We compared Snowflake and Firebolt based on our user's reviews across various parameters. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Both Snowflake and Firebolt receive high marks for performance, user-friendliness, and cost-effectiveness, attracting users with their data management solutions. Snowflake is praised for its powerful performance, scalability, and speedy query execution, coupled with a positive customer service experience and a straightforward licensing model. The platform’s ability to handle large workloads and manage numerous concurrent users efficiently stands out, as does its positive return on investment. Firebolt is recognized for its swifter deployment process, exceptional query speeds, and cost-efficiency, made possible by its elastic scalability and intuitive interface. While its documentation and pricing model clarity could be improved, Firebolt's competitive pricing and flexible licensing options are well-received, along with the commendable customer support. Despite their distinct advantages and minor areas for improvement, both platforms excel in enhancing data analytics and operational efficiency for their users.
The summary above is based on 76 interviews we conducted recently with Snowflake and Firebolt users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"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 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 requires no maintenance on our part. They handle all that. The speed is phenomenal. The pricing isn't really anything more than what you would be paying for a SQL server license or another tool to execute the same thing. We have zero maintenance on our side to do anything and the speed at which it performs queries and loads the data is amazing. It handles unstructured data extremely well, too. So, if the data is in a JSON array or an XML, it handles that super well."
"The most valuable feature is the clone copy."
"It helped us to build MVP (minimum viable product) for our idea of building a data warehouse model for small businesses."
"I like the ability to work with a managed service on the cloud and that is easy to start with."
"The solution speeds up the process of onboarding."
"Very easy to use and easy to query."
"The solution is very easy to use."
"Firebolt's engine takes a long time to start because it needs to make engine calls."
"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."
"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."
"If you go with one cloud provider, you can't switch."
"To ensure the proper functioning of Snowflake as an MDS, it relies heavily on other partner tools."
"The solution needs more connectors."
"It needs a bit more rigor and governance, which is something you don't get with newer tools. This makes it less enterprise scalable. Its governance and structure can be enhanced, which would really be valuable. I would like to see some kind of prebuilt functionality in terms of having almost like a pre-built data warehouse. A functionality for generating automated kind of pieces would be good."
"There are a lot of features that they need to come up with. A lot of functions are missing in Snowflake, so we have to find a workaround for those. For example, OUTER APPLY is a basic function in SQL Server, but it is not there in Snowflake. So, you have to write complex code for it."
"The complexity of the initial setup of Snowflake depends on the use case. However, Snowflake itself, we don't set it up. The difficulty comes from the ingestion patterns, depending on what data I'm putting in, what kind of enrichment, and what additional value we have to add. However, it does tend to get complex because we have a lot of semi-structured data which we need to handle in Snowflake. There have been some challenges."
Firebolt is ranked 14th in Cloud Data Warehouse with 1 review while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Cloud Data Warehouse with 92 reviews. Firebolt is rated 9.0, while Snowflake is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Firebolt writes "Can quickly query it to generate quick results". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Snowflake writes "Good usability, good data sharing and elastic compute features, and requires less DBA involvement". Firebolt is most compared with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, Yellowbrick Cloud Data Warehouse and Amazon Redshift, whereas Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and AWS Lake Formation.
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