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Thought Machine vs Trino

Thought Machine logo

Thought Machine

Technology

Cloud native core banking where products are written as smart contracts

From
On request
Rated
-
Full reviewWebsite
Trino logo

Trino

Technology

A distributed SQL engine that queries data where it already lives, across object storage, warehouses and operational databases.

From
Free
Rated
-
Full reviewWebsite

The short version

  • Only Trino has a free tier, so it costs nothing to try first.
  • Each has a real cost: Thought Machine a core replacement is a two to four year programme at an established bank, and the licence is a minority of total cost against system integrator fees, parallel running and data migration.; 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: Thought Machine covers Smart contract product engine, Trino covers Federated querying.
  • Prices and features above were last checked on 1 September 2026.

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which Thought Machine and Trino actually diverge.

Attributes where Thought Machine and Trino differ
AttributeThought MachineTrino
Starting priceOn requestFree
Pricing modelquoteopen-source
Free tierNoYes
PlatformsWeb, API, CloudWeb

Identical on both: user rating (Not yet rated), category (Technology).

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 Thought Machine

  • Smart contract product engine
  • Cloud native architecture
  • Real time ledger
  • Vault Payments
  • API first design
  • Multi entity and multi currency
  • Product versioning and testing
  • Configurable posting rules

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.

Thought Machine

  • A large bank launching a separate digital brand on a clean core rather than migrating the back booknot Trino
  • A bank whose product launches are blocked by vendor change requests on a legacy corenot Trino
  • An institution needing real time balances and postings for instant payment obligationsnot Trino
  • A group consolidating multiple country cores onto one multi entity platformnot Trino

Trino

  • Ad hoc analysis that spans a data lake and one or more operational databases, without building an ingestion pipeline firstnot Thought Machine
  • Serving a BI tool a single SQL endpoint over an estate that is actually several separate storage systemsnot Thought Machine
  • Querying Iceberg or Delta tables on object storage interactively, as the compute layer of a lakehousenot Thought Machine
  • Investigating whether a dataset is worth ingesting, by querying it in place before committing to a pipeline for itnot Thought Machine

Where each one falls short

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

Thought Machine

  • A core replacement is a two to four year programme at an established bank, and the licence is a minority of total cost against system integrator fees, parallel running and data migration.
  • The smart contract model presumes a bank can write and maintain Python financial products, and institutions without that engineering capability end up outsourcing the very flexibility they bought.
  • Cloud infrastructure cost sits with the bank and is not trivial at scale, so total cost of ownership comparisons against a hosted legacy core often miss a large recurring line.
  • Thought Machine has made two rounds of job cuts pursuing profitability, which is a legitimate supplier stability concern for a system a bank expects to run for fifteen years.
  • The functional footprint is core ledger and product engine, so origination, collections, regulatory reporting and channels all come from other vendors, and the integration estate around Vault is the bank's problem to design and own.

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

Thought Machine

On request
  • Vault Core$undefined/year
    • Quoted per institution, typically on account volumes or annual contract value
    • Implementation and system integrator costs commonly exceed the licence fee
    • Cloud infrastructure costs are the bank's and are not included

Trino

Free

No published plan breakdown. See the Trino review.

Which should you pick?

Choose Thought Machine if

  • You need smart contract product engine.
  • You work on Web, API, Cloud.
  • You also want cloud native architecture.
Thought Machine review

Choose Trino if

  • You need federated querying.
  • You want to start without paying.
  • You also want connector architecture.
Trino review

Questions people ask

Is Thought Machine or Trino better?
Neither clearly leads. Thought Machine starts at On request and Trino at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, Thought Machine or Trino?
Trino has a free tier; the other does not. Paid plans start at On request for Thought Machine and Free for Trino.
Does Thought Machine or Trino run on more platforms?
Thought Machine runs on Web, API, Cloud. Trino runs on Web.
Can I use Trino for free?
Yes. Trino has a free tier, so you can try it without paying. Thought Machine starts at On request.
What is Thought Machine best used for?
Thought Machine is most often used for a large bank launching a separate digital brand on a clean core rather than migrating the back book, a bank whose product launches are blocked by vendor change requests on a legacy core, an institution needing real time balances and postings for instant payment obligations, a group consolidating multiple country cores onto one multi entity platform. Of those, a large bank launching a separate digital brand on a clean core rather than migrating the back book and a bank whose product launches are blocked by vendor change requests on a legacy core are not what Trino is typically brought in for.
What can Thought Machine do that Trino cannot?
Thought Machine covers Smart contract product engine, Cloud native architecture, Real time ledger, Vault Payments. Trino covers Federated querying, Connector architecture, Predicate and aggregation pushdown, Massively parallel execution.

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

Thought Machine: Is Vault Core genuinely cloud native?

Yes. It is containerised, runs on Kubernetes on public cloud, and posts in real time rather than in overnight batch.

Trino: 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.

Thought Machine: How long does a migration take?

Eighteen months at the absolute fastest for a narrow greenfield launch; two to four years for a phased migration at an established bank.

Trino: 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.

Thought Machine: Does the licence fee represent the total cost?

No. Implementation, system integration, parallel running and cloud infrastructure typically cost more than the licence over the programme.

Trino: 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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