PubSub+ Platform vs Starburst Galaxy comparison

Why PeerSpot?

Solace and Starburst are both solutions in the Streaming Analytics category. Solace is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.8, while Starburst is ranked #9 with an average rating of 9.3. Solace holds a 3.9% mindshare in SA, compared to Starburst’s 1.7% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Solace users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Starburst users who would recommend it.

PubSub+ Platform

Read 20 PubSub+ Platform reviews

6,112 Views
2,567 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Starburst Galaxy

Read 12 Starburst Galaxy reviews

2,464 Views
1,133 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

PubSub+ Platform

Starburst Galaxy

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between PubSub+ Platform and Starburst Galaxy based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Streaming Analytics solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed PubSub+ Platform vs. Starburst Galaxy Report (Updated: September 2026).

Buyer's Guide

PubSub+ Platform vs. Starburst Galaxy

September 2026

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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

PubSub+ Platform

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

14th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Message Queue (MQ) Software (10th), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (2nd), Event Monitoring (13th)

Starburst Galaxy

Ranking in Streaming Analytics

9th

Average Rating

9.4

Reviews Sentiment

2.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Science Platforms (7th)

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Streaming Analytics category, the mindshare of PubSub+ Platform is 3.9%, up from 3.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Starburst Galaxy is 1.7%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Streaming Analytics Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Starburst Galaxy	1.7%
PubSub+ Platform	3.9%
Other	94.4%

Streaming Analytics

Featured Reviews

Deepankar Bbhowmick

Integration Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Messaging design has become visual and reliable and now supports fast microservice communication

The unique functions I appreciate about PubSub+ Platform are that it allows me to design my solution in a graphical manner, which is not available in many other products, and the design can also be pushed to the actual infrastructure layer, making it quite advantageous. Mesh technology is useful in scenarios where different geographies have to be connected, although such situations are not commonly found. It is beneficial but not a super-used feature of PubSub+ Platform. The event replay function is quite mature in PubSub+ Platform, allowing me to replay messages that are days in the past, which is a good feature. The main benefits PubSub+ Platform provides for the end-user include building a robust and scalable system with very low network latency, which improves the customer experience, whether using mobile phones or applications. This type of messaging framework is extremely important, and Solace is a very good product in that space. Nowadays, most applications are built using microservices technology, with small microservices interchanging messages via PubSub+ Platform. Without it, realizing a scalable system would not be possible; for example, one cannot have Netflix or similar services that require quick data transit and a good user experience, ensuring that data cannot be lost in transit. The analytics part of PubSub+ Platform is quite useful as it can connect with many analytical software tools, mainly for analysis of system logs, such as Splunk, DataDog, or Prometheus. It has the flexibility to connect with any of these and supports OpenTelemetry, which is not available in many other products, making traceability very easy. I can see how a message travels from a source system to the target system, end-to-end, along with what happens to that message along the path, making the analytics quite good.

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Pedromachado Ventura

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"From my pursuit of the secret sauce, I found that Solace really is, for us, the service and the partnership that we have with the company, having the level of expertise and the subject matter knowledge available to us is second to none."

"This solution reduces the latency to access changes in real-time and the effort required to onboard a new subscriber. It also reduces the maintenance of each of those interfaces because now the publisher and subscribers are decoupled. Event Broker handles all the communication and engagement. We can just push one update, then we don't have to know who is consuming it and what's happening to that publication downstream. It's all done by the broker, which is a huge benefit of using Event Broker."

"The main benefits PubSub+ Platform provides for the end-user include building a robust and scalable system with very low network latency, which improves the customer experience, whether using mobile phones or applications."

"We have seen at least a 50 percent increase in productivity (compared to using Kafka) when using Solace for sharing changes in real-time, onboarding new subscribers, and modifying data sets."

"I rate the PubSub+ Platform a 9 out of 10."

"The way we can replicate information and send it to several subscribers is most valuable."

"With all these new features in place it increases our productivity by something like 50 percent."

"The way we can replicate information and send it to several subscribers is most valuable. It can be used for any kind of business where you've got multiple users who need information. Any company, such as LinkedIn, with a huge number of subscribers and any business, such as publishing, supermarket, airline, or shipping can use it."

More PubSub+ Platform pros

"Starburst Galaxy has improved our organization by unifying access to all major data sources, reducing the need for complex ETL processes."

"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."

"<p>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.</p>"

"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."

"The main positive impact Starburst Galaxy has made is making data more accessible for analytics and reporting."

"Starburst Galaxy is becoming a cornerstone of our data platform, empowering us to make smarter and faster decisions across the organization."

"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."

More Starburst Galaxy pros

Cons

"One of the areas of improvement would be if we could tell the story a bit better about what an event mesh does or why an event mesh is foundational to a large enterprise that has a wide diversity of applications that are homegrown and a small number off the shelf."

"The ease of management could be approved. The GUI is very good, but to configure and manage these devices programmatically in the software version is not easy. For example, if I would like to spin up a new software broker, then I could in theory use the API, but it would require a considerable amount of development effort to do so. There should be a tool, or something that Solace supports, that we could use for this, e.g., a platform like Terraform where we could use infrastructure as code to configure our source appliances."

"It could be cheaper. It could also have easier usage. It is a brilliant product, but it is quite complex to use."

"I would like them to design topic and queue schemas, mapping them to the enterprise data structure."

"Some of the feature's gaps with some of the open-source vendors have been closed in a lot of ways. Being more agile and addressing those earlier could be an area for improvement."

"We have requested to be able to get into the payload to do dynamic topic hierarchy building."

"We have struggled in a sort of perpetual PoC mode internally."

"The licensing and the cost are the major pitfalls."

More PubSub+ Platform cons

"<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>"

"Cluster startup time can be slow, sometimes taking over a minute."

"The most persistent issue is the cluster spin-up time."

"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."

"There is still room for improved usability and diagnostics, especially for users who are not platform specialists."

"I would like Starburst to leverage AI to improve usability. Data lakes are complicated and difficult for users to explore."

"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 to see better alerting integrations for failures and errors in scheduled tasks and maintenance jobs."

More Starburst Galaxy cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have been really happy with the product licensing rates. It has been free for us, up to a 100,000 transactions per second, and all we have to do is pay for support. Making their product available and accessible to us has not been a problem at all."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"The licensing is dependent on the volume that is flowing. If you go for their support services, it will cost some more money, but I think it is worth it, especially if you are just starting your journey."

"Having a free version of the solution was a big, important part of our decision to go with it. This was the big driver for us to evaluate Solace. We started using it as the free version. When we felt comfortable with the free version, that is when we bought the enterprise version."

"I would rate the product's pricing a ten out of ten."

"It could be cheaper. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."

"We are looking for something that will add value and fit for purpose. Freeware is good if you want to try something quickly without putting in much money. However, as far as our decision is concerned, I don't think it helps. At the end of the day, if we are convinced that a capability is required, we will ask for the funding. Then, when the funding is available, we will go for an enterprise solution only."

"There are different tiers where you can choose what would work for you. As a customer, you need to know roughly how many messages a month you will use."

More PubSub+ Platform pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Outsourcing Company

10%

Construction Company

Financial Services Firm

29%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	15

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	4

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PubSub+ Event Broker?

The pricing and setup cost of PubSub+ Platform is very seamless and reliable for medium and large-scale enterprises. For small-sized enterprises, it may be a higher cost, or they may be looking for...

See all answers

What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?

PubSub+ Platform could improve by simplifying some advanced configurations and providing better visualization for event flow. Some advanced configurations in PubSub+ Platform could be made simpler ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for PubSub+ Event Broker?

PubSub+ Platform's main use case in our company is real-time data streaming using applications and API integrations. We are working on an IoT-based application, and our company handles most of the ...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Starburst Galaxy?

See all answers

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....

See all answers

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Compared 19% of the time

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Compared 10% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

PubSub+ Platform

October 2026

Download PubSub+ Platform product report

Buyer's Guide

Starburst Galaxy

October 2026

Download Starburst Galaxy product report

Also Known As

PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal

No data available

Overview

PubSub+ Platform is designed for real-time message publishing and outstanding interoperability. With features like intuitive administration and topic filtering, it offers both stability and high performance for scalable deployments across diverse scenarios.

PubSub+ Platform enhances data integration with its event mesh and seamless protocol compatibility, providing a comprehensive solution for organizations tracking shipments, generating reports, and managing transactions. Its granular topic filtering and WAN optimization ensure high utility in event-driven applications and cloud deployments. Users highlight the platform's intuitive administration and ease of management, though some seek improved integration with third-party tools and enhanced observability. Concerns include scalability for large payloads and training resource availability. Despite its interface complexity, PubSub+ remains valuable for trading and market data distribution.

What are the key features of PubSub+ Platform?

Real-time messaging: Facilitates seamless communication across platforms.
Flexible topic hierarchy: Supports dynamic topic taxonomy for efficient data management.
Event mesh: Enhances integration and interoperability with diverse protocols.
Intuitive administration: Simplifies system management and configuration.
WAN optimization: Ensures efficient connectivity for global deployment.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Messaging stability: Offers consistent performance in dynamic environments.
Scalability: Provides seamless expansion to accommodate growing data volumes.
Security: Maintains robust protection for sensitive information.
Support and configuration: Accessible, reliable support, and UI-driven setup streamline the management.

PubSub+ Platform is widely implemented for asynchronous messaging in industries like finance for trading and market data, logistics for shipment tracking, and tech operations management. It enables companies to modernize applications while ensuring data accuracy and efficiency across global systems.

Solace

Starburst Galaxy offers rapid query speeds and robust cluster management, enhancing data engineering efficiency while supporting AWS integrations and cross-database functionality. Users benefit from its advanced data integration and federated querying capabilities.

Starburst Galaxy stands out with a compute-focused architecture that excels in facilitating seamless data integration. Technological innovations like autoscaling clusters and automated metadata management optimize operations in multi-tenant environments. With a keen emphasis on compatibility, the platform provides support for AWS Glue and enables federated querying across S3, Snowflake, and Redshift. This adaptability ensures comprehensive ETL processes and enhances analytics through querying SQL Server, Google Sheets, and blob stores. While noted for its robust capabilities, users seek improvements in cluster startup times, Tableau and AI support, and desire infrastructure-as-code enhancements.

What are Starburst Galaxy's key features?

Rapid Query Speeds: Enhances data processing with quick responses.
Cluster Autoscaling: Optimizes resource allocation for varying workloads.
Federated Querying: Cross-database functionality for seamless integration.
Compute-Focused Architecture: Ensures efficiency and scalability.
Automated Metadata Management: Streamlines data handling processes.
AWS Integration: Broad compatibility with AWS services.

What benefits should users evaluate in reviews?

Data Engineering Efficiency: Reduces operating expenses and improves productivity.
Cost Reduction: Highlights lower storage costs with efficient data handling.
Seamless Integration: Enables robust data integration across various platforms.
Cluster Management: Supports diverse workloads with advanced management tools.

In industries focusing on large-scale data efforts, Starburst Galaxy plays an essential role in connecting data sources like Amazon S3 and RDS, streamlining tasks in data engineering and ad-hoc analysis across complex environments. Teams leverage its cross-database querying to boost AWS analytics, with features tailored for sectors needing agile data solutions, from ETL pipelines to secure data federation.

Starburst

Sample Customers

FxPro, TP ICAP, Barclays, Airtel, American Express, Cobalt, Legal & General, LSE Group, Akuna Capital, Azure Information Technology, Brand.net, Canadian Securities Exchange, Core Transport Technologies, Crédit Agricole, Fluent Trade Technologies, Harris Corporation, Korea Exchange, Live E!, Mercuria Energy, Myspace, NYSE Technologies, Pico, RBC Capital Markets, Standard Chartered Bank, Unibet

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

PubSub+ Platform vs. Starburst Galaxy

September 2026

Free Report: PubSub+ Platform vs. Starburst Galaxy

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