Best Query Engines for Cloud
View:
Compare the Top Query Engines for Cloud as of October 2025
Sort By:
What are Query Engines for Cloud?
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 for Cloud currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
-
1
Google Cloud BigQuery
Google
BigQuery features a highly optimized query engine that can handle large-scale queries on vast datasets with remarkable speed and efficiency. Its serverless architecture allows businesses to perform high-performance queries without the need for managing infrastructure or servers. BigQuery’s SQL-based query engine is familiar to most data analysts, making it easy to get started with complex data analysis. New customers can explore the query engine with $300 in free credits, enabling them to run a variety of queries and assess how BigQuery can support their analytical needs. The platform is also designed for scalability, ensuring that query performance remains consistent even as data grows.Starting Price: Free ($300 in free credits) -
2
Snowflake
Snowflake
Snowflake is a comprehensive AI Data Cloud platform designed to eliminate data silos and simplify data architectures, enabling organizations to get more value from their data. The platform offers interoperable storage that provides near-infinite scale and access to diverse data sources, both inside and outside Snowflake. Its elastic compute engine delivers high performance for any number of users, workloads, and data volumes with seamless scalability. Snowflake’s Cortex AI accelerates enterprise AI by providing secure access to leading large language models (LLMs) and data chat services. The platform’s cloud services automate complex resource management, ensuring reliability and cost efficiency. Trusted by over 11,000 global customers across industries, Snowflake helps businesses collaborate on data, build data applications, and maintain a competitive edge.Starting Price: $2 compute/month -
3
Amazon Athena
Amazon
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. -
4
Apache Hive
Apache Software Foundation
The Apache Hive data warehouse software facilitates reading, writing, and managing large datasets residing in distributed storage using SQL. Structure can be projected onto data already in storage. A command line tool and JDBC driver are provided to connect users to Hive. Apache Hive is an open source project run by volunteers at the Apache Software Foundation. Previously it was a subproject of Apache® Hadoop®, but has now graduated to become a top-level project of its own. We encourage you to learn about the project and contribute your expertise. Traditional SQL queries must be implemented in the MapReduce Java API to execute SQL applications and queries over distributed data. Hive provides the necessary SQL abstraction to integrate SQL-like queries (HiveQL) into the underlying Java without the need to implement queries in the low-level Java API. -
5
ClickHouse
ClickHouse
ClickHouse is a fast open-source OLAP database management system. It is column-oriented and allows to generate analytical reports using SQL queries in real-time. ClickHouse's performance exceeds comparable column-oriented database management systems currently available on the market. It processes hundreds of millions to more than a billion rows and tens of gigabytes of data per single server per second. ClickHouse uses all available hardware to its full potential to process each query as fast as possible. Peak processing performance for a single query stands at more than 2 terabytes per second (after decompression, only used columns). In distributed setup reads are automatically balanced among healthy replicas to avoid increasing latency. ClickHouse supports multi-master asynchronous replication and can be deployed across multiple datacenters. All nodes are equal, which allows avoiding having single points of failure. -
6
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 -
7
Trino
Trino
Trino is a query engine that runs at ludicrous speed. Fast-distributed SQL query engine for big data analytics that helps you explore your data universe. Trino is a highly parallel and distributed query engine, that is built from the ground up for efficient, low-latency analytics. The largest organizations in the world use Trino to query exabyte-scale data lakes and massive data warehouses alike. Supports diverse use cases, ad-hoc analytics at interactive speeds, massive multi-hour batch queries, and high-volume apps that perform sub-second queries. Trino is an ANSI SQL-compliant query engine, that works with BI tools such as R, Tableau, Power BI, Superset, and many others. You can natively query data in Hadoop, S3, Cassandra, MySQL, and many others, without the need for complex, slow, and error-prone processes for copying the data. Access data from multiple systems within a single query.Starting Price: Free -
8
Tabular
Tabular
Tabular is an open table store from the creators of Apache Iceberg. Connect multiple computing engines and frameworks. Decrease query time and storage costs by up to 50%. Centralize enforcement of data access (RBAC) policies. Connect any query engine or framework, including Athena, BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Databricks, Trino, Spark, and Python. Smart compaction, clustering, and other automated data services reduce storage costs and query times by up to 50%. Unify data access at the database or table. RBAC controls are simple to manage, consistently enforced, and easy to audit. Centralize your security down to the table. Tabular is easy to use plus it features high-powered ingestion, performance, and RBAC under the hood. Tabular gives you the flexibility to work with multiple “best of breed” compute engines based on their strengths. Assign privileges at the data warehouse database, table, or column level.Starting Price: $100 per month -
9
Timeplus
Timeplus
Timeplus is a simple, powerful, and cost-efficient stream processing platform. All in a single binary, easily deployed anywhere. We help data teams process streaming and historical data quickly and intuitively, in organizations of all sizes and industries. Lightweight, single binary, without dependencies. End-to-end analytic streaming and historical functionalities. 1/10 the cost of similar open source frameworks. Turn real-time market and transaction data into real-time insights. Leverage append-only streams and key-value streams to monitor financial data. Implement real-time feature pipelines using Timeplus. One platform for all infrastructure logs, metrics, and traces, the three pillars supporting observability. In Timeplus, we support a wide range of data sources in our web console UI. You can also push data via REST API, or create external streams without copying data into Timeplus.Starting Price: $199 per month -
10
R2 SQL
Cloudflare
R2 SQL is Cloudflare’s serverless, distributed analytics query engine (currently in open beta) that enables you to run SQL queries over Apache Iceberg tables stored in R2 Data Catalog without needing to manage your own compute clusters. It is built to efficiently query large volumes of data by leveraging metadata pruning, partition-level statistics, file and row-group filtering, and Cloudflare’s globally distributed compute infrastructure to parallelize execution. The system works by integrating with R2 object storage and an Iceberg catalog layer, so you can ingest data via Cloudflare Pipelines into Iceberg tables, and then query that data with minimal overhead. Queries can be issued via the Wrangler CLI or HTTP API (with an API token granting permissions across R2 SQL, Data Catalog, and storage). During the open beta period, using R2 SQL itself is not billed, only storage and standard R2 operations incur charges.Starting Price: Free -
11
Axibase Time Series Database
Axibase
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. -
12
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. -
13
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. -
14
IBM Db2 Big SQL
IBM
A hybrid SQL-on-Hadoop engine delivering advanced, security-rich data query across enterprise big data sources, including Hadoop, object storage and data warehouses. IBM Db2 Big SQL is an enterprise-grade, hybrid ANSI-compliant SQL-on-Hadoop engine, delivering massively parallel processing (MPP) and advanced data query. Db2 Big SQL offers a single database connection or query for disparate sources such as Hadoop HDFS and WebHDFS, RDMS, NoSQL databases, and object stores. Benefit from low latency, high performance, data security, SQL compatibility, and federation capabilities to do ad hoc and complex queries. Db2 Big SQL is now available in 2 variations. It can be integrated with Cloudera Data Platform, or accessed as a cloud-native service on the IBM Cloud Pak® for Data platform. Access and analyze data and perform queries on batch and real-time data across sources, like Hadoop, object stores and data warehouses. -
15
Motif Analytics
Motif Analytics
Rich interactive visualizations for identifying patterns in user and business flows, with full visibility into underlying computation. A small set of sequence operations providing full expressivity and fine-grained control in under 10 lines of code. An incremental query engine to seamlessly trade between query precision, speed and cost according to your needs. Currently Motif uses a tiny custom-built DSL called Sequence Operations Language (SOL), which we believe is more natural to use than SQL and more powerful than a drag-and-drop interface. We built a custom engine to optimize sequence queries and are also trading off precision, which goes unused in decision-making, for query speed. -
16
Databricks Data Intelligence Platform
Databricks
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. -
17
AIS labPortal
Analytical Information Systems
Perhaps you want to give your clients access to their LIMS data and reports via the web. AIS labPortal allows you to do just that. Paper copies of sample analyses needn’t be sent out in the post to customers. Using their unique login and security password, clients can access data from their computer, which is not only safer and less time-consuming but also more environmentally friendly. labPortal is a web-based portal that securely stores your clients’ sample information and data in the cloud, allowing them to easily access it instantly from their own desktop, tablet or phone. The labPortal interface is 'inbox' style which is simple and easy to use with an enhanced query engine, conditional highlighting and Microsoft Excel export. The software features a simple and easy-to-use sample registration form which allows users to pre-register samples online. Transcribing data is a time-consuming and tedious activity.Starting Price: $200 per month -
18
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. -
19
QuasarDB
QuasarDB
Quasar's brain is QuasarDB, a high-performance, distributed, column-oriented timeseries database management system designed from the ground up to deliver real-time on petascale use cases. Up to 20X less disk usage. Quasardb ingestion and compression capabilities are unmatched. Up to 10,000X faster feature extraction. QuasarDB can extract features in real-time from the raw data, thanks to the combination of a built-in map/reduce query engine, an aggregation engine that leverages SIMD from modern CPUs, and stochastic indexes that use virtually no disk space. The most cost-effective timeseries solution, thanks to its ultra-efficient resource usage, the capability to leverage object storage (S3), unique compression technology, and fair pricing model. Quasar runs everywhere, from 32-bit ARM devices to high-end Intel servers, from Edge Computing to the cloud or on-premises. -
20
Apache Drill
The Apache Software Foundation
Schema-free SQL Query Engine for Hadoop, NoSQL and Cloud Storage -
21
Presto
Presto Foundation
Presto is an open source distributed SQL query engine for running interactive analytic queries against data sources of all sizes ranging from gigabytes to petabytes. For data engineers who struggle with managing multiple query languages and interfaces to siloed databases and storage, Presto is the fast and reliable engine that provides one simple ANSI SQL interface for all your data analytics and your open lakehouse. Different engines for different workloads means you will have to re-platform down the road. With Presto, you get 1 familar ANSI SQL language and 1 engine for your data analytics so you don't need to graduate to another lakehouse engine. Presto can be used for interactive and batch workloads, small and large amounts of data, and scales from a few to thousands of users. Presto gives you one simple ANSI SQL interface for all of your data in various siloed data systems, helping you join your data ecosystem together. -
22
Apache Spark
Apache Software Foundation
Apache Spark™ is a unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing. Apache Spark achieves high performance for both batch and streaming data, using a state-of-the-art DAG scheduler, a query optimizer, and a physical execution engine. Spark offers over 80 high-level operators that make it easy to build parallel apps. And you can use it interactively from the Scala, Python, R, and SQL shells. Spark powers a stack of libraries including SQL and DataFrames, MLlib for machine learning, GraphX, and Spark Streaming. You can combine these libraries seamlessly in the same application. Spark runs on Hadoop, Apache Mesos, Kubernetes, standalone, or in the cloud. It can access diverse data sources. You can run Spark using its standalone cluster mode, on EC2, on Hadoop YARN, on Mesos, or on Kubernetes. Access data in HDFS, Alluxio, Apache Cassandra, Apache HBase, Apache Hive, and hundreds of other data sources. -
23
Amazon Timestream
Amazon
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. -
24
PySpark
PySpark
PySpark is an interface for Apache Spark in Python. It not only allows you to write Spark applications using Python APIs, but also provides the PySpark shell for interactively analyzing your data in a distributed environment. PySpark supports most of Spark’s features such as Spark SQL, DataFrame, Streaming, MLlib (Machine Learning) and Spark Core. Spark SQL is a Spark module for structured data processing. It provides a programming abstraction called DataFrame and can also act as distributed SQL query engine. Running on top of Spark, the streaming feature in Apache Spark enables powerful interactive and analytical applications across both streaming and historical data, while inheriting Spark’s ease of use and fault tolerance characteristics. -
25
DuckDB
DuckDB
Processing and storing tabular datasets, e.g. from CSV or Parquet files. Large result set transfer to client. Large client/server installations for centralized enterprise data warehousing. Writing to a single database from multiple concurrent processes. DuckDB is a relational database management system (RDBMS). That means it is a system for managing data stored in relations. A relation is essentially a mathematical term for a table. Each table is a named collection of rows. Each row of a given table has the same set of named columns, and each column is of a specific data type. Tables themselves are stored inside schemas, and a collection of schemas constitutes the entire database that you can access. -
26
ksqlDB
Confluent
Now that your data is in motion, it’s time to make sense of it. Stream processing enables you to derive instant insights from your data streams, but setting up the infrastructure to support it can be complex. That’s why Confluent developed ksqlDB, the database purpose-built for stream processing applications. Make your data immediately actionable by continuously processing streams of data generated throughout your business. ksqlDB’s intuitive syntax lets you quickly access and augment data in Kafka, enabling development teams to seamlessly create real-time innovative customer experiences and fulfill data-driven operational needs. ksqlDB offers a single solution for collecting streams of data, enriching them, and serving queries on new derived streams and tables. That means less infrastructure to deploy, maintain, scale, and secure. With less moving parts in your data architecture, you can focus on what really matters -- innovation. -
27
LlamaIndex
LlamaIndex
LlamaIndex is a “data framework” to help you build LLM apps. Connect semi-structured data from API's like Slack, Salesforce, Notion, etc. LlamaIndex is a simple, flexible data framework for connecting custom data sources to large language models. LlamaIndex provides the key tools to augment your LLM applications with data. Connect your existing data sources and data formats (API's, PDF's, documents, SQL, etc.) to use with a large language model application. Store and index your data for different use cases. Integrate with downstream vector store and database providers. LlamaIndex provides a query interface that accepts any input prompt over your data and returns a knowledge-augmented response. Connect unstructured sources such as documents, raw text files, PDF's, videos, images, etc. Easily integrate structured data sources from Excel, SQL, etc. Provides ways to structure your data (indices, graphs) so that this data can be easily used with LLMs. -
28
Polars
Polars
Knowing of data wrangling habits, Polars exposes a complete Python API, including the full set of features to manipulate DataFrames using an expression language that will empower you to create readable and performant code. Polars is written in Rust, uncompromising in its choices to provide a feature-complete DataFrame API to the Rust ecosystem. Use it as a DataFrame library or as a query engine backend for your data models. -
29
VeloDB
VeloDB
Powered by Apache Doris, VeloDB is a modern data warehouse for lightning-fast analytics on real-time data at scale. Push-based micro-batch and pull-based streaming data ingestion within seconds. Storage engine with real-time upsert、append and pre-aggregation. Unparalleled performance in both real-time data serving and interactive ad-hoc queries. Not just structured but also semi-structured data. Not just real-time analytics but also batch processing. Not just run queries against internal data but also work as a federate query engine to access external data lakes and databases. Distributed design to support linear scalability. Whether on-premise deployment or cloud service, separation or integration of storage and compute, resource usage can be flexibly and efficiently adjusted according to workload requirements. Built on and fully compatible with open source Apache Doris. Support MySQL protocol, functions, and SQL for easy integration with other data tools. -
30
Baidu Palo
Baidu AI Cloud
Palo helps enterprises to create the PB-level MPP architecture data warehouse service within several minutes and import the massive data from RDS, BOS, and BMR. Thus, Palo can perform the multi-dimensional analytics of big data. Palo is compatible with mainstream BI tools. Data analysts can analyze and display the data visually and gain insights quickly to assist decision-making. It has the industry-leading MPP query engine, with column storage, intelligent index,and vector execution functions. It can also provide in-library analytics, window functions, and other advanced analytics functions. You can create a materialized view and change the table structure without the suspension of service. It supports flexible and efficient data recovery.
