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Firebolt vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Firebolt
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
15th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Azure Synapse Ana...
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
92
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Firebolt is 0.4%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is 6.5%, down from 10.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Iqbal Hossain Raju - PeerSpot reviewer
Can quickly query it to generate quick results
We have used Snowflake before. We support both. Firebolt has better performance, executing queries much quicker than Snowflake. However, Snowflake has more functionality. Depending on the client's needs, we can recommend the best option. Firebolt is a relatively new technology. Snowflake has many functionalities. Firebolt does not support unloading data to S3. There is no built-in way to do this in Firebolt. Alternatively, the data can be retrieved using API calls and loaded to S3 manually. Data can be unloaded to S3 directly using Snowflake. Firebolt significantly improves our performance over Snowflake because it takes less time to execute queries. This is especially important for our company because we use some KPIs that require fast loading times.
Renee Hoon - PeerSpot reviewer
Scalable performance tuning and optimization for finance and supply chain jobs
We run our finance and supply chain jobs using SQL BW, and we visualize our data loads on Power BI. We are using SQL Data Warehouse for data warehousing In terms of cost savings, we don't need specialization in skills as advanced as Teradata. We used to pay extensive licensing fees for Teradata,…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Firebolt is fast for analytical purposes. For example, we have analytical data in our data warehouse, and Firebolt can quickly query it to generate quick results."
"The integrated workspace in Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics where everything comes together, such as Power BI and Data Factory, is very good. Additionally, the ability to do dedicated SQL pooling is a benefit."
"The MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) architecture helps to make things a lot faster."
"The initial setup was really easy and straightforward."
"I have not used the technical support from Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, but I worked with the developers at Microsoft who were top-notch."
"Overall deployment and integration is pretty fast."
"The most important feature for me is the integration with PolyBase."
"The fact that we can ingest from different types of sources, whether they are internal systems or external sources."
"The solution can scale."
 

Cons

"Firebolt's engine takes a long time to start because it needs to make engine calls."
"Synapse makes it easy to integrate and onboard data from other Microsoft and Azure sources. The interface is familiar because we were using Azure Data Factory before Synapse. It made the transition even easier because the Synapse interface is exactly the same."
"I would like to see better integration with Active Directory, because we have had problems, and we still do."
"Adding more transformations and plugins to the solution is very important."
"The performance needs to improve in future releases."
"This is a young product in transition to the cloud and it needs more work before it is both settled as a product and competitive in the market."
"Synapse Analytics' performance slows down if you don't get your distribution right because it gets queued and goes into a single node."
"Integration with other vendors has limitations and could be improved."
"I would like to see them provide the ingestion of images."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The pricing is quite reasonable in comparison to other products."
"The cost of the licensing depends on the size of the warehouse, where the cost of storage is approximately $130 USD per terabyte."
"The price of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics can vary. Other solutions are typically fixed prices and a fixed cost regardless of usage, but this solution is based on usage or consumption."
"Price varies by use-case. You pay for the database itself in addition to any consumed data within Serverless plus other fees if you use the Data Factory that is inside."
"Because it's cloud the cost is a different convention and the licensing costs are not the same."
"It just depends on how big your instance is. It could be anywhere from 1,000 to 50,000 per year depending on how big your instance is. You pay based on how big you make your database. Essentially, they charge you per hour of usage."
"The solution is very expensive because it often requires the purchase of additional storage."
"It goes by the usage, and there are some limits. Synapse goes by particular pricing, and it is expensive. Both Azure Synapse Analytics and Snowflake are pretty expensive. They don't have standard pricing. They deal with each customer differently."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Educational Organization
52%
Computer Software Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Firebolt?
Firebolt is fast for analytical purposes. For example, we have analytical data in our data warehouse, and Firebolt can quickly query it to generate quick results.
What needs improvement with Firebolt?
Firebolt's engine takes a long time to start because it needs to make engine calls. Currently, the data size of Firebolt is small. It can be increased.
What advice do you have for others considering Firebolt?
One way to retrieve data from firewalls is to add query parameters to the connection string. For example, you can use the REST API to retrieve the security query. Some firewalls have been deployed ...
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 Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?
The product is easy to use, and anybody can easily migrate to advanced DB.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?
We use an enterprise-level subscription for Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics. I would rate our satisfaction with the price around five, as I have not focused much on cost aspects presently.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Azure Synapse Analytics, Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Microsoft Azure SQL DW, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, MS Azure Synapse Analytics
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Toshiba, Carnival, LG Electronics, Jet.com, Adobe, 
Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Microsoft, Google and others in Cloud Data Warehouse. Updated: March 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.