Amazon Redshift vs. Snowflake

Amazon Redshift

213 Reviews and Ratings

Snowflake

373 Reviews and Ratings

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Amazon Redshift	Score9 out of 10	N/A	Amazon Redshift is a hosted data warehouse solution, from Amazon Web Services.	$0.24 per GB per month
Snowflake	Score8.9 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 Redshift

Snowflake

Redshift Managed Storage: $0.24
per GB per month
Current Generation: $0.25 - $13.04
per hour
Previous Generation: $0.25 - $4.08
per hour
Redshift Spectrum: $5.00
per terabyte of data scanned

No answers on this topic

Pricing Offerings
Amazon Redshift	Snowflake
Free Trial
No	Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

No setup fee

No setup fee

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Community Pulse
Key User Insights
	Amazon Redshift	Snowflake
Considered Both Products	Amazon AWS Verified User Chose Amazon Redshift Amazon Redshifts has fewer features but at the same time, you also have some gains once it is running on AWS Cloud and it is really easy to set up. Besides that, in our case, it is a bit cheaper and we don't really need the extra features that you can find on Snowflake. Another … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Amazon Redshift Amazon Redshift, BigQuery, and Snowflake are all fully managed data warehouse services that are designed to handle large volumes of structured data and support business intelligence and analytics efforts. However, Amazon Redshift has the upper hand with its cost-effective … Incentivized Helpful? Dileep Kumar Principal Data Scientist in Research & Development at RudderStack (Computer Software, 51-200 employees) Chose Amazon Redshift Biggest advantage of Amazon Redshift is it's part of the aws ecosystem. When tuned well it is also very cheap compared to something like Snowflake. And compared to spark or databricks, Amazon Redshift is a solid warehouse that's well suited for tabular data. We use it for user … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Amazon Redshift Redshift leapfrogged Hive back when Hive was trying to figure out how to implement indexes, providing a more stable, standardized (postgres), easy to use (any postgres client), easier to administer, and scalable solution for querying server logs and raw usage data. Now, Snowflak… Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Amazon Redshift We like Snowflake for its separation of computing and storage and also the separation of data warehouse different users. We replaced Redshift with Snowflake. However, Snowflake is great for its pay for performance kind of methodology. Incentivized Helpful? Arthur Zubarev Senior Business Intelligence Consultant in Information Technology at Sermo (Research, 201-500 employees) Chose Amazon Redshift Azure SQL Database was discarded because of a less attractive licensing, costs, plus its integrates poorly with many of the Azure offerings as say Azure Data Factory - it is not a true ETL yet. Also, the rest of the tools used were of Open Source type and it did not look like a … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Amazon Redshift We are currently on Redshift, because it was out before Snowflake. However, Snowflake looks promising. It's the new shiny toy that gives options that Redshift does not provide for. The big thing is that storage and compute can be scaled separately, whereas you cannot do that in … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Amazon Redshift Most of our stack is on AWS, so while Snowflake and BigQuery was a viable option from a performance perspective, it was easier to integrate with RedShift. We considered hosting SQL Server on AWS or using Amazon RDS (Postgres or MySQL), however, the self-service aspect of … Incentivized Helpful? Jacob Biguvu Database Engineer/DBA (Cloud and On-Premises) in Information Technology at Capital One (Financial Services, 10,001+ employees) Chose Amazon Redshift Snowflake supports semi-structured data types and provided solutions to manage/process the semi-structured data. It supported sharing data between the different accounts and makes it easy in the scale and scale down process. Snowflake doesn't limit users on the database. Incentivized Helpful? Narayan Motamarri Staff Data Engineer in Engineering at Hearst Autos (Marketing & Advertising, 501-1000 employees) Chose Amazon Redshift We evaluated [Amazon] Redshift vs BigQuery vs Amazon EMR, back in 2014. Back then BigQuery cost was slightly higher than that of [Amazon] Redshift price structure. Amazon EMR, needs lots more management (Admin tasks) and EMR is designed to be ephemeral and not designed to be a … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Amazon Redshift Amazon Redshift is one of the fastest service offerings available in the market now. Plus you get an advantage of using a cutting edge compute service offering from AWS. Other technologies are fast but not as good as Amazon Redshift, I would say. Our business is interested in … Incentivized Helpful?	Snowflake Computing Verified User 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Jacob Biguvu Database Engineer/DBA (Cloud and On-Premises) in Information Technology at Capital One (Financial Services, 10,001+ employees) Chose Snowflake Redshift and Hive both have unique architecture. Both have their own cons. My guess is that Snowflake is made up by using the concepts of the two architecture concepts such as Amazon Redshift and Haddop, addressed the issues or gaps found in Redshift and Hadoop. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Snowflake Snowflake is much faster and more intuitive than Amazon Redshift. We currently use AWS for other aspects of our data ingestion process but found that Snowflake is extremely compatible and the user interface is unmatched. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User 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. Incentivized Helpful? David Williams Head of Engineering in Information Technology at Damstra Technology (Information Technology & Services, 51-200 employees) 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 … Incentivized Helpful? dave withers Sr Director in Engineering at Spireon (Information Services, 501-1000 employees) 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Snowflake Snowflake beats these other products in every category it was rated against Incentivized Helpful? Brian Bickell Data Practice Director in Engineering at InterWorks (Information Services, 201-500 employees) 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User 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. Incentivized Helpful? Duncan Hernandez Product Owner, Business Intelligence in Product Management at Answer Financial Inc. (Insurance, 201-500 employees) 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Jake Schlingman Product Manager in Product Management at AppFolio, Inc. (Computer Software, 1001-5000 employees) Chose Snowflake For us our previous solution in this space was Redshift which we found to be much less reliable and was hardware capped. There may very well be cloud options that our company just wasn't utilizing. For us, queries constantly ran out of memory and failed. Even when they didn't … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Snowflake Delivered as an easy-to-use data warehouse service, Snowflake enables you to process and analyze all your diverse data, build multiple databases, query with a common robust ANSI SQL environment, and execute ACID transnational capabilities. No need to create indexes and optimize … Incentivized Helpful? Andrew Goss Data Engineer in Engineering at Interfolio (Internet, 51-200 employees) Chose Snowflake The average percentage of time that a data warehouse is actually doing something is around 20%. Given this, the price by query estimate becomes an important pricing consideration. For this, Snowflake crucially decouples of storage and compute. With Snowflake you pay for 1) … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Snowflake More flexible and faster compared to Redshift, more functionality compared to BigQuery e.g. - per minute billing, instant spin up of warehouse. Overall, the cost and time savings swayed us in favor of Snowflake. Incentivized Helpful? Carlos Fares, CBIP Director of Business Intelligence in Engineering at CareCloud (Health, Wellness and Fitness, 201-500 employees) Chose Snowflake Instant provisioning of computing resources and data sharing is something we have not seen with any other vendor. Being HIPAA compliant at the time of evaluation was a must for us. Other vendors were late on this. Onboarding on support during implementation was also excellent. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Chose Snowflake I evaluated Redshift and Panoply when making the choice for Snowflake. Panoply is built on Redshift, so the two are equal in drawbacks: Redshift requires a cluster to be running 24/7 for your data to live there. We produce terabytes of data every day, so this was not an option … Incentivized Helpful? Rajesh Ganesan Datawarehouse Engineering Manager in Engineering at PLAYSTUDIOS (Computer Games, 51-200 employees) Chose Snowflake Low-cost, Scalable cloud storage Elastic compute on demand Optimized for semi-structured and structured data Incentivized Helpful?
	Would buy again
	No answers on this topic	No answers on this topic
	Delivers good value for the price
	No answers on this topic	No answers on this topic
	Happy with the feature set
	No answers on this topic	No answers on this topic
	Lived up to sales and marketing promises
	No answers on this topic	No answers on this topic
	Implementation went as expected
No answers on this topic	No answers on this topic

TrustRadius Insights
	Amazon Redshift	Snowflake
Highlights	Research Team Insight Published April 24, 2020 Amazon Redshift and Snowflake are both data warehouse software designed to store data for querying, analysis, and extraction. Mid-sized businesses are the most frequent users of both data warehouse solutions. Large enterprises are more likely to use Snowball, likely due to its ability to work with many types of data. Smaller businesses tend to use Amazon Redshift due to its usability and affordable pricing. Features Amazon Redshift and Snowflake both offer essential data warehouse features, including storage and querying data, but they also have some standout features that set them apart. Amazon Redshift provides end-to-end encryption and highly customizable security features at all price points. Additionally, Amazon Redshift offers many integrations with other technologies, particularly with technologies on the AWS platform. Lastly, Amazon Redshift requires less technical expertise to use as it has a usable interface and secure backup features. Snowflake provides native support for JSON documents, allowing for built-in functions and querying for JSON data. Additionally, Snowflake includes robust automation tools for data vacuuming and compression, which can save time for users. Lastly, Snowflake can handle complex data types like arrays and objects, making it a great choice for businesses with a lot of complex data. Limitations Though Amazon Redshift and Snowflake both offer robust data warehouse features, they also have some limitations that are important to consider. Amazon Redshift has limited JSON support. By default, it splits all JSON data into strings, which can make it difficult to query and analyze. Database management for Amazon Redshift mostly has to be handled manually, as opposed to Snowflakes automation features. Lack of automation may make Amazon Redshift a poor choice for companies with small technical teams that can benefit from automation. Lastly, Amazon Redshift provides limited support for complex data types like arrays and objects. Snowflake offers advanced security features, but they are not available at every price point. Users with small data storage needs, but important security needs may struggle to find the right Snowflake package for them. Snowflake also lacks the seamless AWS technology integrations that Amazon Redshift provides. Businesses with few technical staff members may also struggle with Snowflake’s user interface and backup features. Pricing Amazon Redshift offers a two-month trial where users can see if they like the technology before purchasing. Beyond the trial, Amazon Redshift is priced depending on storage needs and feature requirements. Pricing can start as low as $0.25 per hour, and reach as high as $13.04 per hour. Snowflake offers a one-month free trial for users to try the software. Pricing for Snowflake is dependent on storage needs, platform, and geographic region and starts as low as $2.00 per hour. Snowflake includes scaling pricing based on workload, so a business with a rapidly changing workload may have some savings with Snowflake.

User Ratings
	Amazon Redshift	Snowflake
Likelihood to Recommend	9.0 (38 ratings)	9.2 (43 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	- (0 ratings)	10.0 (2 ratings)
Usability	9.0 (10 ratings)	9.3 (19 ratings)
Support Rating	9.0 (7 ratings)	9.9 (8 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model	10.0 (1 ratings)	8.0 (1 ratings)