We performed a comparison between Snowflake and Teradata based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Both solutions received high marks from users. Snowflake comes out on top in this comparison. It is a powerful and reliable product that is easy to deploy. In addition, its users feel that it is reasonably priced.
"The adaptation to development languages is most valuable. Our developers can SQL code or something else. It has been convenient in that regard."
"Snowflake's most valuable features are data enrichment and flattening."
"The solution is very easy to use."
"The querying speed is fast."
"The overall ecosystem was easy to manage. Given that we weren't a very highly technical group, it was preferable to other things we looked at because it could do all of the cloud tunings. It can tune your data warehouse to an appropriate size for controlled billing, resume and sleep functions, and all such things. It was much more simple than doing native Azure or AWS development. It was stable, and their support was also perfect. It was also very easy to deploy. It was one of those rare times where they did exactly what they said they could do."
"It is a cloud solution with many useful features. It has the data science capability. It can transform data and prepare data for a data science project with scalability."
"The most valuable feature of Snowflake is it's an all-in-one data warehousing solution."
"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."
"A conventional and easily defined way to build a data warehouse or a layer of data marts."
"It has reduced a lot of reworking on maintaining indexes, partitions, etc."
"The two types of partitioning have been very significant for us - row and columnar partitioning."
"Designing the database is easy."
"It effectively has allowed us to remove over 20 portion copies of the data sets on other DB platforms for real-time operational reporting purposes."
"It has massive parallel processing ability to do large amounts of concurrent querying."
"The performance is great, we are able to query our data in one operation."
"Teradata can be easily used in ETL mode transformations, so there is no need for expensive and inconvenient ETL tools"
"They need to incorporate some basic OLAP capabilities in the backend or at the database level. Currently, it is purely a database. They call it purely a data warehouse for the cloud. Currently, just like any database, we have to calculate all the KPIs in the front-end tools. The same KPIs again need to be calculated in Snowflake. It would be very helpful if they can include some OLAP features. This will bring efficiency because we will be able to create the KPIs within Snowflake itself and then publish them to multiple front-end tools. We won't have to recreate the same in each project. There should be the ability to automate raised queries, which is currently not possible. There should also be something for Exception Aggregation and things like that."
"They have a new console, but I couldn't figure out anything in the new console. So, if I shift to the old console, I can figure out where to create the database schema and other things, but I have no idea where to go in the new console. That's one thing they can improve. I don't know why they created a new console to confuse. The old, classic console is much better."
"The UI could improve because sometimes in the security query the UI freezes. We then have to close the window and restart."
"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."
"Some SQL language functions could be included."
"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."
"I would like to see more transparency in data processing, ATLs, and compute areas - which should give more comfort to the end users."
"The user interface continues to be an issue, especially when we need to get data out of Snowflake. It's very easy to get data in, but it's not too easy to get it out or extract it."
"It would help to make scaling easier with a reduced cost. "
"Teradata could improve by being less complicated. There are some aspects that are not available on the Unix server and a Unix system is required to access some data, such as in case of an emergency."
"Teradata is an old data warehouse, and they're not improving in terms of new, innovative features."
"There is some improvement required on OLTP level and some analytical function is missing."
"GUI of administrative tools is really outdated."
"Limited interest and success in some areas make us hesitate about upgrading."
"Teradata's UI could be more user-friendly."
"We tried to use case Teradata for a data warehouse system, but we had some problems in relation to the Teradata system, CDC tools, and source databases. We were unable to transfer data from HPE Integrity mainframe to Teradata."
Snowflake is ranked 1st in Data Warehouse with 92 reviews while Teradata is ranked 3rd in Data Warehouse with 54 reviews. Snowflake is rated 8.4, while Teradata is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Snowflake writes "Good usability, good data sharing and elastic compute features, and requires less DBA involvement". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Teradata writes "Offers seamless integration capabilities and performance optimization features, including extensive indexing and advanced tuning capabilities". Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Vertica, AWS Lake Formation and Amazon EMR, whereas Teradata is most compared with SQL Server, Oracle Exadata, MySQL, BigQuery and Amazon Redshift. See our Snowflake vs. Teradata report.
See our list of best Data Warehouse vendors and best Cloud Data Warehouse vendors.
We monitor all Data Warehouse reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.