We performed a comparison between Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics and Snowflake based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Snowflake had a better user rating regarding ease of deployment and pricing. Both softwares had the same rating when it came to service and support. In terms of features, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics users felt the software had security issues and didn’t feel it was very intuitive. In contrast, users of Snowflake felt the UI needed improvement.
"I have not used the technical support from Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, but I worked with the developers at Microsoft who were top-notch."
"I like the keynotes and their simplicity. Like other Microsoft products, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is simple to understand and use."
"The solution offers strong scalability opportunities."
"The most valuable feature is performance gains."
"One of the most valuable features of this solution is its ability to integrate well with other services offered by Azure."
"Its seamless integration with Azure services is most valuable. If somebody wants to use all Azure services, it is the best solution."
"The pricing seems to be quite fair."
"Synapse makes it easy to integrate and onboard data from other Microsoft and Azure sources. The interface is familiar because we were using Azure Data Factory before Synapse. It made the transition even easier because the Synapse interface is exactly the same."
"The tool is very easy to use. The solution’s desktop features are also very easy to use. Also, the product’s SQL-based connectivity is also good. It can connect with any tool."
"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."
"Time travel is one feature that really helps us out."
"The most valuable feature has been the Snowflake data sharing and dynamic data masking."
"The ability to share the data and the ability to scale up and down easily are the most valuable features. The concept of data sharing and data plumbing made it very easy to provide and share data. The ability to refresh your Dev or QA just by doing a clone is also valuable. It has the dynamic scale up and scale down feature. Development and deployment are much easier as compared to other platforms where you have to go through a lot of stuff. With a tool like DBT, you can do modeling and transformation within a single tool and deploy to Snowflake. It provides continuous deployment and continuous integration abilities. There is a separation of storage and compute, so you only get charged for your usage. You only pay for what you use. When we share the data downstream with business partners, we can specifically create compute for them, and we can charge back the business."
"It's ultra-fast at handling queries, which is what we find very convenient."
"Its performance is most valuable. As compared to SQL Server, we are able to see a significant improvement in performance with Snowflake."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the ease of use, the rapidness, how quickly the solution can be implemented, and of course that it's been very easy to move from the on-premise world to the Cloud world because Snowflake is based on SQL also."
"Scaling this solution up and down is not quick and easy. This could be improved. The pricing of this solution could also be improved."
"The support and price could improve."
"Synapse Analytics' performance slows down if you don't get your distribution right because it gets queued and goes into a single node."
"Integration with other vendors has limitations and could be improved."
"If I'm looking for something good in the cloud, I would want it to have better standard connectors."
"Non-structured data is unavailable with this product."
"When I was trying to link services to an SFTP site it was not able to do all the possible encryption that I needed. They can improve by adding more encryption options."
"The need to improve a little bit in terms of user-friendliness."
"Snowflake has to improve their spatial parts since it doesn't have much in terms of geo-spatial queries."
"Their UiPath, the workspace area, needs some work."
"If we can have a feature where the results can be moved to different tabs, so that I can compare the results with earlier queries before applying the changes, it would be great."
"The scheduling system can definitely be better because we had to use external airflow for that. There should be orchestration for the scheduling system. Snowflake currently does not support machine learning, so it is just storage. They also need some alternatives for SQL Query. There should also be support for Spark in different languages such as Python."
"The solution could use a little bit more UI."
"They should improve the reporting tools."
"Snowflake needs to improve its programming part. Though the tool has Snowpath, it doesn’t support all features like its competitor, Databricks. Snowflake doesn’t support external data ingestion capabilities. You need to have third-party tools for that. Also, the tool needs to incorporate data integration features in its future releases."
"There are always a few operation updates here and there that can be made."
More Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Pricing and Cost Advice →
Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is ranked 2nd in Cloud Data Warehouse with 86 reviews while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Cloud Data Warehouse with 94 reviews. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is rated 7.8, while Snowflake is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics writes "No competitors provide the entire solution to one place ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Snowflake writes "Good usability, good data sharing and elastic compute features, and requires less DBA involvement". Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is most compared with Azure Data Factory, SAP BW4HANA, Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, Teradata and Amazon Redshift, whereas Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and Dremio. See our Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Snowflake report.
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