Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Amazon EMR vs Snowflake Analytics comparison

 

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
6.3
Companies using Amazon EMR often experience significant ROI, with savings up to 20% and substantial returns over on-premise systems.
Sentiment score
6.6
Snowflake Analytics boosts ROI up to 50% by optimizing costs, improving performance, and enabling simultaneous team collaboration.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.6
Amazon EMR support is generally proactive and efficient, but experiences vary, especially during open-source product integration.
Sentiment score
7.0
Snowflake Analytics' support receives mixed reviews; many praise responsiveness, while others face delays and struggle accessing direct help.
They help with billing, cost determination, IAM properties, security compliance, and deployment and migration activities.
The technical support for Snowflake Analytics is excellent based on what I have heard from others.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Amazon EMR effectively scales to enterprise needs, with auto-scaling and adaptability, despite occasional peak demand resource allocation delays.
Sentiment score
8.0
Snowflake Analytics excels in scalability, auto-scaling CPU/GPU resources efficiently, benefiting businesses with its adaptive cloud-based architecture.
Scalability can be provisioned using the auto-scaling feature, EC2 instances, on-demand instances, and storage locations like block storage, S3, or file storage.
It supports both horizontal and vertical scaling effectively.
Storage is unlimited because they use S3 if it is AWS, so storage has no limit.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon EMR is generally stable and reliable, despite occasional data-related stability issues, with robust failover and monitoring features.
Sentiment score
8.5
Snowflake Analytics is highly rated for stability, offering reliable performance and minimal outages thanks to cloud-backed robustness.
Regular updates, patch installations, monitoring, logging, alerting, and disaster recovery activities are crucial for maintaining stability.
Snowflake Analytics is stable, scoring around eight point five to nine out of ten.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon EMR struggles with a steep learning curve, complex configurations, unpredictable costs, and needs enhancements in stability and support.
Snowflake Analytics requires better orchestration, integration, performance, machine learning support, user interface, cost transparency, and AI-driven analytics capabilities.
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.
If it offered flexibility similar to Oracle and supported more heterogeneous data sources and database connectivity, it would be even better.
AIML-based SQL prompt and query generation could be an area for enhancement.
Navigating the user console can be challenging, particularly when looking for details like the account ID.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EMR's costs vary by resources used, with potential high monthly expenses, requiring careful management to prevent surprises.
Snowflake Analytics uses a flexible, consumption-based pricing model, balancing costs with usability for business analytics and streaming workloads.
Cost optimization can be achieved through instance usage, cluster sharing, and auto-scaling.
Snowflake charges per query, which amounts to a very minor cost, such as $0.015 per query.
Snowflake is better and cheaper than Redshift and other cloud warehousing systems.
Snowflake Analytics is quite economical.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EMR is scalable, easy to use, cost-effective, integrates well with Hadoop, and supports diverse analytics applications.
Snowflake Analytics offers scalable, flexible, and secure data integration with standout features for large datasets and AI capabilities across major cloud platforms.
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.
Snowflake Analytics supports data security with a single sign-on feature and complies with framework regulations, which is highly beneficial.
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.
It is a data offering where I can see data lineage, data governance, and data security.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EMR
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
12th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (3rd)
Snowflake Analytics
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
8th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Web Analytics (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon EMR is 3.3%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake Analytics is 0.5%, down from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Prashant  Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamless data integration enhances reporting efficiency and an easy setup
Amazon EMR has multiple connectors that can connect to various data sources. The service charges are based on processing only, depending on the resources used, which can help save money. It is easy to integrate with other services for storage, allowing data to be shifted to cheaper storage based on usage.
KamleshPant - PeerSpot reviewer
Data ecosystem thrives with advanced governance and streaming capabilities
It is a data offering where I can see data lineage, data governance, and data security. Snowflake has a streaming capability to work with real-time streaming data and delta tables. Additionally, task management, job scheduling, and connecting multiple data sources unify my data across internal and external sources. The system ecosystem for analytics is enhanced, and AI capabilities are incorporated.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Data Warehouse solutions are best for your needs.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
14%
Educational Organization
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
20%
Retailer
13%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon EMR?
Amazon EMR is a good solution that can be used to manage big data.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EMR?
Compared to others, Amazon seems efficient and is considered good for Big Data workloads. Costs are involved based on cluster resources, data volumes, EC2 ( /products/amazon-ec2-reviews ) instances...
What needs improvement with Amazon EMR?
There is room for improvement with respect to retries, handling the volume of data on S3 ( /products/amazon-s3-reviews ) buckets, cluster provisioning, scaling, termination, security, and integrati...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake Analytics?
Snowflake is better and cheaper than Redshift and other cloud warehousing systems. It's economical.
What needs improvement with Snowflake Analytics?
Most features are already available. Perhaps AIML integration might be further needed, or Snowflake is already implementing it. AIML-based SQL prompt and query generation could be an area for enhan...
 

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: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.