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 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 solution is quite good at handling analytics. It's done a good job at helping us centralize them."
"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 solution has many features that are applicable to events such as audits."
"I like the idea that you can assign roles and responsibilities, limiting access to data."
"The speed of data loading and being able to quickly create the environment are most valuable."
"The technical support is pretty good, particularly if you are a more technical user."
"The initial setup is very simple."
"It is a very good platform. It can handle structured and semi-structured data, and it can be used for your data warehouse or data lake. It can load and deal with any data that you have. It can extract data from an on-premises database or a website and make it available in the cloud. It has very fast implementation and integration as compared to other solutions. There is no need for the DBA to manage or do the day-to-day DBA tasks, which is one of the greatest things about it."
"A user-friendly and reliable solution."
"It was relatively easy to use, and it was easy for people to convert to it."
"I like Snowflake's data exchange capabilities. It can exchange data with downstream systems and other vendor partners as well."
"For the end-users, it's not as user-friendly as it could be."
"AWS Lake Formation's pricing could be cheaper."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I don't know about GCP, if they have connected for GCP. If they don't, they should allow for it."
"Their strategy is just to leverage what you've got and put Snowflake in the middle. It does work well with other tools. You have to buy a separate reporting tool and a separate data loading tool, whereas, in some platforms, these tools are baked in. In the long-term, they'll need to add more direct partnerships to the ecosystem so that it's not like adding on tools around Snowflake to make it work. They can also consider including Snowflake native reporting tools versus partnering with other reporting tools. It would kind of change where they sit in the market."
"It's not that flexible when compared to Oracle."
"Snowflake has support for stored procedures, but it is not that powerful."
"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."
"The price could be improved."
"I would like to see a client version of the GUI."
"The pricing of the solution should be much easier to calculate or find by yourself."
AWS Lake Formation is ranked 12th in Cloud Data Warehouse with 5 reviews while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Cloud Data Warehouse with 94 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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