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 initial setup is very simple."
"Time travel is one feature that really helps us out."
"It's user-friendly. It's SQL-driven. The fact that business can also go to this application and query because they know SQL is the biggest factor."
"The product's most important feature is unloading data to S3."
"I like the ability to work with a managed service on the cloud and that is easy to start with."
"Its speed and performance were the most valuable. Easy configuration of Snowflake in any cloud was also a benefit."
"It requires no maintenance on our part. They handle all that. The speed is phenomenal. The pricing isn't really anything more than what you would be paying for a SQL server license or another tool to execute the same thing. We have zero maintenance on our side to do anything and the speed at which it performs queries and loads the data is amazing. It handles unstructured data extremely well, too. So, if the data is in a JSON array or an XML, it handles that super well."
"Its analytics has enabled Pythian's clients to get the business insights as quick as they wanted. Its lower maintenance has also improved the ROI."
"The most valuable feature of Vertica is the unmatchable database performance."
"The most valuable feature of Vertica is the ability to receive large aggregations at a very quick pace. The use case of subclusters is very good."
"The most valuable feature is Vertica's performance and the ease of using the database."
"Initiate on one node, and the RPM propagates automatically to all other nodes. "
"The fast columnar store database structure allows our query times to be at least 10x faster than on any other database."
"I have found the solution to be scalable."
"Vertica is a columnar database, this support our developments in analytics, advanced analytics, and ETL process with large sets of data."
"It would be better if they had a data profile tool that tells me where the gaps are in my time series data."
"There could be better ELT tools that are appropriate for Snowflake. We decided on Matillion and it seemed to be the only one. There need to be better choices, it would be great if Snowflake provided an ELT solution that people could use. Additionally, if there was a pure cloud-based ELT tool it would be useful."
"We are yet to figure out how to integrate tools, such as Liquibase, to release changes to our data warehouse model."
"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 can only access Snowflake from the web. It would be better if we could have an app that we can install locally on our laptops to connect to the server without needing to go to the web page. Apart from that, it's hard to point out any limitations in the tool."
"These days, they are pushing users towards the GUI or graphical version. However, I am more familiar with the classic version. I'd like to continue to work with it using the older approach."
"We would like to be able to do modeling with Snowflake. It should support statistical modeling."
"The product's performance could be improved."
"We faced some challenges when trying to use the temporary tables feature."
"It should provide a GUI interface for data management and tuning."
"It needs integration with multiple clouds."
"Performance of management of metadata layer (database catalog) needs improvement. We still have to have smaller customers on PostgreSQL; Vertica cannot manage thousands of schemata."
"Promotion/marketing must be improved, even though it is a very useful product at very good price, it is not as "popular" as it should be."
"I have found that coding support could be simplified."
"The documentation of Vertica is an area with shortcomings where improvements are required."
"I would personally like to see extended developer tooling suited to Vertica – think published PowerDesigner SQL dialect support."
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 Amazon EMR, whereas Vertica is most compared with SQL Server, Amazon Redshift, Teradata, Oracle Exadata and BigQuery. 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.