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 quite easy to manage."
"The Time Travel feature is helpful for accessing historical data and the ability to clone external tables is useful."
"The product's most important feature is unloading data to S3."
"It is very fast and the performance is great."
"The ETL and data ingestion capabilities are better in this solution as compared to SQL Server. SQL Server doesn't do much data ingestion, but Snowflake can do it quite conveniently."
"The most efficient way for real-time dashboards or analytical business intelligence reports to be sent to the customer."
"It is a very easy-to-use solution. It is user-friendly, and its setup time is very less."
"The features that I have found most valuable are the ease of use, the rapidness, how quickly the solution can be implemented, and of course that it's been very easy to move from the on-premise world to the Cloud world because Snowflake is based on SQL also."
"Vertica has a few features that I like. From an architecture standpoint, they have separated compute and storage. So you have low-cost object storage for primary storage and the ability to have several sub-clusters working off the same ObjectStore. So it provides workload isolation."
"We are also opening new areas of business and potential new revenue streams using Vertica's analytic functions, most notably geospatial, where we are able to run billions of comparisons of lat/long point locations against polygon and point/radius locations in seconds. "
"Bulk loads, batch loads, and micro-batch loads have made it possible for our organization to process near real-time ingestions and faster analytics."
"It maximize cloud economics for mission-critical big data analytical initiatives."
"The extensibility and efficiency provided by their C++ SDK."
"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."
"Vertica gives knowledgeable users and DBAs excellent tools for tuning."
"Vertica is a columnar database where the query performance is extremely fast and it can be used for real-time integrations for API and other applications. The solution requires zero maintenance which is helpful."
"There is room for improvement in Snowflake's integration with Python. We do a lot of SQL programming in Snowflake, but we go to a different tool to program when we have to in Python."
"Pricing is an issue for many customers."
"There is a scope for improvement. They don't currently support integration with some of the Azure and AWS native services. It would be good if they can enhance their product to integrate with these services."
"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."
"Portability is a big hurdle right now for our clients. Porting all of your existing SQL ecosystem, such as stored procedures, to Snowflake is a major pain point. Currently, Snowflake stored procedures use JavaScript, but they should support SQL-based stored procedures. It would be a huge advantage if you can write your stored procedures using SQL. It seems that they are working on this feature, and they are yet to release it. I remember seeing some notes saying that they were going to do that in the future, but the sooner this feature comes out, it would be better for Snowflake because there are a lot of clients with whom I'm interacting, and their main hurdle is to take their existing Oracle or SQL Server stored procedures and move them into Snowflake. For this, you need to learn JavaScript and how it works, which is not easy and becomes a little tricky. If it supports SQL-based procedures, then you can just cut-paste the SQL code, run it, and easily fix small issues."
"I think that Snowflake could improve its user interface. The current one is not interactive."
"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."
"It's not that flexible when compared to Oracle."
"Very bad support, I would rate it two out of 10."
"Fact-to-fact joins on multi-billion record tables perform poorly."
"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."
"Whatever's out, the core is not always as great as the engine, especially their first version."
"I would personally like to see extended developer tooling suited to Vertica – think published PowerDesigner SQL dialect support."
"In a future release, we would like to have artificial intelligence capabilities like neural networks. Customers are demanding this type of analytics."
"Documentation has become much better, but can always use some improvement."
"When it is about to reach the maximum storage capacity, it becomes slow."
Snowflake is ranked 1st in Cloud Data Warehouse with 92 reviews while Vertica is ranked 7th in Cloud 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 Cloud Data Warehouse vendors and best 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.
