Databases · alternatives
Alternatives to BigQuery
23 databases tools sit alongside BigQuery in this directory. Below is what separates each from BigQuery on the figures we hold, price, model, tier count and rating, and a direct comparison for every one.
- Alternatives listed
- 23
- With a free tier
- 17
- Cheaper to start
- 0
- BigQuery starts at
- Free
Why people look past BigQuery
Nothing on the record flags a reason to move. BigQuery has a free tier, and starts at Free against a category median of $25/month. People still switch over fit and workflow, and those are not things a catalogue entry can measure, which is what the comparisons below are for.
What each alternative does differently
Ordered by the aggregated rating on each catalogue entry. Differences are drawn from price, pricing model, tier count and rating, the fields the category listing carries. For a feature-level difference, follow the head-to-head link on each card: those pages read both full records.
Fast, scalable cloud data warehouse from AWS
Priced and rated the same as BigQuery on the figures we hold. The difference, if there is one, is in the feature records.
The AI Data Cloud for enterprise data warehousing
- 4 tiers to BigQuery's 2.
Sub-second analytics at cloud data warehouse scale
- No free tier, where BigQuery has one.
- Starts $1.84 a hour dearer, at $1.84/hour.
MPP analytical database with a MySQL wire protocol and sub-second aggregation on wide tables
- Sold on a Open source, no licence fee model rather than usage-based.
- 1 tier to BigQuery's 2.
The Meta-lineage distributed SQL query engine, distinct from the Trino fork
- Sold on a Open source, no licence fee model rather than usage-based.
- 1 tier to BigQuery's 2.
Erlang MQTT broker for large IoT fleets, relicensed to BSL with production free use limited to one node
- Starts $234 a month dearer, at $234/month.
- Sold on a Per month by connection and session volume model rather than usage-based.
- 4 tiers to BigQuery's 2.
Every BigQuery alternative at a glance
A dash means the catalogue entry carries no figure, not that the answer is nothing.
| Tool | Entry price | Model | Tiers | Head to head |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BigQuery (this page) | Free | Usage-based | 2 | |
| Amazon RedshiftAWS's fully managed data warehouse with columnar storage, designed for fast query performance on large datasets. | Free | Usage-based | 2 | vs BigQuery |
| SnowflakeCloud-native data warehouse with separation of compute and storage, supporting multiple workloads. | Free | - | 4 | vs BigQuery |
| FireboltGPU-accelerated data warehouse designed for ultra-fast analytics on massive datasets. | $1.84/hour | Usage-based | - | vs BigQuery |
| Apache Doris | Free | Open source, no licence fee | 1 | vs BigQuery |
| Presto | Free | Open source, no licence fee | 1 | vs BigQuery |
| EMQX | Free, then $234/month | Per month by connection and session volume | 4 | vs BigQuery |
| StarRocks | Free | Open source, no licence fee | 2 | vs BigQuery |
| Solace PubSub+ | Free | Quote | 4 | vs BigQuery |
| Tinybird | Free, then $25/month | Per month by compute and storage | 4 | vs BigQuery |
| Dremio | Free, then $0.2/hour | Per Dremio Compute Unit consumed | 3 | vs BigQuery |
| VerneMQ | Free | Quote | 3 | vs BigQuery |
| Timeplus | Free, then $199/month | Per month for cloud, quoted for self-hosted | 3 | vs BigQuery |
| RisingWave | Free, then $0.227/hour | Per RisingWave Unit hour | 4 | vs BigQuery |
| NATS | Free | Open source, no licence fee | 1 | vs BigQuery |
| Redpanda | Free | Source-available community edition with paid enterprise and cloud tiers | 1 | vs BigQuery |
| RabbitMQ | Free | Open source, no licence fee; managed services billed separately | 1 | vs BigQuery |
| Canary Labs | $3000/year | Per tag band per year | 4 | vs BigQuery |
| Instaclustr | On request | Quote | 1 | vs BigQuery |
| Immuta | On request | Quote | 1 | vs BigQuery |
| Privacera | On request | Quote | 1 | vs BigQuery |
| TIBCO Enterprise Message Service | On request | Quote | 1 | vs BigQuery |
| Apache Solr | Free | Open source, no licence fee | 1 | vs BigQuery |
| Apache Pulsar | Free | Open source, no licence fee | 1 | vs BigQuery |
Ratings are aggregated from third-party sources and imported with each catalogue entry; Softwr hosts no reviews of these products. How each figure is used is set out on the BigQuery badges page.
Cheaper ways to solve the same problem
Free to start (17)
These publish a tier that costs nothing, so they can be evaluated before any money changes hands.
- Amazon Redshift , Free
- Snowflake , Free
- Apache Doris , Free
- Presto , Free
- EMQX , Free, then $234/month
- StarRocks , Free
- Solace PubSub+ , Free
- Tinybird , Free, then $25/month
What you would be giving up
BigQuery is most often brought in for a warehouse for an organisation already on google cloud, where identity, logging and billing are consolidated in the same place, bursty analytical workloads with long idle periods, where paying per query beats keeping a cluster running, event and clickstream analytics ingested continuously through the storage write api and queried without a load window, analytics teams with no infrastructure staff, where the absence of anything to tune or patch is worth more than dialect portability. Anything replacing it has to cover the ones you actually depend on, and a cheaper tool that misses one of them is not cheaper.
Two things this page cannot settle. It compares on price, model, tier count and rating, because those are the fields the category listing carries, feature-level differences need both full records, which is what the head-to-head pages load. And the ratings are third-party aggregates imported with each entry rather than reviews written here, so a 0.2 difference between two tools is noise rather than a finding.
If BigQuery is broadly right and the question is cost, the BigQuery pricing breakdown covers every tier and what each one adds. If you want the whole field rather than a shortlist, the Databases category lists everything the directory holds, and best databases tools ranks them.
BigQuery runs on web, cloud api. Platform coverage is not carried on the category listing for the alternatives, so it is one more thing to check on each head-to-head page rather than here.
Questions about BigQuery alternatives
- What are the main alternatives to BigQuery?
- 23 other databases tools are listed in this directory, led by Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Firebolt, Apache Doris. They are ordered by the aggregated rating on each catalogue entry, not by any Softwr ranking.
- What is the best free alternative to BigQuery?
- 17 of the alternatives listed here can be used without paying: Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Apache Doris, Presto, EMQX.
- Is there a reason to switch away from BigQuery?
- Nothing in the data flags one. BigQuery has a free tier, and starts at Free against a category median of $25/month. Fit and workflow are the usual reasons to move, and those are not things this record can measure.
- What would I give up by switching from BigQuery?
- BigQuery is most often brought in for a warehouse for an organisation already on google cloud, where identity, logging and billing are consolidated in the same place, bursty analytical workloads with long idle periods, where paying per query beats keeping a cluster running, event and clickstream analytics ingested continuously through the storage write api and queried without a load window, analytics teams with no infrastructure staff, where the absence of anything to tune or patch is worth more than dialect portability. Anything you replace it with has to cover the ones you actually rely on, the side-by-side comparisons linked from each alternative below put the two feature records against each other.
- Is there an open-source alternative to BigQuery?
- None of the databases tools listed here are recorded as open source. That is what the licence field on each entry says, and the field is not always filled in, so it is worth checking directly for any tool you are serious about.
- How were these BigQuery alternatives chosen?
- They are the tools filed in the same category, Databases, ordered by the aggregated rating on each entry. There is no editorial shortlist, and nothing on this page is paid: no sponsored placement runs on alternatives pages and the order cannot be bought. Softwr has not used these products.
- Where can I compare BigQuery against one of these directly?
- Every alternative below has a side-by-side page against BigQuery covering price, platforms, features and what each one is used for. Those pages read the full record for both products rather than the summary shown here.
- Does this list cover every databases tool?
- No. It covers what this directory holds in the Databases category, 23 tools beside BigQuery. The category page lists the rest of the catalogue as it grows.