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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
20th
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
105
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (1st), AI Synthetic Data (1st), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (7th), AI Software Development (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Microsoft Analytics Platform System is 2.2%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 9.3%, down from 13.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Snowflake9.3%
Microsoft Analytics Platform System2.2%
Other88.5%
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

"We help customers in many ways from customized analysis for detection of anomalies in tax, operations, customer relationship, and marketing campaigns, and we also use mining and ML to help them discover trends, which provides useful information based on their business."
"I like that it's integrated with other Azure products."
"Microsoft Analytics Platform System's most valuable feature is its ecosystems and seamless integration with other Microsoft reporting platforms and databases."
"The Cube Solution is quite different when compared to the rest of the competition and has unique functionality for advanced analytics."
"I like that it's integrated with other Azure products."
"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."
"This solution will connect to any database, you can combine databases, and you can create a cube or tabular model."
"My company wanted to have all our data in one single place and this what we use Snowflake for."
"We switched to Snowflake for the availability, security, and loading times."
"My company wanted to have all our data in one single place and this what we use Snowflake for. Snowflake also allows us to build connectors to different data sources."
"Snowflake on cloud is the best right now."
"The distributed architecture of Snowflake has the capacity to process huge datasets faster and allows us to scale up and down according to our needs."
"As long as you don't need to worry about storage or cost, this solution would be one of the best ones on the market for scalability purposes."
"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."
"The most valuable features are sharing data, Time Travel, Zero Copy Cloning, performance, and speed."
 

Cons

"We need better real-time analytics capabilities. It's a bit challenging for us."
"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."
"Hybrid environments are complex to manage."
"Microsoft Analytics Platform System could have better support."
"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."
"Functionality needs to be more up-to-date with competing products."
"​Hybrid environments are complex to manage."
"The aspect of it that was more complicated was stored procedures. It does not support SQL language-based stored procedures."
"In a future release we would like to have a link which would allow us to connect to an external database and create certain views in your own database. This is because it is becoming hard for us to compare the data between multiple sources."
"The pricing of the solution should be much easier to calculate or find by yourself."
"The cost is a bit high."
"The design of the product is easily misunderstood."
"There are three things that came to my notice. I am not very sure whether they have already done it. The first one is very specific to the virtual data warehouse. Snowflake might want to offer industry-specific models for the data warehouse. Snowflake is a very strong product with credit. For a typical retail industry, such as the pharma industry, if it can get into the functional space as well, it will be a big shot in their arm. The second thing is related to the migration from other data warehouses to Snowflake. They can make the migration a little bit more seamless and easy. It should be compatible, well-structured, and well-governed. Many enterprises have huge impetus and urgency to move to Snowflake from their existing data warehouse, so, naturally, this is an area that is critical. The third thing is related to the capability of dealing with relational and dimensional structures. It is not that friendly with relational structures. Snowflake is more friendly with the dimensional structure or the data masks, which is characteristic of a Kimball model. It is very difficult to be savvy and friendly with both structures because these structures are different and address different kinds of needs. One is manipulation-heavy, and the other one is read-heavy or analysis-heavy. One is for heavy or frequent changes and amendments, and the other one is for frequent reads. One is flat, and the other one is distributed. There are fundamental differences between these two structures. If I were to consider Snowflake as a silver bullet, it should be equally savvy on both ends, which I don't think is the case. Maybe the product has grown and scaled up from where it was."
"The solution should offer an on-premises version also."
"The solution needs more connectors."
 

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."
"Users have to pay extra for premium-level technical support."
"The initial price is lower than Oracle, but extensive use of SQL may lead to a higher total cost of ownership."
"I rate Microsoft Analytics Platform System a seven out of ten for pricing."
"Snowflake goes by credits. For a financial institution where you have 5,000 employees, monthly costs may run up to maybe $5,000 to $6,000. This is actually based on the usage. It is mostly the compute cost. Your computing cost is the variable that is actually based on your usage. It is pay-per-use. In a pay-per-use case, you won't be spending more than $6,000 to $7,000 a month. It is not more than that for a small or medium enterprise, and it may come down to $100K per year. Storage is very standard, which is $23 a terabyte. It is not much for any enterprise. If you have even 20 terabytes, you are not spending more than $400 per month, which may turn out to be $2,000 to $3,000 per annum."
"The pricing part is based on the computing and storage. The costs are different and then there are services costs as well."
"I believe that pricing is reasonable for this solution."
"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."
"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 whole licensing system is based on credit points. You can also make a license agreement with the company so that you buy credit points and then you use them. What you do not use in one year can be carried over to the next year."
"There is a separation of storage and compute, so you only pay for what you use."
"It's expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
6%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

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 Enterprise59
 

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.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.