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.
"It is a very well-distributed system. It has different data engines for different applications. Many applications can use different computational engines at the same time. In terms of data processing, the feeling was similar to working with a relational database but in a scalable way."
"The tool's performance is good. I think it's the best in the game right now. It usually charges per query. For example, if you run a SQL query on Snowflake with the same number of data records, it would take less than half the time compared to running it on Microsoft. It has good documentation. You can pick up Snowflake if you have previous knowledge of SQL."
"Great scalability and near zero maintenance."
"The most valuable features of Snowflake are that you have to pay per usage, and you don't have to worry about the maintenance of the data warehouse because it is on the cloud."
"The overall ecosystem was easy to manage. Given that we weren't a very highly technical group, it was preferable to other things we looked at because it could do all of the cloud tunings. It can tune your data warehouse to an appropriate size for controlled billing, resume and sleep functions, and all such things. It was much more simple than doing native Azure or AWS development. It was stable, and their support was also perfect. It was also very easy to deploy. It was one of those rare times where they did exactly what they said they could do."
"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 most valuable features are sharing data, Time Travel, Zero Copy Cloning, performance, and speed."
"We find the data sharing and data marketplace aspects of Snowflake absolutely amazing."
"Any novice user can tune vertical queries with minimal training (or no training at all)."
"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."
"It maximizes cloud economics with Eon Mode by scaling cluster size to meet variable workload demands."
"Vertica is easy to use and provides really high performance, stability, and scalability."
"It's the fastest database I have ever tested. That's the most important feature of Vertica."
"The feature I like best is performance. We use Red Tool and Red Job for the data warehouse and reporting. It's perfect. Performance is good, and it can return ad hoc queries very quickly. Of course, it's a cluster, so it's easy to scale."
"The fast columnar store database structure allows our query times to be at least 10x faster than on any other database."
"The performance is very good and the aggregate records are fast."
"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 user interface continues to be an issue, especially when we need to get data out of Snowflake. It's very easy to get data in, but it's not too easy to get it out or extract it."
"They should improve the reporting tools."
"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 data sharing capabilities across business units within the organization should be better."
"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."
"There are a lot of features that they need to come up with. A lot of functions are missing in Snowflake, so we have to find a workaround for those. For example, OUTER APPLY is a basic function in SQL Server, but it is not there in Snowflake. So, you have to write complex code for it."
"We would like to see more security including more masking and more encryption at the database level."
"One feature, which has really benefited us, is the scalability offered by Vertica as it has enabled Pythian's clients to manage data with agility."
"Suboptimal projection design causes queries to not scale linearly."
"There are a lot of limitations within this product and it makes things extremely hard for developers. It lacks Stored Procedure, packages, and triggers like other RDBMs."
"In a future release, we would like to have artificial intelligence capabilities like neural networks. Customers are demanding this type of analytics."
"Some of our small to medium-sized customers would like to see containerization and flexibility from the deployment standpoint."
"In my opinion, Vertica's documentation could be improved. Currently, there is not enough documentation available to gain a comprehensive understanding of the platform."
"If you do not utilize the tuning tools like projections, encoding, partitions, and statistics, then performance and scalability will suffer."
"It's hard to make it slow for a small data volume. For large volumes, it's hard to make it work. It's also hard to make it faster, and to make it scale."
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.
