We compared Snowflake and AWS Lake Formation based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
In summary, Snowflake is praised for its high performance, scalability, user-friendly interface, and efficient customer support. Users find Snowflake's pricing reasonable and appreciate its positive ROI. On the other hand, AWS Lake Formation is lauded for its flexible pricing, excellent data management capabilities, comprehensive security measures, and seamless integration with other AWS services. Users value its efficient setup process and commendable customer service. Areas for improvement in AWS Lake Formation include usability, access permissions management, data processing speed, documentation, data integration options, and customization features.
Features: Snowflake's valuable features include high performance, scalability, and ease of use. Users appreciate its ability to handle large data volumes quickly. In contrast, AWS Lake Formation offers excellent data management capabilities, comprehensive security measures, and seamless integration with other AWS services. Users enjoy the simple setup process and robust access control mechanisms, ensuring reliable data management and efficient workflows.
Pricing and ROI: The setup cost for Snowflake is seen as reasonable and competitive, with a straightforward and uncomplicated process. Users appreciate the flexible licensing terms and options. On the other hand, AWS Lake Formation offers a flexible and cost-effective pricing model, with a straightforward and hassle-free setup cost. Users value the licensing options provided., The user reviews for Snowflake indicate a positive and beneficial ROI. Similarly, AWS Lake Formation also provides a significant ROI with positive results reported by users.
Room for Improvement: Snowflake has room for improvement in specific areas to enhance user experience and functionality. AWS Lake Formation, on the other hand, needs enhancements in usability, access permissions management, data processing speed, troubleshooting resources, data integration options, and feature customization.
Deployment and customer support: The reviews highlight that when evaluating the duration required for a new tech solution, Snowflake users emphasize distinguishing between deployment and setup phases, while AWS Lake Formation users have varying timeframes for deployment, setup, and implementation, suggesting that these phases should be considered separately., Snowflake's customer service has received positive feedback for promptness and effectiveness. Users appreciate the expertise and helpful guidance provided by the support team. AWS Lake Formation's customer service is also commendable, with users valuing their responsiveness, expertise, and commitment to customer success.
The summary above is based on 43 interviews we conducted recently with Snowflake and AWS Lake Formation users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The solution is quite good at handling analytics. It's done a good job at helping us centralize them."
"The solution has many features that are applicable to events such as audits."
"It is seamlessly integrated within the AWS ecosystem, making it straightforward to manage access patterns for AWS-native services."
"We use AWS Lake Formation typically for the data warehouse."
"The most important advantage in using AWS Lake Formation is its ability to connect the data lake to the other technologies in AWS. This is what I advise my clients."
"The speed of data loading and being able to quickly create the environment are most valuable."
"They separate compute and storage. You can scale storage independently of the computer, or you can scale computing independently of storage. If you need to buy more computer parts you can add new virtual warehouses in Snowflake. Similarly, if you need more storage, you take more storage. It's most scalable in the database essentially; typically you don't have this scalability independence on-premises."
"The most valuable features of Snowflake are its performance and power."
"The most valuable feature is the snapshot database. In one second, you can just take a snapshot of the database for test purposes."
"The most valuable feature of Snowflake is its performance. We can access the data quickly. Additionally, it handles structured and non-structured data."
"The product's most important feature is unloading data to S3."
"It is very fast and the performance is great."
"Scaling is a big plus point of Snowflake."
"AWS Lake Formation's pricing could be cheaper."
"For the end-users, it's not as user-friendly as it could be."
"It falls short when it comes to more granular access control, such as cell-level or row-level entitlements which is a significant drawback for organizations that require precise control over who can access specific rows of data."
"The solution could make improvements around orchestration and doing some automation stuff on AWS front automation. It would be useful if we could use automation to build images and use hardened images which are CIS compliant."
"In our experience what could be improved are not the support, performance or monitoring, but at a managerial level, the very expensive professional services of AWS. This could be an area of improvement for them. It's too expensive to acquire their support."
"Snowflake has to improve their spatial parts since it doesn't have much in terms of geo-spatial queries."
"It doesn't enforce typical relational database constraints. Quite expensive."
"We would like to have an on-premises deployment option that has the same features, including scalability."
"Its pricing or affordability is one of the big challenges. Pricing was the only thing that we didn't like about Snowflake. In terms of technical features, it is a complete solution."
"I don't know about GCP, if they have connected for GCP. If they don't, they should allow for it."
"Its stability could be better."
"Its transaction application needs improvement."
"Snowflake can improve its machine learning and AI capabilities."
AWS Lake Formation is ranked 12th in Cloud Data Warehouse with 5 reviews while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Cloud Data Warehouse with 95 reviews. AWS Lake Formation is rated 7.6, while Snowflake is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of AWS Lake Formation writes "Strategically aligning data management in a multi-cloud environment with significant reporting challenges". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Snowflake writes "Good usability, good data sharing and elastic compute features, and requires less DBA involvement". AWS Lake Formation is most compared with Azure Data Factory, Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, BigQuery and Amazon EMR, whereas Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse. See our AWS Lake Formation vs. Snowflake report.
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