Druid is commonly used in business intelligence-OLAP applications to analyze high volumes of real-time and historical data.

[4] Druid is used in production by technology companies such as Alibaba,[4] Airbnb,[4] Nielsen,[4] Cisco,[5][4] eBay,[6] Lyft,[7] Netflix,[8] PayPal,[4] Pinterest,[9] Reddit,[10] Twitter,[11] Walmart,[12] Wikimedia Foundation[13] and Yahoo.

[14] Druid was started in 2011 by Eric Tschetter, Fangjin Yang, Gian Merlino and Vadim Ogievetsky[15] to power the analytics product of Metamarkets.

Apache ZooKeeper is used to register all nodes, manage certain aspects of internode communications, and provide for leader elections.

In 2019, researchers compared the performance of Hive, Presto, and Druid using a denormalized Star Schema Benchmark based on the TPC-H standard.