Compare the Top Query Engines as of January 2026

What are Query Engines?

Query engines are software tools designed to retrieve and process data from databases or large datasets in response to user queries. They efficiently interpret and execute search requests, optimizing the retrieval process to deliver accurate and relevant results quickly. Query engines can handle structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, making them versatile for various applications such as data analytics, business intelligence, and search engines. They often support complex query languages like SQL and can integrate with multiple data sources to provide comprehensive insights. By optimizing data retrieval, query engines enhance the performance and usability of data-driven applications and decision-making processes. Compare and read user reviews of the best Query Engines currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.

  • 1
    Amazon Athena
    Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run. Athena is easy to use. Simply point to your data in Amazon S3, define the schema, and start querying using standard SQL. Most results are delivered within seconds. With Athena, there’s no need for complex ETL jobs to prepare your data for analysis. This makes it easy for anyone with SQL skills to quickly analyze large-scale datasets. Athena is out-of-the-box integrated with AWS Glue Data Catalog, allowing you to create a unified metadata repository across various services, crawl data sources to discover schemas and populate your Catalog with new and modified table and partition definitions, and maintain schema versioning.
  • 2
    StarTree

    StarTree

    StarTree

    StarTree, powered by Apache Pinot™, is a fully managed real-time analytics platform built for customer-facing applications that demand instant insights on the freshest data. Unlike traditional data warehouses or OLTP databases—optimized for back-office reporting or transactions—StarTree is engineered for real-time OLAP at true scale, meaning: - Data Volume: query performance sustained at petabyte scale - Ingest Rates: millions of events per second, continuously indexed for freshness - Concurrency: thousands to millions of simultaneous users served with sub-second latency With StarTree, businesses deliver always-fresh insights at interactive speed, enabling applications that personalize, monitor, and act in real time.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 3
    Apache Impala
    Impala provides low latency and high concurrency for BI/analytic queries on the Hadoop ecosystem, including Iceberg, open data formats, and most cloud storage options. Impala also scales linearly, even in multitenant environments. Impala is integrated with native Hadoop security and Kerberos for authentication, and via the Ranger module, you can ensure that the right users and applications are authorized for the right data. Utilize the same file and data formats and metadata, security, and resource management frameworks as your Hadoop deployment, with no redundant infrastructure or data conversion/duplication. For Apache Hive users, Impala utilizes the same metadata and ODBC driver. Like Hive, Impala supports SQL, so you don't have to worry about reinventing the implementation wheel. With Impala, more users, whether using SQL queries or BI applications, can interact with more data through a single repository and metadata stored from source through analysis.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 4
    Axibase Time Series Database
    Parallel query engine with time- and symbol-indexed data access. Extended SQL syntax with advanced filtering and aggregations. Consolidate quotes, trades, snapshots, and reference data in one place. Strategy backtesting on high-frequency data. Quantitative and market microstructure research. Granular transaction cost analysis and rollup reporting. Market surveillance and anomaly detection. Non-transparent ETF/ETN decomposition. FAST, SBE, and proprietary protocols. Plain text protocol. Consolidated and direct feeds. Built-in latency monitoring tools. End-of-day archives. ETL from institutional and retail financial data platforms. Parallel SQL engine with syntax extensions. Advanced filtering by trading session, auction stage, index composition. Optimized aggregates for OHLCV and VWAP calculations. Interactive SQL console with auto-completion. API endpoint for programmatic integration. Scheduled SQL reporting with email, file, and web delivery. JDBC and ODBC drivers.
  • 5
    Backtrace

    Backtrace

    Backtrace

    Don’t let app, device, or game crashes get in the way of a great experience. Backtrace takes all the manual labor out of cross-platform crash and exception management so you can focus on shipping. Cross-platform callstack and event aggregation and monitoring. Process errors from panics, core dumps, minidumps, and during runtime across your stack with a single system. Backtrace generates structured, searchable error reports from your data. Automated analysis cuts down on time to resolution by surfacing important signals that lead engineers to crash root cause. Never worry about missing a clue with rich integrations into dashboards, notification, and workflow systems. Answer the questions that matter to you with Backtrace’s rich query engine. View a high-level overview of error frequency, prioritization, and trends across all your projects. Search through key data points and your own custom data across all your errors.
  • 6
    Starburst Enterprise

    Starburst Enterprise

    Starburst Data

    Starburst helps you make better decisions with fast access to all your data; Without the complexity of data movement and copies. Your company has more data than ever before, but your data teams are stuck waiting to analyze it. Starburst unlocks access to data where it lives, no data movement required, giving your teams fast & accurate access to more data for analysis. Starburst Enterprise is a fully supported, production-tested and enterprise-grade distribution of open source Trino (formerly Presto® SQL). It improves performance and security while making it easy to deploy, connect, and manage your Trino environment. Through connecting to any source of data – whether it’s located on-premise, in the cloud, or across a hybrid cloud environment – Starburst lets your team use the analytics tools they already know & love while accessing data that lives anywhere.
  • 7
    Databricks Data Intelligence Platform
    The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform allows your entire organization to use data and AI. It’s built on a lakehouse to provide an open, unified foundation for all data and governance, and is powered by a Data Intelligence Engine that understands the uniqueness of your data. The winners in every industry will be data and AI companies. From ETL to data warehousing to generative AI, Databricks helps you simplify and accelerate your data and AI goals. Databricks combines generative AI with the unification benefits of a lakehouse to power a Data Intelligence Engine that understands the unique semantics of your data. This allows the Databricks Platform to automatically optimize performance and manage infrastructure in ways unique to your business. The Data Intelligence Engine understands your organization’s language, so search and discovery of new data is as easy as asking a question like you would to a coworker.
  • 8
    Qubole

    Qubole

    Qubole

    Qubole is a simple, open, and secure Data Lake Platform for machine learning, streaming, and ad-hoc analytics. Our platform provides end-to-end services that reduce the time and effort required to run Data pipelines, Streaming Analytics, and Machine Learning workloads on any cloud. No other platform offers the openness and data workload flexibility of Qubole while lowering cloud data lake costs by over 50 percent. Qubole delivers faster access to petabytes of secure, reliable and trusted datasets of structured and unstructured data for Analytics and Machine Learning. Users conduct ETL, analytics, and AI/ML workloads efficiently in end-to-end fashion across best-of-breed open source engines, multiple formats, libraries, and languages adapted to data volume, variety, SLAs and organizational policies.
  • 9
    Amazon Timestream
    Amazon Timestream is a fast, scalable, and serverless time series database service for IoT and operational applications that makes it easy to store and analyze trillions of events per day up to 1,000 times faster and at as little as 1/10th the cost of relational databases. Amazon Timestream saves you time and cost in managing the lifecycle of time series data by keeping recent data in memory and moving historical data to a cost optimized storage tier based upon user defined policies. Amazon Timestream’s purpose-built query engine lets you access and analyze recent and historical data together, without needing to specify explicitly in the query whether the data resides in the in-memory or cost-optimized tier. Amazon Timestream has built-in time series analytics functions, helping you identify trends and patterns in your data in near real-time.
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