Amazon EMR vs Snowflake Analytics comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Snowflake Computing are both solutions in the Cloud Data Warehouse category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #13 with an average rating of 7.8, while Snowflake Computing is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.3. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 3.4% mindshare in CDW, compared to Snowflake Computing’s 1.5% mindshare. Additionally, 83% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Snowflake Computing users who would recommend it.

Amazon EMR

Read 25 Amazon EMR reviews

1,599 Views
831 Comparison Views

83% willing to recommend

Snowflake Analytics

Read 43 Snowflake Analytics reviews

959 Views
345 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon EMR

Snowflake Analytics

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

Amazon EMR and Snowflake Analytics are key players in the cloud-based data processing arena. Snowflake Analytics leads with its superior feature set and advanced query capabilities, despite its higher costs.

Features: Amazon EMR is known for its scalability, auto-scaling capabilities, and seamless integration with Amazon EC2 and S3. It provides flexibility for data processing tasks without the burdens of IT infrastructure. Snowflake Analytics offers time travel, zero-copy cloning, and operates effortlessly across AWS, Azure, and GCP. It is a SaaS solution ideal for comprehensive data management with no complex installations.

Room for Improvement: Amazon EMR's interface could be improved along with user-friendly job setup and startup times. It could also benefit from better cost management and cluster automation. Snowflake Analytics could enhance machine learning capabilities, simplify data migration, and provide clearer cost transparency. Enhanced integration with AI and Python tools is recommended.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both Amazon EMR and Snowflake Analytics facilitate public cloud deployments, with Amazon EMR noted for private cloud options. Amazon EMR generally receives positive customer service feedback, though response times can vary. Snowflake Analytics is praised for consistent and efficient support.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon EMR is priced affordably but may incur high charges if not carefully managed, as costs are based on EC2 usage. Snowflake Analytics uses a usage-based pricing model, potentially leading to high computation expenses. However, its decoupled compute and storage offers flexibility, and it often provides higher ROI for migrating users from legacy systems.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon EMR vs. Snowflake Analytics Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EMR vs. Snowflake Analytics

December 2025

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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

5.3

Snowflake Analytics improves efficiency and cost management, though ROI varies; users often see notable time and cost savings.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Snowflake Analytics report

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 praised for responsiveness and professionalism but criticized for occasional delays and access issues.

They help with billing, cost determination, IAM properties, security compliance, and deployment and migration activities.

Mirza Mujtaba Baig

Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs

We get all call support, screen sharing support, and immediate support, so there are no problems.

reviewer1343079

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.

reviewer2043696

Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

The Snowflake Analytics documentation is excellent.

reviewer2729628

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.

Garima Goel

Associate Principal Engineer at Nagarro

The technical support for Snowflake Analytics is excellent based on what I have heard from others.

Paresh_Nayak

Solutions Architect at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Snowflake Analytics report

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 scalable cloud infrastructure, automatic resource management, and seamless data handling with strong performance for 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.

Mirza Mujtaba Baig

Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

Storage is unlimited because they use S3 if it is AWS, so storage has no limit.

KamleshPant

Senior Software Architect at USEReady

It supports both horizontal and vertical scaling effectively.

Paresh_Nayak

Solutions Architect at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Maintaining security and data governance becomes easier with an entire data lake in place, and the scalability improves performance.

Garima Goel

Associate Principal Engineer at Nagarro

For more quotes and insights, download the Snowflake Analytics report

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 rated for its stability and reliability, offering minimal issues and excellent cloud support performance.

Regular updates, patch installations, monitoring, logging, alerting, and disaster recovery activities are crucial for maintaining stability.

Mirza Mujtaba Baig

Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

Snowflake Analytics has been stable and reliable in my experience.

Garima Goel

Associate Principal Engineer at Nagarro

Snowflake Analytics is stable, scoring around eight point five to nine out of ten.

Paresh_Nayak

Solutions Architect at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

The Power BI team raised tickets for both Power BI and Snowflake Analytics, and their responses were very good.

reviewer2729628

Lead Analytics Consultant at a outsourcing company with 51-200 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Snowflake Analytics report

Room For Improvement

Amazon EMR users face challenges with customization, stability, onboarding, cost optimization, task speed, and demand enhanced integration and security.

Snowflake Analytics requires better orchestration, integration, Python support, price transparency, data exports, and enhanced machine learning and performance features.

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.

reviewer1343079

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.

Mirza Mujtaba Baig

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.

reviewer2043696

Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

AIML-based SQL prompt and query generation could be an area for enhancement.

KamleshPant

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.

Paresh_Nayak

Solutions Architect at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

Garima Goel

Associate Principal Engineer at Nagarro

For more quotes and insights, download the Snowflake Analytics report

Setup Cost

Amazon EMR pricing is variable, potentially costly, but users can manage expenses with strategic resource and instance management.

Snowflake Analytics provides flexible pricing, balancing usability with cost, offering competitive rates and value through its decoupled storage and compute.

Costs are involved based on cluster resources, data volumes, EC2 instances, instance sizes, Kubernetes, Docker services, storage, and data transfers.

Mirza Mujtaba Baig

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.

reviewer2043696

Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

Snowflake charges per query, which amounts to a very minor cost, such as $0.015 per query.

AyindeHammed

BI Developer at DivVerse LLC

Snowflake is better and cheaper than Redshift and other cloud warehousing systems.

KamleshPant

Senior Software Architect at USEReady

Snowflake Analytics is quite economical.

Paresh_Nayak

Solutions Architect at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Snowflake Analytics report

Valuable Features

Amazon EMR offers scalable, cost-effective big data management with integration, flexibility, security, and seamless Hadoop and Spark processing.

Snowflake Analytics offers efficient, scalable data management with strong security, cloud flexibility, and advanced features for seamless data integration.

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.

Mirza Mujtaba Baig

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.

reviewer1343079

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.

reviewer2043696

Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

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.

AyindeHammed

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.

Paresh_Nayak

Solutions Architect at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

It is a data offering where I can see data lineage, data governance, and data security.

KamleshPant

Senior Software Architect at USEReady

For more quotes and insights, download the Snowflake Analytics report

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EMR

Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse

13th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Hadoop (3rd)

Snowflake Analytics

Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse

10th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Web Analytics (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon EMR is 3.4%, up from 3.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake Analytics is 1.5%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Data Warehouse Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Snowflake Analytics	1.5%
Amazon EMR	3.4%
Other	95.1%

Cloud Data Warehouse

Featured Reviews

reviewer1343079

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.

Read full review

Garima Goel

Associate Principal Engineer at Nagarro

Have created secure cloud-based data lakes and improved real-time data processing using integrated AI features

There are many capabilities which Snowflake Analytics offers that I find valuable, such as the storage and compute engine that allows working with any cloud system such as AWS or Azure, alongside its efficiencies in storage computation and cost-effectiveness, which saves money compared to on-premise systems. We also have features such as pre-cached results, Time Travel, and fail-safe, which are very useful for restoring data if deleted accidentally, and the streams and data pipes that facilitate real-time ingestion are great features as well. Snowflake Analytics offers multiple new connectors, allowing me to connect it with Kafka, and with Snowpark, I can work with any programming language such as Python, Java, or Scala for data processing and analysis. The data sharing feature offered by Snowflake Analytics is good because it allows sharing specific sets of data to end customers or users from different Snowflake Analytics accounts without exposing the entire dataset for data security reasons. Snowflake Analytics' support for machine learning models and real-time insights has enhanced significantly. Originally, it wasn't strong in AI/ML, but now it has multiple models and forecasting capabilities, providing good competition to tools such as Databricks and Spark. In BI, I have worked majorly with Microsoft Power BI, and the integration with Snowflake Analytics is very easy. The way we integrate Snowflake Analytics with other on-premise systems just requires the warehouse details, username, passwords, and the account name, along with multiple options such as client ID and credentials for logging in and creating a session. The end-to-end encryption provided by Snowflake Analytics is very important because, in my previous firm, working in finance and investment management, data encryption is necessary due to the sensitive nature of customer data and the involvement of people's money. It's crucial to have encryption in transit and at rest, along with data masking features which Snowflake Analytics offers.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Educational Organization

13%

Computer Software Company

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

Healthcare Company

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	12

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	12
Large Enterprise	21

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What do you like most about Snowflake Analytics?

Its performance speed is very good.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake Analytics?

Snowflake Analytics is quite economical. It does not appear to incur significant extra expenses beyond the solution's initial cost. However, a complete pricing analysis is still in progress.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Snowflake Analytics?

I do not see any areas that could be improved with Snowflake Analytics.

See all answers

Comparisons

Snowflake vs Amazon EMR

Compared 24% of the time

Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop vs Amazon EMR

Compared 12% of the time

Apache Spark vs Amazon EMR

Compared 8% of the time

Amazon Redshift vs Amazon EMR

Compared 8% of the time

AWS Lake Formation vs Amazon EMR

Compared 7% of the time

More Amazon EMR Competitors

Amplitude vs Snowflake Analytics

Compared 17% of the time

SAP Business Data Cloud vs Snowflake Analytics

Compared 13% of the time

Teradata vs Snowflake Analytics

Compared 11% of the time

Adobe Analytics vs Snowflake Analytics

Compared 10% of the time

SAP IQ vs Snowflake Analytics

Compared 9% of the time

More Snowflake Analytics Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EMR

January 2026

Download Amazon EMR product report

Buyer's Guide

Snowflake Analytics

December 2025

Download Snowflake Analytics product report

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic MapReduce

No data available

Overview

Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) is a web service that makes it easy to quickly and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. Amazon EMR simplifies big data processing, providing a managed Hadoop framework that makes it easy, fast, and cost-effective for you to distribute and process vast amounts of your data across dynamically scalable Amazon EC2 instances.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Conventional data platforms and big data solutions struggle to deliver on their fundamental purpose: to enable any user to work with any data, without limits on scale, performance or flexibility. Whether you’re a data analyst, data scientist, data engineer, or any other business or technology professional, you’ll get more from your data with Snowflake.

To achieve this, we built a new data platform from the ground up for the cloud. It’s designed with a patented new architecture to be the centerpiece for data pipelines, data warehousing, data lakes, data application development, and for building data exchanges to easily and securely share governed data. The result, A platform delivered as a service that’s powerful but simple to use.

Snowflake’s cloud data platform supports a multi-cloud strategy, including a cross-cloud approach to mix and match clouds as you see fit. Snowflake delivers advantages such as global data replication, which means you can move your data to any cloud in any region, without having to re-code your applications or learn new skills.

Snowflake Computing

Sample Customers

Yelp

Lionsgate, Adobe, Sony, Capital One, Akamai, Deliveroo, Snagajob, Logitech, University of Notre Dame, Runkeeper

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EMR vs. Snowflake Analytics

December 2025

Free Report: Amazon EMR vs. Snowflake Analytics

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EMR vs. Snowflake Analytics and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.

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