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APIs · head to head

Formance vs Presto

Formance logo

Formance

APIs

Open source double-entry ledger and payment orchestration for money-moving software

From
Free
Rated
-
Full reviewWebsite
Presto logo

Presto

Databases

The Meta-lineage distributed SQL query engine, distinct from the Trino fork

From
Free
Rated
-
Full reviewWebsite

The short version

  • Each has a real cost: Formance formance holds no money and provides no regulatory cover, so it must be paired with a payments provider or bank, and buyers occasionally mistake a ledger for a treasury system and discover the gap late.; Presto the original creators and most of the active contributor base left for Trino in 2020, so Presto has the smaller community, fewer connectors and slower feature delivery of the two branches.
  • They diverge on capability: Formance covers Double-entry ledger, Presto covers Federated querying.
  • Prices and features above were last checked on 31 August 2026.

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which Formance and Presto actually diverge.

Attributes where Formance and Presto differ
AttributeFormancePresto
PlatformsLinux, Docker, Kubernetes, Web, APILinux, Docker, Kubernetes
CategoryAPIsDatabases

Identical on both: starting price (Free), pricing model (Open source, no licence fee), 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 Formance

  • Double-entry ledger
  • Numscript transaction DSL
  • Multi-currency
  • Payments connectivity
  • Reconciliation
  • Self-hosted deployment
  • Cloud offering
  • API and SDKs

Only in Presto

  • Federated querying
  • In-memory execution
  • Open table format support
  • Presto C++ workers
  • ANSI SQL
  • Pluggable connectors

What people use each for

The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.

Formance

  • A marketplace splitting a single customer payment between seller, platform fee and tax that needs the split to be atomic and auditablenot Presto
  • A fintech whose homegrown balances table produced numbers finance could not reconcile and now needs proper double-entry before an auditnot Presto
  • A payments team that wants one normalised model across several PSPs so reconciliation is not written separately for eachnot Presto
  • A company that wants its ledger under a licence it can keep running even if the vendor disappearsnot Presto

Presto

  • An existing PrestoDB estate that needs continued upgrades rather than a migration to Trinonot Formance
  • A team buying IBM watsonx.data, where Presto is the underlying query enginenot Formance
  • Joining a Hive or Iceberg lake to an operational PostgreSQL database in one query without an ETL stepnot Formance
  • Very large scale interactive SQL where the Meta-tested branch is a specific requirementnot Formance

Where each one falls short

Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.

Formance

  • Formance holds no money and provides no regulatory cover, so it must be paired with a payments provider or bank, and buyers occasionally mistake a ledger for a treasury system and discover the gap late.
  • Numscript is a domain-specific language your team must learn, and while it makes complex splits expressible it also means transaction logic sits outside the languages your engineers already debug well.
  • Self-hosting a ledger that must never lose or duplicate a transaction is a serious operational commitment covering backups, upgrades and Postgres tuning, which is real cost the zero licence fee hides.
  • Enterprise pricing is not published, so the difference between the free path and the supported path cannot be evaluated without a sales conversation.
  • The company is much smaller than the incumbent alternatives, and while the MIT licence protects the code it does not protect the roadmap, so features on the hosted side may arrive slowly or change direction.

Presto

  • The original creators and most of the active contributor base left for Trino in 2020, so Presto has the smaller community, fewer connectors and slower feature delivery of the two branches.
  • Documentation, tutorials and Stack Overflow answers for the two projects are frequently mixed up, and a solution written for Trino often does not apply, which costs real debugging time.
  • It is a query engine with no storage of its own, so query performance is dictated by your file layout, partitioning and statistics, and a badly organised lake makes Presto look slow.
  • Memory-bound execution means a single large join can fail the whole query rather than spilling gracefully, and tuning cluster memory settings is a persistent operational chore.
  • Commercial support has consolidated into IBM since the Ahana acquisition, so the independent vendor market that once existed around Presto is largely gone.

Pricing, plan by plan

Formance

Free
  • Open SourceFree
    • MIT licensed core ledger
    • Numscript transaction DSL
    • Multi-currency tracking
  • Enterprise$undefined/year
    • Managed or private deployment
    • Payments connectivity and reconciliation
    • Support with response commitments

Presto

Free
  • PrestoFree
    • Apache 2.0 licence
    • Presto Foundation governance under the Linux Foundation
    • No node or query limits

Which should you pick?

Choose Formance if

  • You need double-entry ledger.
  • You want to start without paying.
  • You work on Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Web, API.
  • You also want numscript transaction dsl.
Formance review

Choose Presto if

  • You need federated querying.
  • You want to start without paying.
  • You work on Linux, Docker, Kubernetes.
  • You also want in-memory execution.
Presto review

Questions people ask

Is Formance or Presto better?
Neither clearly leads. Formance starts at Free and Presto at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, Formance or Presto?
Formance starts at Free and Presto at Free.
Does Formance or Presto run on more platforms?
Formance runs on Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Web, API. Presto runs on Linux, Docker, Kubernetes.
Can I use Formance for free?
Both have a free tier, so you can try either at no cost before committing.
What is Formance best used for?
Formance is most often used for a marketplace splitting a single customer payment between seller, platform fee and tax that needs the split to be atomic and auditable, a fintech whose homegrown balances table produced numbers finance could not reconcile and now needs proper double-entry before an audit, a payments team that wants one normalised model across several psps so reconciliation is not written separately for each, a company that wants its ledger under a licence it can keep running even if the vendor disappears. Of those, a marketplace splitting a single customer payment between seller, platform fee and tax that needs the split to be atomic and auditable and a fintech whose homegrown balances table produced numbers finance could not reconcile and now needs proper double-entry before an audit are not what Presto is typically brought in for.
What can Formance do that Presto cannot?
Formance covers Double-entry ledger, Numscript transaction DSL, Multi-currency, Payments connectivity. Presto covers Federated querying, In-memory execution, Open table format support, Presto C++ workers.

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

Formance: Is Formance really open source?

Yes. The core ledger is MIT licensed with full source access and no deployment restrictions.

Presto: Is this Presto or Trino?

This is PrestoDB, the branch that stayed at Facebook and moved to the Linux Foundation. Trino is the 2020 fork by the original creators.

Formance: Does Formance move money?

No. It records and orchestrates movements; the actual payments happen at a PSP or bank you connect.

Presto: Which should I choose for a new project?

Trino, in most cases. It has the larger community, more connectors and more commercial options.

Formance: What does the enterprise version cost?

Not published. It is an annual subscription quoted per customer.

Presto: Who maintains Presto now?

Principally Meta, Uber and IBM, which acquired the Presto vendor Ahana in 2023.

Formance: Do I have to use Numscript?

Yes for anything beyond the simplest transfers. It is how multi-party transactions are expressed atomically.

Presto: Is it still actively released?

Yes, releases continue on a regular cadence under the Presto Foundation.

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