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Redshift vs Snowflake comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 22, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.2
Amazon Redshift offers mixed returns; beneficial for high data volumes, but concerns arise over rising costs and limited data effectiveness.
Sentiment score
6.8
Snowflake offers improved data management and security, with varied ROI perceptions, yet users recognize added value and efficiency.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.8
Amazon Redshift's support is responsive but costly, with quick responses for routine issues, though advanced support can be inconsistent.
Sentiment score
7.3
Snowflake's customer service is praised for expertise and responsiveness, though some users experience delays due to time zone differences.
It's costly when you enable support.
I received great support in migrating data to Snowflake, with quick responses and innovative solutions.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Amazon Redshift is generally praised for scalability, though experience varies with larger clusters and specific configurations.
Sentiment score
7.8
Snowflake offers seamless and cost-effective scalability with independent compute and storage, enabling efficient resource management for large data volumes.
The scalability part needs improvement as the sizing requires trial and error.
Snowflake is very scalable and has a dedicated team constantly improving the product.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
Amazon Redshift is praised for stability, high availability, and performance, despite occasional challenges with complex queries and environment changes.
Sentiment score
8.2
Snowflake impresses users with remarkable stability, reliability, and performance, ensuring efficient data management with minimal disruptions and maintenance.
Amazon Redshift is a stable product, and I would rate it nine or ten out of ten for stability.
Snowflake is very stable, especially when used with AWS.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon Redshift faces challenges in performance, integration, cost, and compatibility, needing improvements in speed, security, and serverless options.
Snowflake users desire improvements in spatial components, analytics, pricing, support, data protection, integration, and advanced AI features.
They should bring the entire ETL data management process into Amazon Redshift.
Cost reduction is one area I would like Snowflake to improve.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon Redshift offers competitive pricing for large enterprises, but smaller organizations might find it more costly than alternatives.
Snowflake's pricing is pay-as-you-go with competitive storage, higher compute costs, and discounts for bulk purchases, requiring usage optimization.
The cost of technical support is high.
It's a pretty good price and reasonable for the product quality.
The pricing of Amazon Redshift is expensive.
Snowflake's pricing is on the higher side.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon Redshift provides scalable, efficient data processing with AWS integration, offering robust analytics, security, and user-friendly features.
Snowflake is praised for its scalability, flexibility, performance, cost-effectiveness, and seamless integration with popular cloud platforms.
Amazon Redshift's performance optimization and scalability are quite helpful, providing functionalities such as scaling up and down.
Scalability is also a strong point; I can scale it however I want without any limitations.
Security configurations are implemented across all processes, such as AWS Config and GuardDuty.
One key feature is the separation of compute and storage, which eliminates storage limitations.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Redshift
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
70
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Snowflake
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
99
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (1st), AI Synthetic Data (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon Redshift is 6.9%, down from 9.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 21.5%, down from 22.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Q&A Highlights

Padmanesh NC - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 26, 2017
 

Featured Reviews

Ved Prakash Yadav - PeerSpot reviewer
Works as a data warehouse system and collects data from different sources
In terms of improvement, I believe Amazon Redshift could work on reducing its costs, as they tend to increase significantly. Additionally, there are occasional issues with nodes going down, which can be problematic. We often encounter issues like someone dropping a column or changing the order of columns, which can cause synchronization problems when pushing data through our pipeline. It's a minor issue, but it can be annoying.
Snehasish Das - PeerSpot reviewer
Transformation in data querying speed with good migration capabilities
Snowflake is a data lake on the cloud where all processing happens in memory, resulting in very fast query responses. One key feature is the separation of compute and storage, which eliminates storage limitations. It also has tools for migrating data from legacy databases like Oracle. Its stability and efficiency enhance performance greatly. Tools in the AI/ML marketplace are readily available without needing development.
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Answers from the Community

Padmanesh NC - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 26, 2017
Dec 26, 2017
Interesting. Snowflake has a fundamentally different architecture in that compute and storage are completely separated allowing you to scale each dynamically and independently This makes me to get into Snowflake, Almost I am using Snowflake last 8 months. Its awesome.
2 out of 4 answers
it_user492777 - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 20, 2017
Wow, that is a loaded question and hard to answer and not sound like a sales pitch (I will try). For one, Snowflake has a fundamentally different architecture in that compute and storage are completely separated allowing you to scale each dynamically and independently. That is as you load data the space just expands - no need to add more clusters, extents, files etc. Likewise if you need more compute power, you can resize the compute clusters on the fly using a drop down in the UI to add more nodes while the process is running. No need to put it in read only mode, export the data, then import to a bigger cluster. This is only possible because of the separation of compute and storage. Most other architectures (based on legacy systems) have the compute and storage more tightly coupled. Along with this architecture you can create multiple independent compute clusters of differing sizes and assign each to different work groups or workloads (with access to the same single data store - no data replication required). With this each group gets its own dedicated compute resource such that what one does will not impact performance of the others. This is all new code - not a refactoring of any other RDBMS code base so the founders were able to create features that take advantage of the elasticity of the cloud. In addition Snwoflake can ingest JSON data natively into relational table using a new data type designed to hold semi-structured data (which allows true schema on read using SQL). Very stable - over 400 customers to date. Some with over 1 PB of data and hundreds of users. It also has built in security -256 bit AES encryption of all data in motion and at rest by default with no impact on query performance. Pricing (I am not in sales!) - the pricing is public and on the website: https://www.snowflake.net/product/pricing/ You can check my post about my favorite features for more details: https://www.snowflake.net/top-10-cool-things-i-like-about-snowflake/ As for comparisons to RedShift you would have to talk with some real customers who have done the POCs with both of us. You might also look at some of the customer videos and case studies, but none of them really call out where we replaced RedShift as that tends to be kept confidential. https://www.snowflake.net/our-customers/
MM
Dec 25, 2017
Although I verified it only in a specific case, I performed performance verification with Redshift, BigQuery, Snowflake. Redshift has data redistribution occurred when searching under various conditions and performance was not good, but Snowflake holds data in small units called micro partitions, and also manages data for each column Therefore, operation like data redistribution was minimal and high performance was obtained. Snowflake can also start multiple clusters in the same database, but has an architecture in which conflicts do not occur even when accessing the same data between clusters. I recommend you to try it.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
66%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Computer Software Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
3%
Educational Organization
40%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Amazon Redshift compare with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?
Amazon Redshift is very fast, has a very good response time, and is very user-friendly. The initial setup is very straightforward. This solution can merge and integrate well with many different dat...
What do you like most about Amazon Redshift?
The tool's most valuable feature is its parallel processing capability. It can handle massive amounts of data, even when pushing hundreds of terabytes, and its scaling capabilities are good.
What do you like most about Snowflake?
The best thing about Snowflake is its flexibility in changing warehouse sizes or computational power.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake?
Snowflake's pricing is on the higher side, rated as eight out of ten. If there were ways to reduce costs, it would be a positive improvement.
What needs improvement with Snowflake?
Cost reduction is one area I would like Snowflake to improve. The product is not very cheap, and a reduction in costs would be appreciated.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Snowflake Computing
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Liberty Mutual Insurance, 4Cite Marketing, BrandVerity, DNA Plc, Sirocco Systems, Gainsight, Blue 449
Accordant Media, Adobe, Kixeye Inc., Revana, SOASTA, White Ops
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Redshift vs. Snowflake and other solutions. Updated: February 2025.
842,672 professionals have used our research since 2012.