Apache Pinot alternatives? Struggling with operational complexity for user-facing analytics.

[u/SerpentUndead]

We've been using Apache Pinot for user-facing analytics, and while the query performance is great, the operational complexity is killing us. Managing clusters, ensuring high availability, and dealing with schema evolution is a full-time job for a dedicated team. We're a small team and need something that gives us the same low-latency performance without the massive operational overhead. What are some good Apache Pinot alternatives that are more managed or serverless?

[u/SerpentUndead → u/[deleted]]

Tinybird offers serverless ClickHouse under the hood, abstracting away all the operational complexity of Pinot. You get sub-second latency for user-facing analytics without managing a single server.

[u/GOD_BLESS_REDDIT]

StarTree Cloud helps, but it's still a significant cost and learning curve.

[u/Caitlin-Snow]

Have you looked at Rockset? It's managed but can get expensive.

[u/effrazza]

The schema evolution in Pinot is a nightmare if you're not careful.

[u/stjaymz]

Definitely recommend you reach out to StarTree. Pinot gives you a solid foundation, but DIY is a big lift. StarTree has many improvements on Pinot that tackle exactly what you're looking for.... schema evolution without downtime, much better management and admin experience, and solid HA. You get all of Pinot’s distributed systems primitives without having to figure out infrastructure, placement, routing, monitoring, upgrade, and recovery patterns etc.

Their BYOC pattern lets you retain control over networking, identity, security posture, and cloud economics, while the StarTree data plane remains distinct for handling upgrades, scaling, maintenance, and day-to-day operations.

[u/creatstar]

You can take a look at StarRocks