Snowflake Reviews & Insights

Score8.9 out of 10

373 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Snowflake are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Intuitive User Interface: Users have consistently praised Snowflake's intuitive and easy-to-use interface, with many stating that it is beginner-friendly. The drag and drop feature for tables into queries has been particularly helpful for users when writing complex queries.

Advanced Security Features: Snowflake's security features have received high praise from users, who feel confident in connecting with numerous business partners due to the platform's advanced security measures and effective programming. This positive sentiment indicates that Snowflake successfully prioritizes data protection and privacy.

Seamless Data Integration: Users appreciate Snowflake's ability to integrate, analyze, and transfer data from multiple clouds. They find it easy to have a transparent idea about data extraction and transfer. This feature allows users to efficiently work with their diverse datasets across different cloud platforms without any hassle or complications.

Snowflake Reviews

11 Reviews

Engineering

Snowflake the MPP data platform of the future, today!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

August 10, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Snowflake is used as a scale-out data lake and data warehouse at Spireon. The separation of compute from storage enables the company to provide timely and scalable insights. The confluence of streaming and batch processing at a pay-as-you-go pricing model aids in being intelligent and efficient on budget planning and use.

Pros

Massive parallel processing
SQL for schema-on-read data lakes
Secure and compressed storage for semi-structured data

Cons

Support site
Transparency on performance
Full text search

Likelihood to Recommend

Cloud based analytical data store type workloads where data is volumous and query access patterns are well-known is Snowflake's sweet spot. The MPP engine is second to none and being able to scale up or down on demand enables queries that weren't previously possible. Where Snowflake isn't particularly suited is for on-premise or smaller data workloads or transactional processing workloads.

dave withers

Sr Director in Engineering at Spireon (Information Services, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

Best Analytics Database in existence

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 30, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Powers our entire data warehouse

Pros

storage
compute
query time
admin maintenance

Cons

lack of multiple indexes
indexing by primary key is non performant

Likelihood to Recommend

Best analytics database in existence.
Able to be setup and administered by a lightly technical SQL user !
Performance performance performance
Able to query terabytes of data in seconds

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Internet company, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

The Snowflake data cloud is the most complete cloud data platform

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 7, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Snowflake is a modern cloud data platform that InterWorks refers, resells, and implements for our data analytics clients. We also use it to back our internal data analytics initiatives within InterWorks. Customers of ours use Snowflake across every vertical and industry for any problem where they need an efficient, easy to use, scalable data environment.

Pros

Snowflake is very easy to use and doesn't have heavy DBA overhead.
Snowflake's ability to separate storage and compute is a radical departure from how databases of the past were built.
Snowflake is very easy for customers to scale as their needs shrink and grow.

Cons

Snowflake still has room to grow in the advanced analytics use cases with the addition of Python, Scala, or Java running natively on Snowflake virtual warehouses.
Snowflake can be somewhat unintuitive for customers coming from a prior RDBMS background because some of the concepts are such a radical departure.
Snowflake is still not especially suited for many database use cases, such as OLTP scenarios. It's hard to call this a con, since that's obviously not what the product was designed for, but users should be aware.

Likelihood to Recommend

Specific scenarios where Snowflake is very strong include analytical data processing scenarios. Snowflake is wonderful at inexpensively consolidating and storing data and allowing very fast access to that data while maintaining a low cost profile with it's ability to automatically resume and suspend virtual warehouses.

Snowflake is less suited to transaction processing scenarios and isn't a best choice to back up an online order processing system.

Brian Bickell

Data Practice Director in Engineering at InterWorks (Information Services, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

5 years of experience

View profile

Snowflake is a future full stack database

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 28, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Snowflake is acting as a company-wide Data Repository. With its cloud architecture and scalability, it addresses our storage, warehouse, and computation problem at the same time. Snowflake has powerful group roles and policy, which makes it beneficial for enterprise edition and usage. The ability to change the computational resources anytime is one of the biggest advantages. We have from manager to analyst been consuming the Snowflakes as a data repo. We have around a few hundred TB of data stored and it works smoothly on data growing exponentially too.

Pros

Hosted on cloud: Helps with scalability.
Community is active and ever-growing: You will have someone from the community to help whenever you need it.
The new functionality and thoughtful design are based on new world problems.
Support for JSON and XML is one of the main advantages.

Cons

Beta testing functionality needs to be properly tested and stick to the committed deadline set at the initial release.
The ODBC connector could be improved to accommodate multiple roles.
Updates on functionality need to be informed to the user. Just a document update might not be the right approach every time.

Likelihood to Recommend

Snowflake acts as a single platform for both data storage and warehousing needs. For deployment purposes, it has the best group policy management and the best UI I've encountered personally. It also accommodates direct connection with AWS and Azure, which is another advantage. The only scenario where Snowflake would require second thought would be data that has PII information, as it doesn't have encryption options for such data points.

Sudarshan Kothari

Lead Analyst in Engineering at iQuanti, Inc. (Information Technology and Services, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

Amazing cloud-based DB

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

November 25, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Snowflake on our Data Engineering team to house our data warehouse and offload a substantial amount of our ETL processes to Snowflake. Snowflake enables us to offer ultra-fast querying to the business to quickly gain insights into our current data set.

Pros

Extremely intuitive and easy to use querying language.
Allows high performance querying of large data sets with very little setup and configuration.
Interfaces very easily with AWS S3.
Works seamlessly with both structured and unstructured data sets.
Very granular security.

Cons

IDE is OK but can be a bit clunky given it's web-based.

Likelihood to Recommend

Snowflake works extremely well for storing a data warehouse as the querying is optimized for larger tables that are filled in batches. It also works extremely well with unstructured data and has basically replaced any need we previously had for NoSQL databases. Snowflake does not perform well for transactional databases.

Torrey Vegter

Senior Data Engineer in Engineering at Outsell (Marketing and Advertising, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

Snowflake's ease of use allows you to focus on what matters most - the data you're filling it with

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

June 10, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My company adopted Snowflake as our first cloud-based data warehouse. It is being used as a central repository for all company data from each business unit for the purposes of business intelligence.

Pros

Ease of use
Separation of storage and compute resources
Simple to scale up or down with virtual warehouses
Built-in support for the most popular data formats
Standard SQL dialect
Robust function library

Cons

Lacks support for common table expressions
Lacks support for correlated subqueries
Better technical support for customer identified bugs
Clearer pricing model

Likelihood to Recommend

Snowflake architecture was designed at its foundation to take advantage of the cloud and then adds some unique benefits that support ease of use and increased productivity. The most popular cloud data warehouse platforms are all powerful tools and solid choices. With an investment in one of these, what really matters is how productive will you be using the data warehouse.

Snowflake's 'data-warehouse-as-a-service' model lessens the maintenance tasks of optimization/tuning that have traditionally fallen to DBAs and ETL developers. There are no servers to manage, software to install, or indexes to tune. This allows data engineers and analysts to focus more exclusively on analytic tasks that will translate into growth for the company.

While Snowflake doesn’t have all the performance optimization bells and whistles of other cloud data warehouse platforms, this is actually a good thing and that most people don't really need all of them or miss them. Using Snowflake on the whole means less knob-turning and futzing with setup/tweaking. Snowflake has its query optimizer already built-in.

Andrew Goss

Data Engineer in Engineering at Interfolio (Internet, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Great DW tool!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 27, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Snowflake for basic data munging from OLTP databases, APIs, etc. It is only used in our sizable Data department. It solves the problem of spinning up and managing a DW quickly without dedicated DBA support.

Pros

A nice UI with options to see the SQL/Code to automate steps in the UI.
Has great SQL features like LISTAGG or Count Distinct, which go above and beyond Oracle and MS SQL.
It's very fast!

Cons

The SQL editor. The worksheets are nice, but code editors today have auto-fill, debug highlighters, etc. They are working on this I'm told.
Worksheets (where you edit SQL) cannot be exported today.
Occasionally a bug is introduced during releases. It's no big deal.

Likelihood to Recommend

Snowflake is great for quick dirty analysis.

Eric Fischer

Senior Product Manager - Data Solutions in Engineering at Accruent (Computer Software, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

Cloud-Based Data Warehousing Done Right

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 5, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We replaced our RDS Postgres based DW with Snowflake. We use it as the main data source for all analytics components within our SaaS product, internal reporting, and ad hoc analysis by power users. We are now also able to analyze JSON without the need for transformation by easily replicating S3 buckets with Snowpipe.

Pros

Provision compute resources instantly and autoscaling. True elastic, pay as you go pricing model.
Secure Data Sharing. No other vendor offers this. This is big if you have the need to do a lot of data extracts.
Ability to segregate clusters of computer resources (warehouses) by use pool. You can give power users access without the fear of slowing down critical applications.
Cloud first architecture offers simple integration with other cloud-centric technologies/tools like S3 storage, streaming/replication brokers like Kafka, Alooma and cloud base BI tools.
Big Data analytics capabilities with the familiarity of ANSI SQL. Short learning curve.

Cons

Compilation times on somewhat complex queries is high. We use materialized views to address this problem and take advantage of caching, but we believe there is room for improvement here.
SLA's dependent on the big cloud player (AWS, Azure, GCP). If they have interruptions, you have interruptions. This is the current reality of cloud computing.

Likelihood to Recommend

Snowflake is an analytics data store. If your main use case for evaluating it is analytics workload, then there is no reason to at least do a POC. If your workload is more transactional, real-time log analytics or search, then there are other options.

Carlos Fares, CBIP

Director of Business Intelligence in Engineering at CareCloud (Health, Wellness and Fitness, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

The best data warehouse on the market

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 25, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Snowflake across our entire organization. We selected Snowflake to replace Redshift as our data warehouse. All of our data now funnels into Snowflake and users are able to query it and draw insights that they have never had before. Additionally, we were able to build and release a reporting dashboard for our external clients to see all of their historical data with us in one place.

Pros

You only pay for the resources when you are using them
ANSI SQL compliant
Great documentation
Native Apache Spark connector

Cons

Does not support Dynamic SQL
Right now you can write User-Defined Functions (UDFs) in pure SQL or Javascript. I would love to see support for something like Python
We have been seeing more downtime lately as of writing this review

Likelihood to Recommend

Snowflake is great as a data warehouse for any sized company. Since you only pay for what you use, you can request fewer resources if you are on a smaller budget.

The only time I would say Snowflake is not the right option is when you are not using one of their supported languages. My team works in Python and Spark, so we have no issue connecting to the DB. Other teams at my company use PHP, which does not have a 1st-party connector yet (it is in private preview), so they will have to use a workaround for now.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Internet company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Snowflake - a very cost effective JSON querying tool.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

August 6, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Snowflake is currently being used to ingest daily JSON files exported from an analytics package into S3. We use Snowflake for Ad Hoc Queries, aggregating daily KPIs and pushing that data into a SQL Server, as well as creating Tableau extracts for our dashboards. We have also started using it for deeper Machine Learning types of analysis - such as creating predictive models.

Pros

Process Engine control - we can stop/pause/start engines for various tasks.
Processing speed is adequate unless there are many users on at the same time.
Web interface is easy and intuitive, like the fact that your queries are automatically saved in tabs.

Cons

Very limited amount of tabs - saved queries, which requires us to store the code somewhere else and re-use existing queries.
Performance can really be a problem if there are many users on the system at the same time.
SnowFlake support sometimes can be hard to reach.

Likelihood to Recommend

Snowflake is great in quick process and ad hoc queries of JSON files (with built-in JSON support). Snowflake would not be the best alternative for sitting on top of Tableau Dashboards - mostly because of the engine being idle and filtering might take additional time. The fact that you only pay for engine time you actually use makes Snowflake is very cost-effective.

Verified User

Team Lead in Engineering (Computer Games company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

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Snowflake's ease of use allows you to focus on what matters most - the data you're filling it with

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

June 10, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My company adopted Snowflake as our first cloud-based data warehouse. It is being used as a central repository for all company data from each business unit for the purposes of business intelligence.

Pros

Ease of use
Separation of storage and compute resources
Simple to scale up or down with virtual warehouses
Built-in support for the most popular data formats
Standard SQL dialect
Robust function library

Cons

Lacks support for common table expressions
Lacks support for correlated subqueries
Better technical support for customer identified bugs
Clearer pricing model

Likelihood to Recommend

Andrew Goss

Data Engineer in Engineering at Interfolio (Internet, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience