solution is open source."
"KNIME is a cheap product. I currently use KNIME's open-source version."
"This is a free open-source solution."
"It is free of cost. It is GNU licensed."
"Scaling to the on-premises version requires a licensing fee per user that is a bit expensive in comparison to R, Python, and SAS."
"The client versions are mostly free, and we pay only for the KNIME server version. It's not a cheap solution."
"There is a Community Edition and paid versions available."
"KNIME desktop is free, which is great for analytics teams. Server is well priced, depending on how much support is required."
Information not available
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Science Platforms solutions are best for your needs.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
University
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
6%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Computer Software Company
11%
Construction Company
7%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business21
Midsize Enterprise16
Large Enterprise32
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for KNIME?
I rate the product’s pricing a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.
What needs improvement with KNIME?
I would describe KNIME Decision Hub as somewhat helpful in making data-driven decisions more efficient. It could have been a scalable decisioning as a service at the back end, but it's not working ...
What is your primary use case for KNIME?
I mainly use KNIME Business Hub currently for data ETLs and then it meets with predictive analytics. Sometimes I utilize it for forecasting, but mostly it's predictive analytics. I have utilized bo...
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?
Starburst Galaxy can be improved by discovering unstructured data and building in streaming ingestion because we are currently using Kafka for that purpose. We rely on third-party tools for ingesti...
What is your primary use case for Starburst Galaxy?
My main use case for Starburst Galaxy is querying petabytes of data across vast data sources, and I use a federated query engine to join data sources from different databases and then join them usi...
 

Also Known As

KNIME Analytics Platform
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Infocom Corporation, Dymatrix Consulting Group, Soluzione Informatiche, MMI Agency, Estanislao Training and Solutions, Vialis AG
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about KNIME Business Hub vs. Starburst Galaxy and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.