APACHE DRUID vs APACHE PINOT

“2-7x lower latency on 3-4x throughput with lower costs too”

Engineering teams at leading tech companies are moving streaming and real-time analytics workloads from Druid to Apache Pinot.

StarTree helps them succeed.

Meet with a Pinot expert Read: Druid vs Clickhouse vs Pinot

Top reasons compaines are switching
to Apache Pinot from Druid

At StarTree, we help engineering teams move workloads from Apache Druid to Apache Pinot. These are some of the most common reasons we hear for the switch:

Superior performance at scale

Pinot outperforms Druid in real-world usage as data volume, dimensionality, and concurrency rise. StarTree customers have seen 2-7x lower latency on 3-4x throughput. More

Native real-time upserts

Pinot supports true real-time upserts at scale — eliminating versioning workarounds and ensuring continuously correct data at query time. More

Lower infrastructure costs

Richer indexing, superior compression and more flexible storage options typically lead to 30-60% lower infrastructure costs with Pinot on StarTree Cloud compared to Druid/Imply. More

Simpler operations and management

Pinot’s clean separation of concerns and StarTree’s managed service dramatically simplify cluster operations and scaling. Pinot offers automatic rebalancing, simpler cluster management, schema evolution, and more. More

One platform for many workloads

Pinot supports more users, workloads, and use cases within a single deployment. Pinot's true multi-tenancy enables organizations to isolate resources and support diverse schemas, variable concurrency patterms and complex indexing without fragmenting clusters. More

Direct query on Iceberg

Apache Pinot on StarTree Cloud has powerful tiered-storage capabilities allowing for performant queries directly on data in object storage. This makes it possible to offer low-latency query on historical data without duplicating or moving data. More

Explore Apache Pinot on StarTree Cloud

Comparisons from the field

Performance results and relative improvements depend on many factors. Yet over and over users have cited that Apache Pinot can perform the same queries as Apache Druid in a fraction of the time.

YouGov

5x-7x faster with Pinot

Confluera

2x-4x faster with Pinot

Zomato

2x faster with Pinot

Apache Pinot handles the deficiencies found in Apache Druid.

When given multiple queries to handle simultaneously Druid rapidly sees query responsiveness rise to 10 seconds or even more — making it unsuitable for many real-time use cases such as web or mobile applications that require blink-of-an-eye responsiveness for user bases measured in the millions of data consumers.

Apache Pinot can provide latencies measured in milliseconds, even at 1000 QPS or more. In a benchmark published by Confluera, Apache Druid often exhibited latencies as high as 2 to 4 seconds or more, whereas Apache Pinot ran the same queries in a single second. Even in cases where Apache Druid latencies were subsecond, Apache Pinot latencies were lower — at times up to an order of magnitude faster. Read More

Outperforming all other Real-time DBs at YouGov

YouGov tried various databases to meet their needs for fast analytics. This shows the clear advantage of using a real-time Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) database compared to traditional Online Transactional Processing (OTLP) databases like PostgreSQL (SQL) or Cassandra (NoSQL).

Even amongst real-time OLAP databases Apache Pinot handily out-performed Apache Druid and Clickhouse. (Lower results are better.) Read More

Read the Report

GigaOm Sonar Report for Real-Time Analytical Databases

This report rigorously evaluates leading real-time analytical vendors (StarTree, Imply, Clickhouse, CelerData and more) to uncover the distinct technical advantages that set these specialized solutions apart.

Get a copy

Edit Promo

Financial data is real-time in nature. We use Apache Pinot to empower our users with fast, accurate, and fresh data about their financial transactions.

Lakshmi Rao

Software Engineer

Read the Case Study

A database ideal for real-time analytics – at speed and scale.

Apache Pinot is a real-time OLAP database built for ultra-fast analytics on high-volume data. It supports sub-second queries on billions of rows, even with high cardinality and concurrency — ideal for working with telemetry, logs, streaming business data and more.

StarTree Cloud delivers a fully managed Pinot experience with enterprise-grade security, automated scaling, and seamless integrations (Kafka, Flink, BI tools, etc.). It gives your team the power to build real-time dashboards, alerts, and APIs on live data — without compromising performance or reliability.

If you’re tracking fast-moving data and need millisecond-level insights at scale, Pinot + StarTree can help you move faster and operate smarter.

Need advice?

Talk to a Pinot Expert

We're here to provide advice and guidance on how best to leverage Apache Pinot for a wide range of use-cases. Get in touch and we'll help you get the ball rolling.