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."
"I like the ability to work with a managed service on the cloud and that is easy to start with."
"Snowflake is scalable both in terms of the amount of data that you can run through it and the number of users that engage with it."
"It is a very well-distributed system. It has different data engines for different applications. Many applications can use different computational engines at the same time. In terms of data processing, the feeling was similar to working with a relational database but in a scalable way."
"The syntax is advanced which reduces the time to write code."
"This is the advanced version of the cloud version, so it's really a flexible tool. If you have it implemented at home, you can access it from anywhere."
"The solution is stable."
"Snowflake's most valuable features are data enrichment and flattening."
"The most valuable feature is the clone copy."
"Firebolt's engine takes a long time to start because it needs to make engine calls."
"Snowflake has to improve their spatial parts since it doesn't have much in terms of geo-spatial queries."
"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."
"We would like to be able to do modeling with Snowflake. It should support statistical modeling."
"There are some challenges with loading unstructured data and integrating some message queues or brokers. In one project, we had a problem connecting to one of the message queues and we had to take a different route altogether on Microsoft Azure."
"There is a need for improvements in the documentation, this would allow more people to switch over to this solution."
"The data sharing capabilities across business units within the organization should be better."
"In future releases, it can also support full unstructured data."
"The price could be improved."
Firebolt is ranked 14th in Cloud Data Warehouse with 1 review while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Cloud Data Warehouse with 94 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 and Yellowbrick Cloud Data Warehouse, whereas Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and AWS Lake Formation.
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