We performed a comparison between Snowflake and Vertica based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Vertica has an edge in this comparison due to its excellent performance. Snowflake does come out on top in the Ease of Deployment category, however.
"The most efficient way for real-time dashboards or analytical business intelligence reports to be sent to the customer."
"The product's most important feature is unloading data to S3."
"The solution speeds up the process of onboarding."
"The querying speed is fast."
"Data sharing is a good feature. It is a majorly used feature. The elastic compute is another big feature. Separating compute and storage gives you flexibility. It doesn't require much DBA involvement because it doesn't need any performance tuning. We are not really doing any performance tuning, and the entire burden of performance tuning and SQL tuning is on Snowflake. Its usability is very good. I don't need to ramp up any user, and its onboarding is easier. You just onboard the user, and you are done with it. There are simple SQL and UI, and people are able to use this solution easily. Ease of use is a big thing in Snowflake."
"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."
"I like the fact that we don't need a DBA. It automatically scales stuff."
"The Time Travel feature is helpful for accessing historical data and the ability to clone external tables is useful."
"Vertica enabled us to close large deals. Customers with large data sets had to be migrated from PostgreSQL to Vertica due to performance."
"Vertica's most outstanding features are the compression rates achieved and the speed of access of high volume data."
"The solution is quick, has good compression data, and is not expensive."
"I don't need any special hardware. I can use commodity hardware, which is nice to have in a commercial solution."
"The performance is very good and the aggregate records are fast."
"Vertica gives knowledgeable users and DBAs excellent tools for tuning."
"Vertica is easy to use and provides really high performance, stability, and scalability."
"DBAs don’t need to add a partition every month/quarter like with other DBs."
"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."
"I would like to see more transparency in data processing, ATLs, and compute areas - which should give more comfort to the end users."
"Maybe there could be some more connectors to other systems, but this is what they are constantly developing anyway."
"I would like to see a client version of the GUI."
"It doesn't enforce typical relational database constraints. Quite expensive."
"The price could be improved."
"For the Snowflake database, there should be some third-party features for the ETL. It would also be good to be able to use some kind of controls to get the data either from another database or a flat file. Its price should be improved. It should be cheaper than Microsoft."
"It's difficult to know how to size everything correctly."
"They could improve the integration and some of the features in the cloud version."
"Vertica seems to scale well, except for one use case where you are on a multi-node cluster. For example, if you had a nine-node cluster, one node goes down, then the eight nodes don't scale, because the absence of the node is very apparent, which is a problem. If you have nine nodes or multiple nodes, the whole idea is that if one of those nodes goes down, then you should not see an impact on the system if you have enough capacity. Even though we have enough capacity, you can still see the impact of the one node going down."
"Very bad support, I would rate it two out of 10."
"The biggest problem is the cost of cloud deployment."
"Suboptimal projection design causes queries to not scale linearly."
"Limitations in group by projections is where I would like to see an improvement."
"Fact-to-fact joins on multi-billion record tables perform poorly."
"They could improve on customer service."
Snowflake is ranked 1st in Data Warehouse with 94 reviews while Vertica is ranked 4th in Data Warehouse with 83 reviews. Snowflake is rated 8.4, while Vertica 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 Vertica writes " A user-friendly tool that needs to improve its documentation part". Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, AWS Lake Formation and Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, whereas Vertica is most compared with SQL Server, Amazon Redshift, Teradata, BigQuery and Oracle Exadata. See our Snowflake vs. Vertica 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.