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Firebolt vs Snowflake comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 26, 2025

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
16th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Snowflake
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
101
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (1st), AI Synthetic Data (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Firebolt is 1.1%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 17.0%, down from 22.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Snowflake17.0%
Firebolt1.1%
Other81.9%
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.
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.

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 technical support on offer is excellent."
"Once you have finished your designs they can be easily imported to Snowflake and the information can be readily accessed without an IT expert."
"In addition to the database, Snowflake also provides ingestion capabilities."
"The cloning functionality has been the most valuable. I have been able to completely copy databases. The data sharing concept is also useful. As compared to, for example, SAP, Snowflake is a lot more open, and it allows a lot more connectivity for other providers than an SAP ecosystem."
"The most valuable features of Snowflake are that you have to pay per usage, and you don't have to worry about the maintenance of the data warehouse because it is on the cloud."
"Snowflake is scalable both in terms of the amount of data that you can run through it and the number of users that engage with it."
"The thing I find most valuable is that scalability, space storage, and computing power is separate. When you scale up, it is live from one second to the next — constantly available as you scale — so there is no downtime or interruption of services."
"It is a very well-distributed system. It has different data engines for different applications. Many applications can use different computational engines at the same time. In terms of data processing, the feeling was similar to working with a relational database but in a scalable way."
 

Cons

"Firebolt's engine takes a long time to start because it needs to make engine calls."
"Their strategy is just to leverage what you've got and put Snowflake in the middle. It does work well with other tools. You have to buy a separate reporting tool and a separate data loading tool, whereas, in some platforms, these tools are baked in. In the long-term, they'll need to add more direct partnerships to the ecosystem so that it's not like adding on tools around Snowflake to make it work. They can also consider including Snowflake native reporting tools versus partnering with other reporting tools. It would kind of change where they sit in the market."
"Snowflake can improve its machine learning and AI capabilities."
"The documentation could improve. They should provide architecture information."
"Its stability could be better."
"I would like to see more transparency in data processing, ATLs, and compute areas - which should give more comfort to the end users."
"The product is not very cheap, and a reduction in costs would be appreciated."
"Support needs improvement, as it can take several days before you get some initial support."
"Portability is a big hurdle right now for our clients. Porting all of your existing SQL ecosystem, such as stored procedures, to Snowflake is a major pain point. Currently, Snowflake stored procedures use JavaScript, but they should support SQL-based stored procedures. It would be a huge advantage if you can write your stored procedures using SQL. It seems that they are working on this feature, and they are yet to release it. I remember seeing some notes saying that they were going to do that in the future, but the sooner this feature comes out, it would be better for Snowflake because there are a lot of clients with whom I'm interacting, and their main hurdle is to take their existing Oracle or SQL Server stored procedures and move them into Snowflake. For this, you need to learn JavaScript and how it works, which is not easy and becomes a little tricky. If it supports SQL-based procedures, then you can just cut-paste the SQL code, run it, and easily fix small issues."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The pricing is economical as compared to traditional solutions like Oracle and competitive pricing."
"Snowflake licensing is more flexible and it is cheaper than other solutions. I can use it for only 10 days for MVP, or three years, and for flexible models. I can scale up, or down, and the pricing is based on the volume and duration. There are many licensing permutation combinations available."
"They give a different price for every single company. I don't know if I negotiated that well, but we got the enterprise tier for $3 a credit, and the other two were a dollar-ninety a credit. I suspect we don't have almost zero compute usage, but I know that our annual contract packages are below all of their minimums."
"On average, with the number of queries that we run, we pay approximately $200 USD per month."
"It is per credit. It has a use-it-as-you-go model. We bought a chunk of 20,000 credits, and they were lasting us for at least a year. We didn't have the scale of data like a much larger company to consume more credits. For us, it was very inexpensive. Their strategy is just to leverage what you've got and put Snowflake in the middle. It doesn't make it expensive because most of the organizations already have reporting tools. Now, if you were starting from scratch, it might be cheaper to go a different way."
"We're based on credits. So, we're paying four and a half dollars of credit. There are no additional costs. I would rate it a two out of five in terms of pricing."
"It is not cheap."
"Snowflake has consumption-based costs; users only pay for storage and computing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business28
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise57
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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?
It is complicated to understand how requests impact warehouse size. Unlike competitors such as Microsoft and Databricks ( /products/databricks-reviews ), Snowflake lacks transparency in estimating ...
What needs improvement with Snowflake?
Pricing is quite high for Snowflake Data Cloud, which is an area that could be improved. Snowflake Data Cloud is still beneficial to use, but only if you can afford it. It can be cost-effective if ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Snowflake Computing, Snowflake Data Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Accordant Media, Adobe, Kixeye Inc., Revana, SOASTA, White Ops
Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Microsoft, Google and others in Cloud Data Warehouse. Updated: October 2025.
872,922 professionals have used our research since 2012.