# Firebolt

> Low-latency cloud warehouse for data-intensive applications

Firebolt is a cloud data warehouse built for sub-second analytics on customer-facing applications, pairing stateless elastic engines with primary, join, and aggregating indexes, and shipping a free self-hosted edition alongside the managed service.

Website: https://www.firebolt.io

## Use it when

- The warehouse serves an application, not a dashboard: high concurrency with sub-second answers, where indexes (primary, aggregating, join) beat brute-force scans.
- Ingest, transformation, and serving need isolation without copies; multiple read-write engines share the same data.
- You want to try the real engine free; Firebolt Core self-hosts the same distributed engine with no data or query limits.
- PostgreSQL-compliant SQL keeps the dialect familiar.

## Think twice when

- The managed service is AWS-only (six regions); multi-cloud plans need Core or a different warehouse.
- Core is source-available, not open source: Elastic License 2.0, unpublished source, and no offering it as a hosted service.
- The workload is classic broad-scan BI over huge history; scan-optimized warehouses and lake engines fit that economics better, and the real comparison set here is ClickHouse, StarRocks, and Pinot.

## How it runs

Managed on AWS: stateless engines scale from one to 128 nodes and up to ten clusters, autoscaling on CPU, RAM, and queue time, over S3 with local SSD cache. Iceberg reads in place; READ_STREAM ingests from Kafka exactly-once. Firebolt Core ships as a container, deployable from a laptop to a multi-node cluster.

## Details

### General

| Attribute | Value |
| --- | --- |
| License | Source-available |
| SPDX identifier | Elastic-2.0 |
| Deployment | Managed, Self-hosted |
| Operational complexity | Medium |
| Pricing | Free, Subscription |
| Repository | https://github.com/firebolt-db/firebolt-core |
| Documentation | https://docs.firebolt.io |
| Stars | 251 |

### Data Warehouses

| Attribute | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Where it runs | AWS only, six regions; Firebolt Core self-hosts anywhere |
| Compute and storage | MPP over S3 with local SSD cache, scales by node size, count and clusters |
| Storage format | Proprietary; reads Iceberg in place |
| SQL dialect | PostgreSQL-compliant |
| Streaming ingest | Native: READ_STREAM over Kafka, exactly-once |
| Concurrent users | Multi-cluster engines: autoscale on CPU, RAM and queue time, up to 10 clusters |
| Acceleration | Sparse primary index, aggregating and join indexes; result and subresult caching |
| Billing unit | FBU-second of engine runtime: node type x nodes x clusters; storage per TiB-month |
| Time travel | None |
| Access control | Org and account RBAC, column-level grants, secure views for row filtering; SSO and network policies |

## Capabilities

- [Data Warehouses](https://matca.io/capabilities/data-warehouse)

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Source: https://matca.io/firebolt
Last updated: 2026-08-31T11:40:49.615Z