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Snowflake Computing Logo
12,615 views|7,271 comparisons
Teradata Logo
6,277 views|5,267 comparisons
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on May 29, 2022

We performed a comparison between Snowflake and Teradata based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Ease of Deployment: Snowflake users say the initial setup is straightforward and easy. While some Teradata reviewers report the initial setup to be straightforward, others feel that the setup can be complex and requires a higher level of technical expertise.

  • Features: Users of both products are happy with their stability and scalability. Snowflake users like its data sharing features and say it is flexible, fast, and secure. Several users mention that they would like more support for SQL language querying. Teradata users say it performs well and offers good data warehousing. A number of users would like Teradata to provide better training for the solution.
  • Pricing: Most Snowflake users say it is reasonably priced. In contrast, most Teradata users feel that it is an expensive product.
  • ROI: Users are satisfied with the ROI of both products.

  • Service and Support: Users of both solutions report being satisfied with the level of the support they receive.

Comparison Results: Both solutions received high marks from users. Snowflake comes out on top in this comparison. It is a powerful and reliable product that is easy to deploy. In addition, its users feel that it is reasonably priced.

To learn more, read our detailed Snowflake vs. Teradata Report (Updated: March 2024).
763,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Snowflake has three great features: Snowpiping is proving to be very valuable, Time Travel is excellent, and Snowpipes are another great functionality the solution has made available.""It has great flexibility whenever we are loading data and performs ELT (extract, load, transform) techniques instead of ETL.""Its performance is a big advantage. When you run a query, its performance is very good. The inbound and outbound share features are also very useful for sharing a particular database. By using these features, you can allow others to access the Snowflake database and query it, which is another advantage of this solution. It has good security, and we can easily integrate it. We can connect it with multiple source systems.""A user-friendly and reliable solution.""My company wanted to have all our data in one single place and this what we use Snowflake for. Snowflake also allows us to build connectors to different data sources.""Can be leveraged with respect to better performance, auto tuning and competition.""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.""It's ultra-fast at handling queries, which is what we find very convenient."

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"The key advantages are Performance when processing Terabytes of data and scalability.""Teradata is a great, industry-leading data warehousing product that has MPP architecture.""Teradata can be deployed on-premise, on the cloud, or in a virtual machine, which means customers can move without having to create their architecture all over again.""​We really enjoy the FastLoad, TPump, and MultiLoad features.​""Auto-partitioning and indexing, and resource allocation on the fly are key features.""It has massive parallel processing ability to do large amounts of concurrent querying.""It's a pre-configured appliance that requires very little in terms of setting-up.""The most valuable features of Teradata are that it is a massively parallel platform and I can receive a lot of data and get the queries out correctly, especially if it's been appropriately designed. The native features make it very suitable for multiple large data tasks in a structured data environment. Additionally, the automation is very good."

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Cons
"Maybe there could be some more connectors to other systems, but this is what they are constantly developing anyway.""I would like to see more transparency in data processing, ATLs, and compute areas - which should give more comfort to the end users.""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.""Sometimes it can be tricky to manage multiple environments if you're purely using Snowflake as your scripting and pipeline environment.""Pricing is an issue for many customers.""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.""Snowflake could improve if they had an Operational Data Store(ODS) space.""Every product has room for improvement, although in this case, it needs some broadening of the functionality."

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"It would help to make scaling easier with a reduced cost. ​""Apart from Control-M, it would be nice if it could integrate with other tools.""Teradata's pricing is quite high compared to Redshift, Synapse, or GCP alternatives.""Query language and its functionality are rather limited, compared to Oracle or even SQL Server. However, it is possible to perform any kind of logic in it (though some workarounds may be required).""Teradata's UI could be more user-friendly.""I'm not sure about the unstructured data management capabilities. It could be improved.""The cloud is the new challenge and the new opportunity.""Teradata hardly supports unstructured data or semi-structured data"

More Teradata Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Pricing can be confusing for customers."
  • "The whole licensing system is based on credit points. You can also make a license agreement with the company so that you buy credit points and then you use them. What you do not use in one year can be carried over to the next year."
  • "You pay based on the data that you are storing in the data warehouse and there are no maintenance costs."
  • "It is not cheap."
  • "The pricing for Snowflake is competitive."
  • "On average, with the number of queries that we run, we pay approximately $200 USD per month."
  • "Pricing is approximately $US 50 per DB. Terabyte is around $US 50 per month."
  • "The price of Snowflake is very reasonable."
  • More Snowflake Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Teradata is not cheap, but you get what you pay for."
  • "Make sure you have the in-house skills to design and support the solution, as relying on external sources is extremely costly and tends to lock you into specific platforms, tools, and paradigms."
  • "In the past, it turned out that other solutions, in order to provide the full range of abilities that the Teradata platform provides plus the migration costs, would end up costing more than Teradata does."
  • "The initial cost may seem high, but the TCO is low."
  • "Teradata is currently making improvements in this area."
  • "It is still a very expensive solution. While I very much like the pure technological supremacy of the software itself, I believe Teradata as a company needs to become more affordable. They are already losing the market to more flexible or cheaper competitors."
  • "Teradata is expensive but gives value for money, especially if you don't want to move your data to the cloud."
  • "Price is quite high, so if it is really possible to use other solutions (e.g. you do not have strict requirements for performance and huge data volumes), it might be better to look at alternatives from the RDBMS world."
  • More Teradata Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The best thing about Snowflake is its flexibility in changing warehouse sizes or computational power.
    Top Answer:The real-time streaming feature is limited with Snowflake and could be improved. Currently, Snowflake doesn't support unstructured data. With Snowflake, you need to be very particular about the type… more »
    Top Answer: I have spoken to my colleagues about this comparison and in our collective opinion, the reason why some people may declare Teradata better than Oracle is the pricing. Both solutions are quite… more »
    Top Answer: Before my organization implemented this solution, we researched which big brands were using Teradata, so we knew if it would be compatible with our field. According to the product's site, the… more »
    Top Answer:Teradata is not a difficult product to work with, especially since they offer you technical support at all levels if you just ask. There are some features that may cause difficulties - for example… more »
    Ranking
    1st
    out of 33 in Data Warehouse
    Views
    12,615
    Comparisons
    7,271
    Reviews
    40
    Average Words per Review
    455
    Rating
    8.4
    3rd
    out of 33 in Data Warehouse
    Views
    6,277
    Comparisons
    5,267
    Reviews
    19
    Average Words per Review
    451
    Rating
    8.1
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Snowflake Computing
    Learn More
    Overview

    Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehousing solution for storing and processing data, generating reports and dashboards, and as a BI reporting source. It is used for optimizing costs and using financial data, as well as for migrating data from on-premises to the cloud. The solution is often used as a centralized data warehouse, combining data from multiple sources.

    Snowflake has helped organizations improve query performance, store and process JSON and XML, consolidate multiple databases into one unified table, power company-wide dashboards, increase productivity, reduce processing time, and have easy maintenance with good technical support.

    Its platform is made up of three components:

    1. Cloud services - Snowflake uses ANSI SQL to empower users to optimize their data and manage their infrastructure, while Snowflake handles the security and encryption of stored data.
    2. Query processing - Snowflake's compute layer is made up of virtual cloud data warehouses that let you analyze data through requests. Each of the warehouses does not compete for computing resources, nor do they affect the performance of each other.
    3. Database storage - Snowflake automatically manages all parts of the data storage process, including file size, compression, organization, structure, metadata, and statistics.

    Snowflake has many valuable vital features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Snowflake architecture provides nearly unlimited scalability and high speed because it uses a single elastic performance engine. The solution also supports unlimited concurrent users and workloads, from interactive to batch.
    • Snowflake makes automation easy and enables enterprises to automate data management, security, governance, availability, and data resiliency.
    • With seamless cross-cloud and cross-region connections, Snowflake eliminates ETL and data silos. Anyone who needs access to shared secure data can get a single copy via the data cloud. In addition, Snowflake makes remote collaboration and decision-making fast and easy via a single shared data source.
    • Snowflake’s Data Marketplace offers third-party data, which allows you to connect with Snowflake customers to extend workflows with data services and third-party applications.

    There are many benefits to implementing Snowflake. It helps optimize costs, reduce downtime, improve operational efficiency, and automate data replication for fast recovery, and it is built for high reliability and availability.

      Below are quotes from interviews we conducted with users currently using the Snowflake solution:

      Sreenivasan R., Director of Data Architecture and Engineering at Decision Minds, says, "Data sharing is a good feature. It is a majorly used feature. The elastic computing is another big feature. Separating computing and storage gives you flexibility. It doesn't require much DBA involvement because it doesn't need any performance tuning. We are not doing any performance tuning, and the entire burden of performance and SQL tuning is on Snowflake. Its usability is very good. I don't need to ramp up any user, and its onboarding is easier. You just onboard the user, and you are done with it. There are simple SQL and UI, and people are able to use this solution easily. Ease of use is a big thing in Snowflake."

      A director of business operations at a logistics company mentions, "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."

      A Solution Architect at a wholesaler/distributor comments, "The ability to share the data and the ability to scale up and down easily are the most valuable features. The concept of data sharing and data plumbing made it very easy to provide and share data. The ability to refresh your Dev or QA just by doing a clone is also valuable. It has the dynamic scale up and scale down feature. Development and deployment are much easier as compared to other platforms where you have to go through a lot of stuff. With a tool like DBT, you can do modeling and transformation within a single tool and deploy to Snowflake. It provides continuous deployment and continuous integration abilities. There is a separation of storage and compute, so you only get charged for your usage. You only pay for what you use. When we share the data downstream with business partners, we can specifically create compute for them, and we can charge back the business."

      Teradata is a multi-cloud data platform company that provides data warehouse and relational database tools. The brand has an extensive portfolio of big data analytic solutions, integrated marketing applications, and services. The products that Teradata offers can be categorized in the following ways:

      • Software: The products in this category include Teradata Vantage, an advanced SQL engine and Teradata database.

      • Cloud: The solutions can work with popular cloud services such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and VMware. Teradata Cloud and customer cloud are also included in this product category.

      • Ecosystem management: The products in this section include IntelliSphere, business continuity manager, data lab, data mover, data stream, QueryGrid, and viewpoint.

      • Hardware: This category includes backup, archive, and restore (BAR) and IntelliFlex.

      • Applications: Master data management (MDM) and Teradata analytics for enterprise applications are the two products in this category.

      One of the most popular and commonly used products by Teradata is Teradata Vantage. This is a connected multi-cloud data platform for enterprise analytics. The product unifies data lakes, analytics, and data warehouses, as well as data sources and types. The solution offers its customers scalability, which allows them to scale dimensions to handle massive workloads of data. Teradata Vantage utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to power more models and enhance quality.

      Through Vantage Console, businesses can benefit from role-based, no-code software to organize and manage their data. The product offers deployment on many popular public clouds, on premises, and on commodity hardware. Teradata Vantage unifies and integrates all data types from sources and provides companies with a single source of information. It achieves this by supporting all common data types and formats. The product also provides organizations with tools for monitoring, analyzing, and connecting data throughout the organizations.

      Part of this product is also VantageCloud, which offers a modern cloud-native architecture as well as hybrid and multi-cloud deployment options. This solution offers new ways for clients to deploy their platforms. These include the next-generation, cloud-native architecture of Teradata VantageCloud Lake.

      Teradata Features

      The different products that Teradata offers have various features which facilitate data management for customers. Some of the key capabilities of the solutions offered by Teradata include:

      • Connectivity: Users can benefit from connections to the mainframe or network-attached systems. The product provides its own extension for interaction with data stored in the tables. It also supports SQL.

      • Linear scalability: Teradata solutions are highly scalable and linear. The solution can handle large volumes of data effectively while also supporting the ability to scale up to 2048 nodes.

      • Load and unload utilities: The product offers features to move data in and out of the product's system effectively.

      • Mature optimizer: Part of this feature is Teradata Optimizer, which is an advanced product that can handle up to 64 joins in a single query.

      • Robust utilities: The solution includes multiple robust utilities in this category of features that facilitate data handling in and out of the product's systems. The tools include MultiLoad, FastLoad, and FastExport.

      • Shared nothing architecture: This set of features, connected to the architecture of Teradata, is known as “shared nothing architecture” because the nodes, processors, and disks all work independently. These capacities ensure better value for a given task.

      • Unlimited parallelism: These features divide large volumes of data into smaller processes that are executed in parallel. This contributes to the execution of complex tasks in a timely manner.

      Teradata Benefits

      Through its multiple solutions, Teradata offers various benefits for its clients. Some of these include:

      • The solution facilitates prototype creation and offers faster times for completion.

      • Through Teradata, users are able to use faster, simpler, and easier solutions for data-related tasks.

      • The product eliminates the need for unnecessary data movement, which contributes to performance improvements.

      • Teradata offers developers the ability to decide where in the architecture different parts of an application run.

      • Teradata allows database administrators to manage databases from a single point of control.

      • The solution provides the option to get the same data on multiple deployment options.

      • The product supports Online Analytical Programming (OLAP) functions, which allows it to perform a complex analytical process of data.

      • Teradata uses the Service Workstation to provide a single operation view for the multi-node system of the product.

      Reviews from Real Users

      Martin P., a services manager at Bytes Systems Integration, describes Teradata as a product that is very fast with good database control and excellent support.

      Blaine V., principal at Insight Data Consulting, rates Teradata highly because of its excellent native features, highly stable, and impressive automation.

      Sample Customers
      Accordant Media, Adobe, Kixeye Inc., Revana, SOASTA, White Ops
      Netflix
      Top Industries
      REVIEWERS
      Computer Software Company29%
      Financial Services Firm20%
      Manufacturing Company6%
      Healthcare Company6%
      VISITORS READING REVIEWS
      Educational Organization26%
      Financial Services Firm13%
      Computer Software Company10%
      Manufacturing Company6%
      REVIEWERS
      Comms Service Provider26%
      Computer Software Company22%
      Financial Services Firm9%
      Energy/Utilities Company9%
      VISITORS READING REVIEWS
      Financial Services Firm26%
      Computer Software Company10%
      Manufacturing Company8%
      Healthcare Company7%
      Company Size
      REVIEWERS
      Small Business24%
      Midsize Enterprise20%
      Large Enterprise55%
      VISITORS READING REVIEWS
      Small Business15%
      Midsize Enterprise33%
      Large Enterprise52%
      REVIEWERS
      Small Business33%
      Midsize Enterprise11%
      Large Enterprise56%
      VISITORS READING REVIEWS
      Small Business14%
      Midsize Enterprise9%
      Large Enterprise77%
      Buyer's Guide
      Snowflake vs. Teradata
      March 2024
      Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake vs. Teradata and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
      763,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.

      Snowflake is ranked 1st in Data Warehouse with 40 reviews while Teradata is ranked 3rd in Data Warehouse with 21 reviews. Snowflake is rated 8.4, while Teradata is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Snowflake writes "Easy to set up with great cloning and time travel". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Teradata writes "Very fast with good database control and excellent support". Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Vertica, AWS Lake Formation and Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, whereas Teradata is most compared with SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle Exadata, BigQuery and Amazon Redshift. See our Snowflake vs. Teradata 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.