Amazon Athena vs. Snowflake

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Athena
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can point Athena at their data stored in S3 and begin using standard SQL to run ad-hoc queries and get results in seconds. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to setup or manage, and customers pay only for the queries they run. You can use Athena to process logs, perform ad-hoc analysis, and run…
$5
per TB of Data Scanned
Snowflake
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
The Snowflake Cloud Data Platform is the eponymous data warehouse with, from the company in San Mateo, a cloud and SQL based DW that aims to allow users to unify, integrate, analyze, and share previously siloed data in secure, governed, and compliant ways. With it, users can securely access the Data Cloud to share live data with customers and business partners, and connect with other organizations doing business as data consumers, data providers, and data service providers.N/A
Pricing
Amazon AthenaSnowflake
Editions & Modules
Price per Query
$5.00
per TB of Data Scanned
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon AthenaSnowflake
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon AthenaSnowflake
Considered Both Products
Amazon Athena
Chose Amazon Athena
- Super Cost-Effective - Well integrated with the AWS ecosystem - Easy setup with multiple formats.
Chose Amazon Athena
Amazon redshift and EMR require explicit configuration for underlying compute infrastructure. In Amazon Athena, Users don't have to set up any underlying infrastructure. It saves a lot of costs required for infrastructure. Users have to pay only for scanned data. Athena is good …
Chose Amazon Athena
Traefik Mesh, DigitalOcean Kubernetes and Amazon DynamoDB
Chose Amazon Athena
Amazon Athena, a product from Amazon, competes with offerings from Google and Microsoft. Overall, I think your database choice depends on some of the other applications you are running at your company. For example, if you are using Microsoft Power BI for reporting needs, you …
Snowflake
Chose Snowflake
Snowflake provides various features, such as integration with Python using Snowpark. The reporting feature that caters to your small reporting needs is Snowsight. The Snowflake data marketplace is where you can get multiple data for free and even some of the data which you can …
Chose Snowflake
These are comparable products that can make sense depending on the specific needs of your organization. All are certainly serviceable and have varying pros and cons. Snowflake seems to provide the greatest degree of flexibility and easy scalability as new data gets brought into …
Chose Snowflake
Snowflake stacks up well against many of the other players in the space. We used Teradata before and it seems to perform better.
Chose Snowflake
We needed scalability and a new way of organizing our data; Snowflake allowed us to have a clearer view of our data warehouses and schemas. Snowflake is also way superior in terms of speed and quick insights from the raw data you query, which is very valuable to us.
Chose Snowflake
Snowflake has an attractive pricing model with auto-suspend and auto-resume and pay per use. AWS Redshift requires higher administrative efforts to maintain and scale the platform whereas with Snowflake those admin tasks are not needed or automatically taken care of.
Chose Snowflake
Cloud -Native architecture, Separation of Storage and Compute provides flexibility, Scalable Compute, Cost and Data Security
Chose Snowflake
We had a MS SQL server with over 2 TB of ram & 51 processors that we were using, that could no longer handle our workload. Snowflake can handle 3 times that workload with ease and efficiency.
Chose Snowflake
Snowflake is much faster and easier to write queries and pull data. But the visualization part of Snowflake is not as good as them. Also, Snowflake only supports SQL queries but not python or other languages. So basically Snowflake is the expert in its field but not suitable …
Chose Snowflake
We particularly liked Snowflake's security model as well as its unique storage (whereby everything is essentially a pointer to immutable micro-partitions, which is the key behind its zero-copy cloning, its secure sharing, its time travel, etc.). and also how it separates …
Chose Snowflake
While Snowflake is more open to cloud eco system, SAP integrated well with SAP eco system products like SAP ECC or SAP S/4. So for people who have invested heavily in SAP eco system including SAP ECC or S/4, it makes sense to go with SAP DWC which is also evolving very rapidly. …
Chose Snowflake
In my opinion, the other tools have similar and some different features; however, when I ran proof of technologies between Synapse and Snowflake. Snowflake did things better or just had functionality that the other tools did not. One that stuck out at the time was scale up …
Chose Snowflake
Each of the other solutions were cloud vendor specific, Snowflake can ride on either Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. The fact that they are ANSI-sql compliant and have an effective means of offloading data makes them portable and easy to sell to teams …
Chose Snowflake
Azure and Snowflake compared very similarly, but Snowflake provided more options to integrate and connect with tools/companies that were not partners. It seemed to be a more flexible environment. The barrier for entry on Oracle and Google we just too complicated. In particular, …
Chose Snowflake
I have had the experience of using one more database management system at my previous workplace. What Snowflake provides is better user-friendly consoles, suggestions while writing a query, ease of access to connect to various BI platforms to analyze, [and a] more robust system …
Chose Snowflake
Snowflake has won the match because it is giving an excellent performance with its efficient features and reliable results. This is a totally secure program for our precious and important data.
Chose Snowflake
Our initial data warehousing solution was Treasure Data. We had issues with the costly pricing model, which would be exhorbitant if we want to hold our data in memory and query using Presto. As a result, some heavy lifting was done in Hive (managed by Treasure Data); …
Chose Snowflake
Snowflake beats these other products in every category it was rated against
Chose Snowflake
In my experience running the data management practice at InterWorks, we believe that cloud data warehouse products will eventually serve the majority of data warehousing use cases and power data analytics at most companies. Of this cohort, we believe that Snowflake is the best …
Chose Snowflake
Redshift compute and storage can be scaled up/down together (though they added some features recently, they don't quite add up). I haven't tried Avalanche or Firebolt but would love to in the near future, due to their pedigree or revolutionary billing methods.
Chose Snowflake
- Cost was the main aspect on the decision.
- Performance was in par or better compared to other tools in the market.
- Snowflake in my opinion stacks better than other tools I have used in the past.
Chose Snowflake
Accommodates future data types such as JSON and XML. Scalability is another advantage. Pay per use is beneficial for organizations like yours. Direct connectors with AWS help us to go with it. No limit on user creation and clone data not eating up extra disk space are a few …
Chose Snowflake
Since we switch from amazon redshift to Snowflake, we found Snowflake is much better than redshift in many ways, including the data integrate and data pull. However, comparing directly pull data from amazon s3, Snowflake is quite slow in terms of data pull speed and the more …
Chose Snowflake
Compared to Amazon Redshift, Snowflake is slightly easier and faster to achieve ROI but based on the user's perspective, the two tools have very little difference since both are leveraging SQL to pull data from AWS S3. Snowflake is also working with Microsoft Azure but it is …
Chose Snowflake
Our issue with Redshift was that it was very expensive. On top of that, queries were still slow and if we used more of Redshift's memory, then it would have cost even more. Snowflake is not cheap, but less costly for us. Plus, the performance was much better. Also, we got to …
Chose Snowflake
Snowflake is a lot faster, feels more lightweight, and is overall easier for our BI team to manage and grant warehouse accesses.
Features
Amazon AthenaSnowflake
Database-as-a-Service
Comparison of Database-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Athena
8.6
Ratings
1% below category average
Snowflake
-
Ratings
Automatic software patching8.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Database scalability9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated backups7.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Database security provisions9.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring and metrics8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Automatic host deployment9.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon AthenaSnowflake
Small Businesses
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.5 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon AthenaSnowflake
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.2
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.3
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.9
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon AthenaSnowflake
Likelihood to Recommend
Best suited for analyzing huge amounts of data by just querying on Amazon Athena. Amazon Athena is also best to integrate with Amazon Quickight for visualization and reporting of data. Easy to work with CSV, JSON, and columnar data formats like Parquet, and ORC. Less appropriate to work with AVRO data format and also stored procedures are not supported in Amazon Athena. The size of a single row is also limited to 32 MB.
Read full review
If you need a quick query, snowflake is the way to go. It's super simple and scalable; we were struggling before with Azure, and with Snowflake, everything runs smoothly, and we have more control over our schemas and warehouses. Snowflake, in my opinion, is the next step when you want to scale your business and manage data. If your company is still small, there may be cheaper options.
Read full review
Pros
  • Load Balance traffic analysis
  • Big data report generation
  • Micro services pattern query analysis
Read full review
  • Snowflake scales appropriately allowing you to manage expense for peak and off peak times for pulling and data retrieval and data centric processing jobs
  • Snowflake offers a marketplace solution that allows you to sell and subscribe to different data sources
  • Snowflake manages concurrency better in our trials than other premium competitors
  • Snowflake has little to no setup and ramp up time
  • Snowflake offers online training for various employee types
Read full review
Cons
  • Every dialect of SQL has some missing functions. I wish there was automated GROUP BY options here.
  • There are connection problems back to Power BI occasionally.
  • If you don't watch certain queries, it's possible that it takes a long time to run and charges you a lot of money.
Read full review
  • Add constraints for views and not just for tables
  • Do not force customers to renew for same or higher amount to avoid loosing unused credits. Already paid credits should not expire (at least within a reasonable time frame), independent of renewal deal size.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
SnowFlake is very cost effective and we also like the fact we can stop, start and spin up additional processing engines as we need to. We also like the fact that it's easy to connect our SQL IDEs to Snowflake and write our queries in the environment that we are used to
Read full review
Usability
Easy to use. Scalable. Gets the job of data warehousing setup done. Using the datalake on S3 has become super convenient.
Read full review
The interface is similar to other SQL query systems I've used and is fairly easy to use. My only complaint is the syntax issues. Another thing is that the error messages are not always the easiest thing to understand, especially when you incorporate temp tables. Some of that is to be expected with any new database.
Read full review
Support Rating
No answers on this topic
We have had terrific experiences with Snowflake support. They have drilled into queries and given us tremendous detail and helpful answers. In one case they even figured out how a particular product was interacting with Snowflake, via its queries, and gave us detail to go back to that product's vendor because the Snowflake support team identified a fault in its operation. We got it solved without lots of back-and-forth or finger-pointing because the Snowflake team gave such detailed information.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Amazon Athena, a product from Amazon, competes with offerings from Google and Microsoft. Overall, I think your database choice depends on some of the other applications you are running at your company. For example, if you are using Microsoft Power BI for reporting needs, you might want to consider going the Azure route.
Read full review
Snowflake provides various features, such as integration with Python using Snowpark. The reporting feature that caters to your small reporting needs is Snowsight. The Snowflake data marketplace is where you can get multiple data for free and even some of the data which you can buy according to your needs. And the integration options with various tools like Sigma are add-ons.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • It's easy to store and query data on S3. Multiple teams can query the same data to generate their reports. It removes the need for a full-fledged data warehouse for a startup. Saves costs.
  • Improved team efficiency on monitoring user activities by easy logging and reporting.
  • As the dataset gets heavier on S3, one needs to understand partitioning and that leads to the requirement of expertise.
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  • With separate compute and storage feature, the queries get executed quickly and it improves our overall productivity.
  • Earlier we were using a different product for analytical purposes, but with Snowflake's in-built analytical feature we are now able to save money.
  • Snowflake is cost efficient, features like auto suspend for compute resources helped to control the costs.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Snowflake Screenshots

Screenshot of Snowflake Installation