Presto and Trino
A distributed SQL engine that queries data where it already lives - object storage, a data lake, an existing database - instead of holding it. You point it at connectors and write SQL across them.
Searching for it is confusing, because there are two projects, and both have a claim to the name.
The split
- 2012 - Presto starts at Facebook.
- January 2019 - Martin Traverso, Dain Sundstrom and David Phillips, three of the original creators who had left Facebook the year before, fork the project. They keep the name Presto and use the PrestoSQL handle to distinguish it, and set up the Presto Software Foundation.
- 2019 - Facebook applies for a trademark on Presto® and begins enforcing it.
- 27 December 2020 - PrestoSQL is renamed Trino. The announcement is blunt about why: the trademark meant “we must now change the name in a short period of time, with little ability to minimize user disruption.” The foundation is renamed too.
So the fork carries the original authors, and the original name carries the original code. Neither is the impostor, which is why the confusion persists.
Where they stand
Both are alive, and the star counts mislead - the Presto repository is seven years older, which is most of its lead. Figures from the GitHub API on 2026-08-11, commits and contributors over the preceding twelve months.
| Presto | Trino | |
|---|---|---|
| Repository created | 2012-08-09 | 2019-01-19 |
| Latest release | 0.298.1 (2026-06-17) | 483 (2026-07-18) |
| Commits, 12 months | 1,463 | 4,268 |
| Contributors, 12 months | 159 | 157 |
| Stars | 16,721 | 13,126 |
| Forks | 5,543 | 3,727 |
| Governance | Linux Foundation | Trino Software Foundation |
The number worth looking at is commits: near-identical contributor counts, and Trino doing roughly
three times the work. The other one is the version. Presto has been on 0.x for fourteen years and
releases about five times a year; Trino ships numbered releases at a similar cadence but stopped
pretending to be pre-1.0.
Choosing
Trino if you have no other constraint - the development rate is the difference, and the query engine is where you feel it.
Presto if something you already run picks it for you. It is a Linux Foundation project with real corporate weight behind it, and “less active than Trino” is not the same as inactive at 1,463 commits a year.
Check which one your vendor means before you read their benchmark. Both get called “Presto”.
Trino. Presto stays worth knowing about, mostly because vendors keep shipping it.
Links
- prestodb.io and github.com/prestodb/presto
- trino.io and github.com/trinodb/trino
- Relational Databases - if the data is small enough to load, load it.