List of the Top 7 Query Engines for Apache Kafka in 2025

StarTree Cloud functions as a fully-managed platform for real-time analytics, optimized for online analytical processing (OLAP) with exceptional speed and scalability tailored for user-facing applications. Leveraging the capabilities of Apache Pinot, it offers enterprise-level reliability along with advanced features such as tiered storage, scalable upserts, and a variety of additional indexes and connectors. The platform seamlessly integrates with transactional databases and event streaming technologies, enabling the ingestion of millions of events per second while indexing them for rapid query performance. Available on popular public clouds or for private SaaS deployment, StarTree Cloud caters to diverse organizational needs. Included within StarTree Cloud is the StarTree Data Manager, which facilitates the ingestion of data from both real-time sources—such as Amazon Kinesis, Apache Kafka, Apache Pulsar, or Redpanda—and batch data sources like Snowflake, Delta Lake, Google BigQuery, or object storage solutions like Amazon S3, Apache Flink, Apache Hadoop, and Apache Spark. Moreover, the system is enhanced by StarTree ThirdEye, an anomaly detection feature that monitors vital business metrics, sends alerts, and supports real-time root-cause analysis, ensuring that organizations can respond swiftly to any emerging issues. This comprehensive suite of tools not only streamlines data management but also empowers organizations to maintain optimal performance and make informed decisions based on their analytics.

No matter if your project consists of a single table or multiple tables, StarRocks promises a remarkable performance boost of no less than 300% when stacked against other commonly used solutions. Its extensive range of connectors allows for the smooth ingestion of streaming data, capturing information in real-time and guaranteeing that you have the most current insights at your fingertips. Designed specifically for your unique use cases, the query engine enables flexible analytics without the hassle of moving data or altering SQL queries, which simplifies the scaling of your analytics capabilities as needed. Moreover, StarRocks not only accelerates the journey from data to actionable insights but also excels with its unparalleled performance, providing a comprehensive OLAP solution that meets the most common data analytics demands. Its sophisticated caching system, leveraging both memory and disk, is specifically engineered to minimize the I/O overhead linked with data retrieval from external storage, which leads to significant enhancements in query performance while ensuring overall efficiency. Furthermore, this distinctive combination of features empowers users to fully harness the potential of their data, all while avoiding unnecessary delays in their analytic processes. Ultimately, StarRocks represents a pivotal tool for those seeking to optimize their data analysis and operational productivity.

Timeplus is a robust and user-friendly stream processing platform that combines power with affordability. Packaged as a single binary, it allows for easy deployment across multiple environments. Targeted at data teams in various industries, it facilitates the rapid and intuitive processing of both streaming and historical data. With a streamlined design that eliminates the need for external dependencies, Timeplus provides extensive analytical capabilities for both types of data. Its pricing structure is remarkably economical, costing just a tenth of what comparable open-source solutions demand. Users can effortlessly transform real-time market and transaction data into actionable insights. The platform adeptly supports both append-only and key-value streams, making it particularly suited for financial information monitoring. Moreover, Timeplus simplifies the creation of real-time feature pipelines, enhancing its functionality. It serves as a comprehensive hub for managing all infrastructure logs, metrics, and traces, which are vital for ensuring observability. The user-friendly web console UI accommodates a wide range of data sources, while also allowing data to be pushed via REST API or to create external streams without data duplication. Overall, Timeplus stands out as a versatile and thorough solution for data processing, making it an excellent choice for organizations striving to improve their operational efficiency. Its innovative features set a new standard in stream processing technology.

The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform empowers every individual within your organization to effectively utilize data and artificial intelligence. Built on a lakehouse architecture, it creates a unified and transparent foundation for comprehensive data management and governance, further enhanced by a Data Intelligence Engine that identifies the unique attributes of your data. Organizations that thrive across various industries will be those that effectively harness the potential of data and AI. Spanning a wide range of functions from ETL processes to data warehousing and generative AI, Databricks simplifies and accelerates the achievement of your data and AI aspirations. By integrating generative AI with the synergistic benefits of a lakehouse, Databricks energizes a Data Intelligence Engine that understands the specific semantics of your data. This capability allows the platform to automatically optimize performance and manage infrastructure in a way that is customized to the requirements of your organization. Moreover, the Data Intelligence Engine is designed to recognize the unique terminology of your business, making the search and exploration of new data as easy as asking a question to a peer, thereby enhancing collaboration and efficiency. This progressive approach not only reshapes how organizations engage with their data but also cultivates a culture of informed decision-making and deeper insights, ultimately leading to sustained competitive advantages.

VeloDB, powered by Apache Doris, is an innovative data warehouse tailored for swift analytics on extensive real-time data streams. It incorporates both push-based micro-batch and pull-based streaming data ingestion processes that occur in just seconds, along with a storage engine that supports real-time upserts, appends, and pre-aggregations, resulting in outstanding performance for serving real-time data and enabling dynamic interactive ad-hoc queries. VeloDB is versatile, handling not only structured data but also semi-structured formats, and it offers capabilities for both real-time analytics and batch processing, catering to diverse data needs. Additionally, it serves as a federated query engine, facilitating easy access to external data lakes and databases while integrating seamlessly with internal data sources. Designed with distribution in mind, the system guarantees linear scalability, allowing users to deploy it either on-premises or as a cloud service, which ensures flexible resource allocation according to workload requirements, whether through the separation or integration of storage and computation components. By capitalizing on the benefits of the open-source Apache Doris, VeloDB is compatible with the MySQL protocol and various functions, simplifying integration with a broad array of data tools and promoting flexibility and compatibility across a multitude of environments. This adaptability makes VeloDB an excellent choice for organizations looking to enhance their data analytics capabilities without compromising on performance or scalability.

Palo enables organizations to quickly set up a PB-level MPP architecture for their data warehouses in mere minutes while effortlessly integrating large volumes of data from various sources, including RDS, BOS, and BMR. This functionality empowers Palo to perform extensive multi-dimensional analyses on substantial datasets with ease. Moreover, Palo is crafted to integrate smoothly with top business intelligence tools, allowing data analysts to visualize and quickly extract insights from their data, which significantly enhances the decision-making process. Featuring an industry-leading MPP query engine, it includes advanced capabilities such as column storage, intelligent indexing, and vector execution. The platform also provides in-library analytics, window functions, and a range of sophisticated analytical instruments, enabling users to modify table structures and create materialized views without any downtime. Furthermore, its strong support for flexible and efficient data recovery further distinguishes Palo as a formidable solution for businesses seeking to maximize their data utilization. This extensive array of features not only simplifies the optimization of data strategies but also fosters an environment conducive to innovation and growth. Ultimately, Palo positions companies to gain a competitive edge by harnessing their data more effectively than ever before.

Scale from zero to millions of events each second with Arroyo, which is provided as a single, efficient binary. It can be executed locally on MacOS or Linux for development needs and can be seamlessly deployed into production via Docker or Kubernetes. Arroyo offers a groundbreaking approach to stream processing that prioritizes the ease of real-time operations over conventional batch processing methods. Designed from the ground up, Arroyo enables anyone with a basic knowledge of SQL to construct reliable, efficient, and precise streaming pipelines. This capability allows data scientists and engineers to build robust real-time applications, models, and dashboards without requiring a specialized team focused on streaming. Users can easily perform operations such as transformations, filtering, aggregation, and data stream joining merely by writing SQL, achieving results in less than a second. Additionally, your streaming pipelines are insulated from triggering alerts simply due to Kubernetes deciding to reschedule your pods. With its ability to function in modern, elastic cloud environments, Arroyo caters to a range of setups from simple container runtimes like Fargate to large-scale distributed systems managed with Kubernetes. This adaptability makes Arroyo the perfect option for organizations aiming to refine their streaming data workflows, ensuring that they can efficiently handle the complexities of real-time data processing. Moreover, Arroyo’s user-friendly design helps organizations streamline their operations significantly, leading to an overall increase in productivity and innovation.