GigaOm TCO report: Starburst data lakehouse enables 3x faster time to insight at half the cost

A GigaOm report compares the cost, time, and effort required to adopt a Snowflake cloud data warehouse versus a data lakehouse powered by Starburst, concluding that Starburst offers superior price-performance and faster time-to-insight at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). The report highlights that while both systems achieve nearly identical cost-performance on standard BI workloads, Starburst excels with 5x better price-performance on complex and semi-structured workloads. Additionally, a Starburst lakehouse is up to 67% faster to set up than migrating data into Snowflake, reducing the overall migration effort significantly. Over a three-year period, Starburst's TCO is up to 55% less than Snowflake, owing to lower costs in infrastructure, data migration, ongoing maintenance, and opportunity costs during migration. The findings demonstrate that Starburst's modern data lake approach not only provides comparable query performance to traditional data warehouses but also offers a more flexible, cost-effective alternative that mitigates data movement and duplication challenges.