Developer Tools · head to head
Earthly vs Trino
Trino
Technology
A distributed SQL engine that queries data where it already lives, across object storage, warehouses and operational databases.
- From
- Free
- Free plan
- Yes
The short version
- Each has a real cost: Earthly pricing model not published; requires sales contact; Trino trino stores nothing and computes no statistics of its own, so the plan it produces is only as good as the partitioning, file sizes and table statistics on the source; a Hive table of thousands of small files or a lake with no stats produces a slow query the engine cannot improve.
- They diverge on capability: Earthly covers Policy as code, Trino covers Federated querying.
- Prices and features above were last checked on 30 August 2026.
Where they differ
Only the attributes on which Earthly and Trino actually diverge.
Identical on both: starting price (Free), free tier (Yes), user rating (Not yet rated).
What each one covers
Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.
Only in Earthly
- Policy as code
- Multi-stage enforcement
- AI agent governance
- Repository-wide policies
- Incident response automation
- Compliance management
- Earthfiles build tool
- Satellites
Only in Trino
- Federated querying
- Connector architecture
- Predicate and aggregation pushdown
- Massively parallel execution
- Fault-tolerant execution
- Resource groups
- Iceberg and Delta table support
- Standard client protocols
What people use each for
The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.
Earthly
- Enforcing engineering standards across AI and human developersnot Trino
- Automating incident response procedures across all repositoriesnot Trino
- Embedding compliance requirements into development workflowsnot Trino
- Standardizing build processes with Earthfilesnot Trino
Trino
- Ad hoc analysis that spans a data lake and one or more operational databases, without building an ingestion pipeline firstnot Earthly
- Serving a BI tool a single SQL endpoint over an estate that is actually several separate storage systemsnot Earthly
- Querying Iceberg or Delta tables on object storage interactively, as the compute layer of a lakehousenot Earthly
- Investigating whether a dataset is worth ingesting, by querying it in place before committing to a pipeline for itnot Earthly
Where each one falls short
Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.
Earthly
- Pricing model not published; requires sales contact
- Earthly Lunar is a recent launch (2025) with limited track record
- Primarily GitHub-focused; limited integration with other platforms
- No public documentation on pricing or feature tiers
Trino
- Trino stores nothing and computes no statistics of its own, so the plan it produces is only as good as the partitioning, file sizes and table statistics on the source; a Hive table of thousands of small files or a lake with no stats produces a slow query the engine cannot improve.
- Federated queries pull data out of the systems they touch, so a join between a lake table and a production Postgres can put a full table scan onto an OLTP database that other applications depend on, and the person who wrote the query will not see the incident it causes.
- Releases come roughly every one to two weeks with no community long-term support line, and deprecations arrive quickly, so you either dedicate someone to keeping current or you buy Starburst Enterprise for a supported long-term version.
- It is memory-based and disk spilling was deprecated in favour of fault-tolerant execution, so a query exceeding cluster memory fails outright rather than degrading; enabling fault-tolerant execution requires an external exchange store on object storage and makes queries measurably slower.
- It is a query engine and not a warehouse: there is no built-in job scheduling, no incremental materialised view maintenance and no transformation framework, so producing curated tables still needs dbt or an equivalent layer that somebody has to own.
- The 2020 fork split the ecosystem, so documentation, connectors, Stack Overflow answers and vendor material written before then describe PrestoDB, which is now a different project with different behaviour, and following the wrong one wastes real time.
Pricing, plan by plan
Earthly
FreeNo published plan breakdown. See the Earthly review.
Trino
FreeNo published plan breakdown. See the Trino review.
Which should you pick?
Choose Earthly if
- You need policy as code.
- You want to start without paying.
- You work on Web, CLI.
- You also want multi-stage enforcement.
Choose Trino if
- You need federated querying.
- You want to start without paying.
- You also want connector architecture.
Questions people ask
- Is Earthly or Trino better?
- Neither clearly leads. Earthly starts at Free and Trino at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
- Which is cheaper, Earthly or Trino?
- Earthly starts at Free and Trino at Free.
- Does Earthly or Trino run on more platforms?
- Earthly runs on Web, CLI. Trino runs on Web.
- Can I use Earthly for free?
- Both have a free tier, so you can try either at no cost before committing.
- What is Earthly best used for?
- Earthly is most often used for enforcing engineering standards across ai and human developers, automating incident response procedures across all repositories, embedding compliance requirements into development workflows, standardizing build processes with earthfiles. Of those, enforcing engineering standards across ai and human developers and automating incident response procedures across all repositories are not what Trino is typically brought in for.
- What can Earthly do that Trino cannot?
- Earthly covers Policy as code, Multi-stage enforcement, AI agent governance, Repository-wide policies. Trino covers Federated querying, Connector architecture, Predicate and aggregation pushdown, Massively parallel execution.
Answered from the vendors’ own pages
Earthly: What is the difference between Earthfiles and Earthly Lunar?
Earthfiles is an open-source build tool that reached 12,000 GitHub stars and is used by companies like NVIDIA, Intel, and Databricks. Earthly Lunar is a separate governance platform launched in 2025 for enforcing standards across development workflows.
SourceTrino: What is the difference between Trino and Presto?
They share an origin. The original creators left Meta and renamed their fork from PrestoSQL to Trino in December 2020; PrestoDB continues separately under the Linux Foundation. They have diverged in features, connectors and SQL behaviour, so material written for one may not apply to the other.
Earthly: How does Earthly Lunar enforce standards?
Lunar converts engineering standards, compliance requirements, and processes documented in AGENTS.md files, wikis, and incident postmortems into enforceable guardrails that apply consistently across repositories and development stages.
SourceTrino: Does Trino replace my data warehouse?
Not on its own. It is compute without storage, scheduling or transformation. Paired with Iceberg or Delta on object storage and something like dbt for modelling it can serve as a lakehouse; used alone it is a query layer over what you already have.
Earthly: What is the pricing for Earthly Lunar?
Pricing is not published on the website. Interested customers should contact Earthly's sales team for current pricing and feature tiers.
SourceTrino: Why is my federated query slow?
Usually because a connector could not push a filter or aggregation down, so Trino is pulling whole tables across the network to join them itself. The fix is usually better source-side partitioning or statistics, or ingesting that source rather than federating it.
Trino: What happens when a query runs out of memory?
It fails. Disk spilling was deprecated in favour of fault-tolerant execution, which checkpoints to an external exchange store such as S3 and lets long queries survive memory pressure and worker loss, at the cost of noticeably slower execution.
Trino: Is there commercial support?
Yes, from Starburst, which offers Starburst Enterprise with long-term supported releases and Starburst Galaxy as a managed service. The open source project itself has no long-term support line.
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