Compare

LakehouseBox and MotherDuck

MotherDuck is hosted DuckDB: storage and compute together, in its own format. LakehouseBox stores open Iceberg tables and your engine brings the compute; in a chat, a capped read-only query runs on our side. Both let an agent start without an account.

Side by side

Their column is what their own pages said on 12 October 2026 (sources below); prices are theirs, in their currency, before tax.

	MotherDuck	LakehouseBox
Who operates it, where	MotherDuck, on AWS; European organisations in Frankfurt or Dublin, chosen when the organisation is made. Its Agent Chat may use inference outside the EU	Lakehousebox, S.L. (Spain, in formation); tables and files stored at Hetzner in Nuremberg, Germany; a locked backup copy in France
To start	An agent needs no account: new.motherduck.com gives it a token and a database for 72 hours, until a person claims it. A person: the free Lite plan	An agent needs no account: `lhbox new` gives it a catalog it can write for 72 hours, until a person claims it. A person: a free account, 5 GB, no card
Price	Lite: free, 10 GB and 10 compute hours a month. Business: $250 a month plus usage; storage $0.043 per GB-month	Free up to 5 GB. Only storage is metered: no request, egress or compute fees. Paid storage is not open yet (announced at €0.10 per GB-month)
Format and catalog	MotherDuck's own storage format by default; managed DuckLake as an option; reads and writes Iceberg through REST catalogs. DuckLake is not an Iceberg REST catalog	Apache Iceberg tables behind an Iceberg REST catalog; each engine gets storage credentials for one table at a time, valid for an hour
Engines	DuckDB and MotherDuck's SQL; DuckLake also has Spark, DataFusion and Trino clients	DuckDB 1.5.5+, PyIceberg 0.12, Spark 3.5 (status per engine)
Compute	Included: serverless DuckDB, billed per use	Yours: your agent or laptop runs the engine. Server-side read-only SQL (20 s per query) through the API and MCP
MCP	Remote server, read and write	Remote server, read and write (one SQL statement per call)
SLA	99.9% on Business	None yet; one site, no standby

Which one

Choose MotherDuck when you want the compute run for you (serverless DuckDB), a hosted SQL editor and dashboards, or an SLA.

Choose LakehouseBox when your tables should be open Apache Iceberg any engine reads (PyIceberg, Spark, DuckDB) through a REST catalog; your agent already has compute and needs only storage; or the operator and its infrastructure provider should be European companies.

Start with LakehouseBox: let your agent start without an account, or sign up free. Other comparisons: all of them.

Sources

Checked 12 October 2026. Something out of date? Write to hello@lakehousebox.com and we correct it.

Ours: pricing, sovereignty, engines, capabilities.