What is MotherDuck?
MotherDuck is a cloud data warehouse built on DuckDB. Its homepage describes fast, serverless analytics powered by DuckDB, with dedicated compute for every user and every agent, and it positions the product for data teams, software engineers building application analytics, founders and operators.
The platform covers compute, storage and agent tooling, including a Python runtime for pipelines and enrichment, an MCP server for natural-language questions, and dashboards that agents can build. The company also publishes comparison pages against Snowflake, Postgres, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks and ClickHouse.
Pricing is by plan plus usage. Lite starts at $0 for solo practitioners and hobbyists, with up to 3 internal active users and 2 service accounts. Business costs $250 per organization per month, allows up to 10 internal active users and unlimited service accounts, and adds role-based access control. A higher tier offers Bring Your Own Compute on request. Storage is billed at $0.043 per GB per month, and compute is billed per second by instance size.
Key capabilities
- Serverless analytics DuckDB-based compute with dedicated compute per user.
- Lite plan From $0 for up to 3 internal active users and 2 service accounts.
- Business plan $250 per organization per month with role-based access control.
- Python runtime For pipelines, enrichment and scheduled jobs.
- Usage billing Storage at $0.043 per GB per month and compute billed per second.
Where MotherDuck fits
- Serverless DuckDB warehouse Fast, serverless analytics powered by DuckDB, as a cloud data warehouse that needs no infrastructure to manage.
- Compute per user and agent Every person, dashboard and agent session gets its own isolated DuckDB instance, called a Duckling, so heavy queries do not slow others.
- Flights Python pipelines run on MotherDuck compute, so you can schedule ELT and run AI classifiers on a flexible runtime.
- Dives Agents build interactive visualizations, internal or embedded in your application, with no BI tool required.
- Guides and MCP server Guides give agents a context layer for more accurate queries, and a remote MCP server lets you analyze data in natural language.
- DuckLake and data stack DuckLake builds a data lake on your own files, and integrations include dbt, Fivetran and Tableau.
- Access control Role-based access control and shared organizations are available on the Business plan.
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StarburstStarburst is a data platform built on Trino that queries data across warehouses, lakes and databases in place, in cloud, on-premises or hybrid setups.