However, Starburst rivals, such as Databricks and Snowflake, offer agent governance features with Unity Catalog and Horizon, respectively. Analysts point out that the agent usage tracking features added to Startburst are not only important for controlling over-expenditure but are also becoming table stakes across data lakehouses. While Databricks' Mosaic AI Gateway offers rate limits, usage tracking, and inference logs and tables, with cost monitoring through system tables, Snowflake's Cortex AI Observability offers tracing, evaluations, and cost and usage analysis, along with community-built cost dashboards.
This introduces latency, complexity and what we call 'bloat,' explains Chad Meley, SVP of Marketing at StarTree. We're collapsing that serving and query layer into one piece of the puzzle, significantly reducing the bloat and simplifying that architecture.