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Firebolt vs Snowflake comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 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
15th
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 September 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Firebolt is 0.7%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 17.7%, down from 23.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Snowflake17.7%
Firebolt0.7%
Other81.6%
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."
"In addition to the database, Snowflake also provides ingestion capabilities."
"The feature that is really striking is the ability to translate the SQL workloads into the NoSQL version that can be used by Snowflake."
"The technical support is pretty good, particularly if you are a more technical user."
"The solution's customer service is good."
"The most valuable features are sharing data, Time Travel, Zero Copy Cloning, performance, and speed."
"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 snapshot feature is good, the rollback feature is good and the interface is user-friendly."
"Everything is automatic, and I don't have to do any maintenance."
 

Cons

"Firebolt's engine takes a long time to start because it needs to make engine calls."
"The documentation could improve. They should provide architecture information."
"They should improve the reporting tools."
"Getting data out of the tool to third-party applications is difficult."
"Improvement is needed in integrating external tools, such as data catalogs, which can be complicated due to differing formats and usage across departments."
"I don't think that the AI tools in Snowflake are good."
"There are always a few operation updates here and there that can be made."
"The cost efficiency and monitoring of this solution could be improved. It's easy to spend a lot on Snowflake and it does offer monitoring tools but they're pretty basic."
"Snowflake has to build more capabilities because they have only built very few adapters, but they're growing and they're building. They should provide provisions to collect ETL pipeline capabilities, reduce developer work, and make more rapid application development, rather than some customizations. There are very few options, but they are building. I hope they will build ETL rapid application development provisions with more variety."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"We used Snowflake to see if it is cheaper than using BigQuery. It was just to maintain the cost or the KPI regarding the cost of connectivity by users. Snowflake wasn't cheaper than BigQuery, and its affordability was the main issue."
"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."
"It's expensive."
"Snowflake’s pricing is transparent. It is one of the cheapest cloud database warehouse providers. The tool follows a credit cost model. Everything on Snowflake is charged on the basis of credits. The credits depend on the cloud region and the public cloud provider that we use. Hence, the cost per credit will be different for AWS in Frankfurt and AWS in India. I think North Virginia is the cheapest region in terms of cost per credit. You will be consuming around 16 credits for large data warehouses."
"The pricing for Snowflake is competitive."
"Comparing Snowflake to on-prem options such as Oracle or SAP, it seemed more cost-effective."
"The solution is expensive but worth the cost because the quality is there."
"I believe that pricing is reasonable for this solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
13%
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 Enterprise56
 

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 ...
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

No data available
 

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: August 2025.
867,676 professionals have used our research since 2012.