We compared Snowflake and Firebolt based on our user's reviews across various parameters. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Both Snowflake and Firebolt receive high marks for performance, user-friendliness, and cost-effectiveness, attracting users with their data management solutions. Snowflake is praised for its powerful performance, scalability, and speedy query execution, coupled with a positive customer service experience and a straightforward licensing model. The platform’s ability to handle large workloads and manage numerous concurrent users efficiently stands out, as does its positive return on investment. Firebolt is recognized for its swifter deployment process, exceptional query speeds, and cost-efficiency, made possible by its elastic scalability and intuitive interface. While its documentation and pricing model clarity could be improved, Firebolt's competitive pricing and flexible licensing options are well-received, along with the commendable customer support. Despite their distinct advantages and minor areas for improvement, both platforms excel in enhancing data analytics and operational efficiency for their users.
The summary above is based on 76 interviews we conducted recently with Snowflake and Firebolt users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"Firebolt is fast for analytical purposes. For example, we have analytical data in our data warehouse, and Firebolt can quickly query it to generate quick results."
"The snapshot feature is good, the rollback feature is good and the interface is user-friendly."
"The technical support on offer is excellent."
"The most valuable features are the clustering, LS50, being able to change the size, the pay per use feature, the flexibility with many different sources and analytic applications."
"The most valuable feature of Snowflake is it's an all-in-one data warehousing solution."
"The initial setup is straightforward. You just need to follow the documentation."
"Snowflake is scalable both in terms of the amount of data that you can run through it and the number of users that engage with it."
"The initial setup is very simple."
"The most valuable features are sharing data, Time Travel, Zero Copy Cloning, performance, and speed."
"Firebolt's engine takes a long time to start because it needs to make engine calls."
"Pricing is an issue for many customers."
"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."
"Snowflake has to build more capabilities because they have only built very few adapters, but they're growing and they're building. They should provide provisions to collect ETL pipeline capabilities, reduce developer work, and make more rapid application development, rather than some customizations. There are very few options, but they are building. I hope they will build ETL rapid application development provisions with more variety."
"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."
"Its transaction application needs improvement."
"The solution could improve the user interface and add functionality to the system."
"Maybe there could be some more connectors to other systems, but this is what they are constantly developing anyway."
"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."
Firebolt is ranked 14th in Cloud Data Warehouse with 1 review while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Cloud Data Warehouse with 92 reviews. Firebolt is rated 9.0, while Snowflake is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Firebolt writes "Can quickly query it to generate quick results". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Snowflake writes "Good usability, good data sharing and elastic compute features, and requires less DBA involvement". Firebolt is most compared with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, Yellowbrick Cloud Data Warehouse and Amazon Redshift, whereas Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and AWS Lake Formation.
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