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Ably vs Snowplow comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Ably
Ranking in AWS Marketplace
11th
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Snowplow
Ranking in AWS Marketplace
22nd
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the AWS Marketplace category, the mindshare of Ably is 0.2%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowplow is 0.2%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
AWS Marketplace Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Ably0.2%
Snowplow0.2%
Other99.6%
AWS Marketplace
 

Featured Reviews

Uday Nagpure  - PeerSpot reviewer
Program Manager at Zensar Technologies
Reduced manual work and built reliable real-time collaboration with serverless messaging
I love Ably for its advanced pub/sub messaging capabilities, which help us with messaging Delta Compression, allowing us to send only changes from previous messages instead of entire payloads every time. For example, if I have to say 'hi', instead of sending the whole payload, it only sends the change in the current payload, reducing bandwidth consumption and enabling high-frequency data streaming. This major change has made our clients really happy as they receive notifications and messages without latency. Additionally, if a client goes offline, Ably stores messages in history for up to 72 hours, allowing clients to query history and catch up on missed events, ensuring complete stream continuity. It also supports multi-protocol, using WebSockets and gracefully falling back to server-sent events and long polling as needed, including support for MQTT and IoT devices along with pub/sub control for easy migration.I appreciate the serverless integration that has the integrated native web hook, instantly triggering serverless functions such as AWS Lambda and Azure Function when specific real-time events occur. It also allows Kafka Connector for seamless ingestion of messages from Kafka topics to stream them out to millions of users in milliseconds.
KK
Product Owner at Karine Caimo
Data teams have gained full control over real‑time user behavior tracking for advertising insights
Snowplow offers the best features in that you are completely free to make your own data model, track the way you want to track, and control the way the data comes to Snowflake so you are the complete owner of the raw data without being forced into a certain data model. Having that level of flexibility impacts our team's work and projects as we needed quite a lot of people that were really good in Snowplow. However, from the moment that you completely understood the technical aspects, you were completely free to set up your own Snowplow environment and track the way you wanted to track and what you wanted to track, which is not possible with Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics, for example. Snowplow has impacted my organization positively, very well. For DPG Media, it is the most important data source that we have, delivering a lot of value in the company. We are making data mesh products on this data all over the company. I think for advertisement, it is really the most important source of data.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"My most-liked feature is its highly reliable real-time messaging capacity."
"Ably's API integration is intuitive; it definitely improved our efficiency, and we saw faster user interaction and around a 20% reduction in latency during peak times, which improved user experience as well."
"Ably has improved our organization by enhancing real-time communication capabilities and providing reliable data delivery."
"We experience vast improvements across many areas with Ably; when users connect bank accounts, we previously had to poll repeatedly, which is now replaced by Ably's real-time infrastructure that maintains a persistent back-end connection, significantly reducing the need for infrastructure management and API load, resulting in average bank connection display times decreasing from eight to twelve seconds down to one to two seconds, and with persistent back-end connections reducing API calls, we achieve a lower operational load, seeing an impressive reduction of thirty thousand to forty thousand calls monthly."
"Ably has a big capacity to stream data all over the world, has higher reliability and a 99.99% uptime, offers robust security guarantees and ease of integration, and saved at least 80% of the cost that would have required more developers and more time for integration testing and development."
"Ably has positively impacted our organization by providing a good return on investment by avoiding the labor cost of building and maintaining a custom WebSocket server."
"Snowplow has impacted my organization positively, very well. For DPG Media, it is the most important data source that we have, delivering a lot of value in the company."
"We have a lot more insight into our user behaviour and can now make the correct decisions."
"Snowplow has positively impacted my organization by enabling me to see user behavior in real time."
"Snowplow is excellent at what it is designed for: full control over data collection and processing, strong schema-driven tracking, and works really well with warehouse-first stacks like Google BigQuery."
"Snowplow is doing perfectly what it says it is doing; it meets everything it promises and develops the product all the time."
 

Cons

"Ably can be improved in several areas."
"It falls just short of a perfect ten only because full twenty-four-hour phone or live chat escalation is heavily gated behind their highest enterprise pricing tiers."
"Overall, Ably appears strong for managed real-time operations, but could improve areas such as pricing predictability."
"Setup is challenging because getting the pipeline infrastructure right is hard."
"The only issue that we had at a certain moment was that Snowplow was offering more services and asking us to pay more, but we did not use all these services."
"Snowplow can be improved by reducing the pricing, as it is currently too high."
"Maintenance overhead was high, debugging and schema management were time-consuming, and there were increasing security concerns due to it no longer being actively maintained."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
34%
Outsourcing Company
19%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Consumer Goods Company
7%
Construction Company
36%
Insurance Company
29%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise9
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Ably?
For the use I have made, I didn't see any limit or margin to implement to go higher.
What is your primary use case for Ably?
My main use case for Ably is integrating the Kafka queue with Ably and sending notifications to IoT devices like a smartwatch. After the topic was reached by the message, Ably can fetch it from thi...
What advice do you have for others considering Ably?
I would recommend trying Ably if you have a wider range of IoT device types to deliver notifications. I gave this review a rating of 9.
What needs improvement with Snowplow?
The setup process is an area for improvement because getting the pipeline infrastructure right is hard.
What is your primary use case for Snowplow?
I use it for product analytics such as tracking clicks and page views, as well as providing a customer 360.
 

Comparisons

No data available
No data available
 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Ably vs. Snowplow and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
909,948 professionals have used our research since 2012.