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Microsoft Analytics Platform System vs Snowflake comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 1, 2026

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

Microsoft Analytics Platfor...
Ranking in Data Warehouse
19th
Average Rating
6.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Snowflake
Ranking in Data Warehouse
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
104
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (1st), AI Synthetic Data (2nd), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (7th), AI Software Development (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Microsoft Analytics Platform System is 2.3%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 9.5%, down from 14.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Snowflake9.5%
Microsoft Analytics Platform System2.3%
Other88.2%
Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

MahmoudMohamed1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data Engineer at Tatweer Educational Technologies Company - TETCO
Offers smooth data integration between systems, but requires better real-time analytics capabilities
We leverage its capabilities for many applications. We can integrate with our databases, like Oracle, MySQL, or any other, using Microsoft Integration Services. This lets us continue using private databases without paying additional licensing fees. Additionally, the license includes Analytics services and Power BI, which work on-premises, unlike most other technologies that require cloud solutions.
SunilPatil1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Asset Builder at Genpact - Headstrong
Have prioritized security while managing multi-agent data migration and cloud adoption
We utilize Time Travel with Snowflake because this is a very useful feature. Everyone finds it crucial because in conventional data platforms, it's very difficult to handle these kinds of things. This feature is essential, though I don't have the use cases currently; it is just there for implementation. Regarding Snowflake's automated scaling and suspension features, this auto-scaling is very significant. We had a comparison with Databricks and Snowflake a few months back, and this auto-scaling takes an edge within Snowflake; that's what our observation reflects.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The result is a highly flexible, affordable, and scalable platform that makes large-scale Hub and Spoke EDW architectures a practical reality."
"The Cube Solution is quite different when compared to the rest of the competition and has unique functionality for advanced analytics."
"This solution will connect to any database, you can combine databases, and you can create a cube or tabular model."
"We leverage its capabilities for many applications. We can integrate with our databases, like Oracle, MySQL, or any other, using Microsoft Integration Services."
"This is a well-integrated solution and that integration empowers results."
"The most valuable part of the product is that it is a system, with different tools for different services for different kinds of scenarios, making it a very rich, integrated, technology-rich platform whose total integration with the rest of Microsoft products creates flexibility and compatibility and makes the tool a very useful one."
"By combining both Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) and unstructured Hadoop analytical capabilities in a single, easy-to-manage EDW appliance, Microsoft APS is well positioned to help organizations use information to enhance their competitive position."
"It is closely integrated with other products in the MS portfolio."
"Snowflake is an enormously useful platform. The Snowpipe feature is valuable because it allows us to load terabytes and petabytes of data into the data mart at a very low cost."
"It is quite easy to manage."
"The most valuable aspect of Snowflake is its scalability."
"It is a very good platform; it can handle structured and semi-structured data, be used for your data warehouse or data lake, load and deal with any data that you have, extract data from an on-premises database or a website and make it available in the cloud, and there is no need for the DBA to manage or do the day-to-day DBA tasks, which is one of the greatest things about it."
"Snowflake is the latest technology, it has great flexibility whenever we are loading data and performs ELT (extract, load, transform) techniques instead of ETL."
"Snowflake is faster than on-premise systems and allows for variable compute power based on need."
"The features I found most valuable with this solution are sharing options and built-in time zone conversion."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the ease of use, the rapidness, how quickly the solution can be implemented, and of course that it's been very easy to move from the on-premise world to the Cloud world because Snowflake is based on SQL also."
 

Cons

"In general, I am not really very satisfied with the tutorials that are out there."
"Releases of new products and functionality is never accompanied by associated documentation, training and resources that adequately explain the release."
"I think the biggest problem with the product is that it does a data ingest model, which is very expensive."
"The flexibility of this solution needs to be improved because you cannot make changes at every one of the different steps."
"Functionality needs to be more up-to-date with competing products."
"Machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities need to be more friendly for beginning users."
"However, centralized EDW tends to be extremely expensive and very inflexible."
"On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product overall as a five. This is probably because there is still a lot of room for improvement, features that other products have that are missing, and a lot of open-source technology nowadays that are very good and people can use instead."
"Currently there isn't end-to-end or B2B sharing of data."
"Pricing is quite high for Snowflake Data Cloud, which is an area that could be improved."
"The addition of more AI capabilities in Snowflake would help us more."
"There could be better ELT tools that are appropriate for Snowflake. We decided on Matillion and it seemed to be the only one. There need to be better choices, it would be great if Snowflake provided an ELT solution that people could use. Additionally, if there was a pure cloud-based ELT tool it would be useful."
"I can only access Snowflake from the web. It would be better if we could have an app that we can install locally on our laptops to connect to the server without needing to go to the web page. Apart from that, it's hard to point out any limitations in the tool."
"Availability is a problem."
"The pricing of the solution should be much easier to calculate or find by yourself."
"Every product has room for improvement, although in this case, it needs some broadening of the functionality."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are currently paying $200,000 a year for all the different parts of the suite during an ingest model Microsoft now charges us $700,000 a year."
"The initial price is lower than Oracle, but extensive use of SQL may lead to a higher total cost of ownership."
"Users have to pay extra for premium-level technical support."
"I rate Microsoft Analytics Platform System a seven out of ten for pricing."
"Snowflake has consumption-based costs; users only pay for storage and computing."
"The product's price range falls between average to a bit expensive range. I think the tool is worth the money if you use it properly."
"We use Snowflake pretty heavily. We pay a significant amount of money for the tool. I'd say we pay $300k to $400K every year."
"The pricing is economical as compared to traditional solutions like Oracle and competitive pricing."
"The solution is expensive."
"It is hard to say because we're usually engaged in the transition as opposed to the long term. Their storage costs are easily within pennies of what AWS S3 would normally cost. Most of the clients I've been working with are in the financial sector, and they're relatively small. I would put them in an SMB connection. The first thing we have to bring up for people is that they're going to build this. They shouldn't store their data in S3. They should pipeline directly into Snowflake and use it on their storage. So, the cost is a big issue because these are small to medium size companies, and that is the biggest thing we had to price point for them."
"The pricing for Snowflake is competitive."
"Comparing Snowflake to on-prem options such as Oracle or SAP, it seemed more cost-effective."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
21%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise58
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake?
For pricing, setup cost, and licensing, everything is managed smoothly. Regarding licensing, it is inexpensive. The setup cost is low, mainly due to AWS Marketplace; we only need to pay for serverl...
What needs improvement with Snowflake?
Snowflake is already quite improved, but they have recently introduced AI features. AI integration would be beneficial for direct data capturing from systems such as SAP and Salesforce to Snowflake...
What is your primary use case for Snowflake?
Snowflake is primarily used to handle the data warehousing part, for creating data modeling, and also keeping the raw data and creating reporting data so that it is further used for data analytics....
 

Also Known As

Microsoft APS, MS Analytics Platform System
Snowflake Computing, Snowflake Data Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Transport for London, E-Plus Mobilfunk GmbH & Co. KG, Prometeia, Tangerine, SSM Health Care, Service Corporation International
Accordant Media, Adobe, Kixeye Inc., Revana, SOASTA, White Ops
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Analytics Platform System vs. Snowflake and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
886,858 professionals have used our research since 2012.