Best Data Lake Software in 2026
Updated
In short: Unilake is ranked #1 of 17 as of 4 October 2026, ahead of AWS Lake Formation and HPCC Systems. The best-ranked option with a free plan is AWS Lake Formation. The lowest first paid tier on this page is Tencent Cloud CDN at CNY 21/mo.
Data lake software gives teams a way to bring data together for storage, governance and analysis. The ranked options can be compared across ingestion modes, metadata catalogs, governance controls and support for open table formats, as well as deployment model and query interface. Data sharing and free-plan availability may matter when you’re fitting a platform into an existing stack; paid starting prices offer an additional comparison point. Unilake leads the entries, with AWS Lake Formation and HPCC Systems among the tools that follow. Consider which combination of access, management and querying fits your data workflows, then use the listed characteristics to distinguish platforms without assuming every lake serves the same use case.
17 data lake software ranked on what their makers publish — plans and prices, free tiers, platforms and the facts on their own pages.
| # | Platform | Score | Why | From | Free plan | Paid from | Deployment model | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Unilake | 7.4 | RecognisedAPIDocumented | — | — | — | hybrid | View |
| 2 | AWS Lake Formation | 7.3 | RecognisedAPIDocumented | Free | No | — | cloud | View |
| 3 | HPCC Systems | 7.3 | RecognisedAPIDocumented | Free | Yes | — | hybrid | View |
| 4 |  lakeFS | 7.3 | RecognisedAPIDocumented | — | Yes | — | hybrid | View |
| 5 |  HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric | 7.2 | RecognisedAPIDocumented | — | — | — | — | View |
| 6 | Cloudera Data Lake Service | 6.9 | RecognisedAPIDocumented | — | — | — | hybrid | View |
| 7 | Qubole | 6.8 | RecognisedAPIDocumented | — | No | — | cloud | View |
| 8 | Baidu AI Machine Translation | 6.7 | RecognisedAPIDocumented | — | No | — | hybrid | View |
| 9 |  Huawei Cloud Machine Translation | 6.7 | RecognisedAPIDocumented | — | — | — | cloud | View |
| 10 |  Tencent Cloud Application Performance Management | 5.9 | RecognisedAPIDocumented | — | Yes | — | cloud | View |
| 11 | Apache Hadoop HDFS | 5.4 | RecognisedAPIDocumented | — | Yes | — | self-hosted | View |
| 12 | Parseable | 5.3 | RecognisedAPIDocumented | — | Yes | — | — | View |
| 13 |  Tencent Cloud CDN | 5.3 | RecognisedAPIDocumented | CNY 21/mo | No | — | cloud | View |
| 14 | Tencent Cloud Data Lake Compute (DLC) | 5.1 | RecognisedAPIDocumented | — | No | — | cloud | View |
| 15 | Oracle Big Data Service | 5.0 | RecognisedAPIDocumented | — | No | — | cloud | View |
| 16 |  Tencent Cloud GooseFS | 5.0 | RecognisedAPIDocumented | — | No | — | hybrid | View |
| 17 | Apache Ozone | 4.9 | RecognisedAPIDocumented | — | No | — | self-hosted | View |
Is your platform on this list?
Numbered spots on this list can be sponsored. They are labelled, and the editorial order and scores never change for payment.
Questions about this list
Which data lake software is ranked first on Inferse?
Unilake is ranked #1 of 17 with a score of 7.4. AWS Lake Formation is second and HPCC Systems third.
How many of these have a free plan?
2 of the 17 on this page publish a free plan on their own pricing pages.
Which is the cheapest paid option?
On this page, Tencent Cloud CDN has the lowest first paid tier we found: CNY 21/mo.
How is this list ranked?
Ranked on what each maker publishes, open and connectable first: a public API, open-source code, the depth of its documentation and a free tier to try it on. Model lists are sorted by the figure in their title, exactly as each provider publishes it. Paid placements never change a rank.