We performed a comparison between Amazon EMR and Snowflake based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Cloud Data Warehouse solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."We are using applications, such as Splunk, Livy, Hadoop, and Spark. We are using all of these applications in Amazon EMR and they're helping us a lot."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"The solution helps us manage huge volumes of data."
"The solution is scalable."
"This is the best tool for hosts and it's really flexible and scalable."
"It allows users to access the data through a web interface."
"Amazon EMR's most valuable features are processing speed and data storage capacity."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The most valuable feature of Snowflake is its performance. We can access the data quickly. Additionally, it handles structured and non-structured data."
"It is a very easy-to-use solution. It is user-friendly, and its setup time is very less."
"Great scalability and near zero maintenance."
"The solution is stable."
"The querying speed is fast."
"I like the idea that you can assign roles and responsibilities, limiting access to data."
"It helped us to build MVP (minimum viable product) for our idea of building a data warehouse model for small businesses."
"The syntax is advanced which reduces the time to write code."
"The dashboard management could be better. Right now, it's lacking a bit."
"The initial setup was time-consuming."
"The product must add some of the latest technologies to provide more flexibility to the users."
"There is room for improvement in pricing."
"There is no need to pay extra for third-party software."
"The most complicated thing is configuring to the cluster and ensure it's running correctly."
"We don't have much control. If we have multiple users, if they want to scale up, the cost will go and increase and we don't know how we can restrict that price part."
"As people are shifting from legacy solutions to other technologies, Amazon EMR needs to add more features that give more flexibility in managing user data."
"These aren't as crucial, but there are common errors sometimes where the database is down, or a table is nullified and a new table is added and you are not given access to that. With those errors, you don't have permissions."
"Currently, Snowflake doesn't support unstructured data."
"The cost of the solution could be reduced."
"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."
"The cost is a bit high."
"The solution needs more connectors."
"They need to improve its ETL functionality so that Snowflake becomes an ETL product. Snowpipe can do some pipelines and data ingestion, but as compare to Talend, these functionalities are limited. The ETL feature is not good enough. Therefore, Snowflake can only be used as a database. You can't use it as an ETL tool, which is a limitation. We have spoken to the vendor, and they said they are working on it, but I'm not sure when they will bring it to production."
"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."
Amazon EMR is ranked 9th in Cloud Data Warehouse with 20 reviews while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Cloud Data Warehouse with 92 reviews. Amazon EMR is rated 7.8, while Snowflake is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Amazon EMR writes "Provides efficient data processing features and has good scalability ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Snowflake writes "Good usability, good data sharing and elastic compute features, and requires less DBA involvement". Amazon EMR is most compared with Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop, Azure Data Factory, Amazon Redshift, Apache Spark and Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, whereas Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics. See our Amazon EMR vs. Snowflake report.
See our list of best Cloud Data Warehouse vendors.
We monitor all Cloud 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.