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Amazon EMR vs Snowflake Analytics comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
4.8
Amazon EMR offers cost savings and ROI benefits, with some users experiencing up to 20% cost reduction and high returns.
Sentiment score
5.6
Users experience mixed ROI with Snowflake; it often improves operational efficiency, time savings, and cost control.
Snowflake Analytics has positively impacted our organization by saving about eight to ten hours per week, which we can use for advanced analytics and automation tasks.
Junior Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.9
Amazon EMR customer service varies, with generally responsive support despite reported delays and occasional gaps in integration assistance.
Sentiment score
6.9
Snowflake Analytics support is often responsive and competent, but accessibility issues exist for non-major partners, despite strong community resources.
They help with billing, cost determination, IAM properties, security compliance, and deployment and migration activities.
Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs
We get all call support, screen sharing support, and immediate support, so there are no problems.
Senior Chief Engineer (Enterprise System Presales/Postsales) at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
I would rate the technical support from Amazon as ten out of ten.
Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees
The Snowflake Analytics documentation is excellent.
Lead Analytics Consultant at a outsourcing company with 51-200 employees
Recently we had a two-day session where the Snowflake Analytics team provided a demo on Cortex AI and its features.
Associate Principal Engineer at Nagarro
The technical support for Snowflake Analytics is excellent based on what I have heard from others.
Data Governance Architect at Sterlite Technologies Ltd
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
Amazon EMR efficiently scales for businesses, offering customizable cluster options to manage diverse data sizes and enterprise demands.
Sentiment score
7.7
Snowflake Analytics offers exceptional scalability through auto-scaling, cloud integration, and efficient resource management, ideal for handling large data volumes.
Scalability can be provisioned using the auto-scaling feature, EC2 instances, on-demand instances, and storage locations like block storage, S3, or file storage.
Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs
Storage is unlimited because they use S3 if it is AWS, so storage has no limit.
Senior Software Architect at USEReady
It supports both horizontal and vertical scaling effectively.
Data Governance Architect at Sterlite Technologies Ltd
Maintaining security and data governance becomes easier with an entire data lake in place, and the scalability improves performance.
Associate Principal Engineer at Nagarro
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Amazon EMR is praised for stability and reliability, with high ratings due to its configurability and robust features.
Sentiment score
8.4
Snowflake Analytics is highly stable, supported by major cloud providers, with strong performance and minimal technical issues reported.
Regular updates, patch installations, monitoring, logging, alerting, and disaster recovery activities are crucial for maintaining stability.
Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs
Snowflake Analytics has been stable and reliable in my experience.
Associate Principal Engineer at Nagarro
Snowflake Analytics is very stable; I have never experienced any crash downs or server issues.
Junior Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Snowflake Analytics is stable, scoring around eight point five to nine out of ten.
Data Governance Architect at Sterlite Technologies Ltd
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon EMR users face challenges with customization, stability, onboarding, cost optimization, task speed, and demand enhanced integration and security.
Snowflake Analytics struggles with data migration, integration, performance, cost issues, and needs better UI, job scheduling, and AWS support.
The cost factor differs significantly. When you run Spark application on EKS, you run at the pod level, so you can control the compute cost. But in Amazon EMR, when you have to run one application, you have to launch the entire EC2.
Senior Chief Engineer (Enterprise System Presales/Postsales) at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
There is room for improvement with respect to retries, handling the volume of data on S3 buckets, cluster provisioning, scaling, termination, security, and integration between services like S3, Glue, Lake Formation, and DynamoDB.
Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs
I have thoughts on what would be great to see in the product, such as AI/ML features or additional options.
Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees
AIML-based SQL prompt and query generation could be an area for enhancement.
Senior Software Architect at USEReady
If it offered flexibility similar to Oracle and supported more heterogeneous data sources and database connectivity, it would be even better.
Data Governance Architect at Sterlite Technologies Ltd
I would prefer Snowflake Analytics to improve their support response times, as sometimes the responses we receive are not very prompt and ticket assignments may not be timely.
Associate Principal Engineer at Nagarro
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EMR pricing is variable, potentially costly, but users can manage expenses with strategic resource and instance management.
Snowflake Analytics uses a pay-as-you-go model, emphasizing strategic design to manage costs, often seen as competitively priced.
Costs are involved based on cluster resources, data volumes, EC2 instances, instance sizes, Kubernetes, Docker services, storage, and data transfers.
Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs
I would rate the price for Amazon EMR, where one is high and ten is low, as a good one.
Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Snowflake charges per query, which amounts to a very minor cost, such as $0.015 per query.
BI Developer at DivVerse LLC
Snowflake is better and cheaper than Redshift and other cloud warehousing systems.
Senior Software Architect at USEReady
Snowflake Analytics is quite economical.
Data Governance Architect at Sterlite Technologies Ltd
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EMR offers scalable, cost-effective big data management with integration, flexibility, security, and seamless Hadoop and Spark processing.
Snowflake Analytics provides scalable, secure, and user-friendly analytics with cloud integration, supporting diverse data needs and flexible data sharing.
Amazon EMR helps in scalability, real-time and batch processing of data, handling efficient data sources, and managing data lakes, data stores, and data marts on file systems and in S3 buckets.
Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs
Amazon EMR provides out-of-the-box functionality because we can deploy and get Spark functionality over Hadoop.
Senior Chief Engineer (Enterprise System Presales/Postsales) at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The features at Amazon EMR that I have found most valuable are fully customizable functions.
Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Running a considerable query on Microsoft SQL Server may take up to thirty minutes or an hour, while Snowflake executes the same query in less than three minutes.
BI Developer at DivVerse LLC
Snowflake Analytics supports data security with a single sign-on feature and complies with framework regulations, which is highly beneficial.
Data Governance Architect at Sterlite Technologies Ltd
Previously, we faced issues with slow queries due to traditional systems, but within Snowflake, we can assign separate virtual warehouses for reporting as well as data processing, ensuring that it does not impact tool performance and does not delay reporting to business users.
Junior Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EMR
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
13th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (3rd)
Snowflake Analytics
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
11th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Web Analytics (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon EMR is 3.8%, up from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake Analytics is 3.4%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Snowflake Analytics3.4%
Amazon EMR3.8%
Other92.8%
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1343079 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Chief Engineer (Enterprise System Presales/Postsales) at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Has simplified ETL workflows with on-demand processing but needs improved cost efficiency and visibility
I have used AWS Glue with S3 for making tables and databases, but regarding Amazon EMR, I do not remember much as we are currently using it very minimally. This is my observation: In EKS, we have had to deploy by ourselves because EKS does not provide the Hadoop framework, Spark, Hive, and everything, but we have completed all the deployment ourselves. Whereas Amazon EMR provides all these things. The cost factor differs significantly. When you run Spark application on EKS, you run at the pod level, so you can control the compute cost. But in Amazon EMR, when you have to run one application, you have to launch the entire EC2. In Qubole, the interface was very good. I could see many details because in Amazon EMR console, very few details are available. In Qubole, at one link, you can get all the details of what is happening, how the processes are running, and the cost decreased by using Qubole. I found Qubole more user-friendly and cost-effective. From the security point of view, we had to open some access rights to Qubole, which might be a drawback in comparison to Amazon EMR which is native to AWS.
Hemanthreddy Vakiti - PeerSpot reviewer
Junior Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Daily restaurant dashboards have become faster and now support simultaneous team analytics
Some of the best features of Snowflake Analytics is how it is separated for compute and storage, which allows multiple teams to run queries without performance impact. Our project has more than nine or ten teams, so if a team is working on a particular dashboard and another team wants to work on Snowflake Analytics, they can easily work on it without disturbing the work of one team, ensuring that the work can be consistent and multiple users can use the tool simultaneously. This is one of the main features I appreciate about Snowflake Analytics.The other aspect is how the query performance is high due to its columnar storage and also automatic optimization, allowing for scaling down during weekdays when there is less data and scaling up during weekends or festivals when the data can be huge. Because of this automatic scaling, if there is less data, we are using only 5 GB instead of 10 GB, which reduces the storage level, and consequently, the cost can be reduced. This automatic scaling and optimization saves us a huge amount of money for our project. Snowflake Analytics has impacted our organization positively by providing faster query performance and better scalability. Previously, we faced issues with slow queries due to traditional systems, but within Snowflake, we can assign separate virtual warehouses for reporting as well as data processing, ensuring that it does not impact tool performance and does not delay reporting to business users. Analysts can run complex queries without affecting ETL workloads due to this separation, which has improved our speed of reporting, and our business users have expressed happiness due to how fast we are generating reports during peak hours.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Construction Company
17%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise23
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EMR?
I would rate the price for Amazon EMR, where one is high and ten is low, as a good one.
What needs improvement with Amazon EMR?
I feel some lack of functionality in Amazon EMR. I have thoughts on what would be great to see in the product, such as AI/ML features or additional options.
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon EMR?
I find it easy to integrate Amazon EMR with other AWS services like S3 or EC2 for data processing needs. I would rate this review as eight out of ten.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake Analytics?
The pricing for Snowflake Analytics is reasonable, but as I am not part of the management team, I am not certain about our organization's exact costs. Overall, the return on investment for this too...
What needs improvement with Snowflake Analytics?
One improvement Snowflake Analytics could benefit from is in cost, particularly during peak hours. Sometimes, due to its automatic scalability, we think it has scaled up, but it does not always hap...
What is your primary use case for Snowflake Analytics?
I am using Snowflake Analytics because we are already using Snowflake for data engineering and data warehousing tasks, and we are using it for analytics as well as business intelligence reporting. ...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic MapReduce
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Yelp
Lionsgate, Adobe, Sony, Capital One, Akamai, Deliveroo, Snagajob, Logitech, University of Notre Dame, Runkeeper
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EMR vs. Snowflake Analytics and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
914,262 professionals have used our research since 2012.