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Redshift vs Snowflake comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 1, 2026

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
6.0
Some entities quickly achieved cost savings and ROI, while others face challenges with optimization and evaluating benefits.
Sentiment score
5.7
Companies appreciate Snowflake's scalability and security, reporting cost reduction and productivity gains, despite challenges in isolating ROI impact.
We earned back our investment in Amazon Redshift within the first year.
Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.8
Amazon Redshift support is efficient yet costly, praised for documentation, but phone contact and complex issue resolution face delays.
Sentiment score
5.5
Snowflake's responsive, knowledgeable support and resources are valued, though time differences and complex queries can cause delays.
Whenever we need support, if there is an issue accessing stored data due to regional data center problems, the Amazon team is very helpful and provides optimal solutions quickly.
Analyst at Cepstrum(EEE Students Society), IIT Guwahati
Documentation that allows anyone with prior knowledge of Redshift or SQL to resolve technical issues.
Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It's costly when you enable support.
Senior Analyst at ESRI INDIA
We sought this documentation multiple times but faced difficulty in obtaining it.
Data Integration Developer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I received great support in migrating data to Snowflake, with quick responses and innovative solutions.
Technology Leader at eTCaaS
I am satisfied with the work of technical support from Snowflake; they are responsive and helpful.
Asset Builder at Genpact - Headstrong
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Amazon Redshift is highly scalable with flexible cluster adjustments, despite some challenges at larger scales and heavy loads.
Sentiment score
7.7
Snowflake offers seamless scalability and flexibility in managing large datasets efficiently, with some noting potential cost implications.
The scalability part needs improvement as the sizing requires trial and error.
Data Analytics, Ai & Automation Lead at a venture capital & private equity firm with 10,001+ employees
We have successfully increased our storage space, which was a smooth process without server crashes before or after scaling.
Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Snowflake is very scalable and has a dedicated team constantly improving the product.
Technology Leader at eTCaaS
The billing doubles with size increase, but processing does not necessarily speed up accordingly.
Data Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Recently, Snowflake has introduced streaming capabilities, real-time and dynamic tables, along with various connectors.
Senior Data Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Opinions on Amazon Redshift's stability vary, with some praising reliability and others noting issues in large clusters or maintenance.
Sentiment score
8.3
Snowflake is praised for its high stability and performance, handling large datasets seamlessly across various cloud providers.
Amazon Redshift is a stable product, and I would rate it nine or ten out of ten for stability.
Data Analytics, Ai & Automation Lead at a venture capital & private equity firm with 10,001+ employees
Snowflake is highly stable and performs well even with large data sets exceeding terabytes, maintaining stability throughout.
Data Integration Developer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Snowflake is very stable, especially when used with AWS.
Technology Leader at eTCaaS
Snowflake as a SaaS offering means that maintenance isn't an issue for me.
Data Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon Redshift users face challenges with performance, integration, cost, and features, preferring improved solutions like Snowflake's offerings.
Users recommend UI and pricing transparency improvements, enhanced analytics, data tools, support, and unstructured data integration in Snowflake.
They should bring the entire ETL data management process into Amazon Redshift.
Data Analytics, Ai & Automation Lead at a venture capital & private equity firm with 10,001+ employees
Integration with AI could be a good improvement.
Analyst at Cepstrum(EEE Students Society), IIT Guwahati
Integration with AI features could elevate its capabilities and popularity.
Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Enhancements in user experience for data observability and quality checks would be beneficial, as these tasks currently require SQL coding, which might be challenging for some users.
Data Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
What things you are going with to ask the support and how we manage the relationship matters a lot.
Asset Builder at Genpact - Headstrong
If more connectors were brought in and more visibility features were added, particularly around cost tracking in the FinOps area, it would be beneficial.
Senior Data Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
 

Setup Cost

Amazon Redshift offers mid-to-high pricing, seen as reasonable due to its scalability and potential cost-effectiveness compared to competitors.
Snowflake's pricing is flexible and competitive but estimating costs can be challenging due to its credit-based model.
The cost of technical support is high.
Senior Analyst at ESRI INDIA
It's a pretty good price and reasonable for the product quality.
Data Analytics, Ai & Automation Lead at a venture capital & private equity firm with 10,001+ employees
The pricing of Amazon Redshift is expensive.
Co-Founder, Director at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
When it comes to cloud support, the setup cost is very cheap compared to other platforms, such as Oracle or PostgreSQL, which typically require higher costs.
Data Integration Developer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Snowflake's pricing is on the higher side.
Technology Leader at eTCaaS
Snowflake lacks transparency in estimating resource usage.
Data Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
 

Valuable Features

Amazon Redshift offers scalability, fast queries, AWS integration, flexibility, security, cost-effectiveness, easy setup, and compatibility for complex data management.
Snowflake provides scalable, efficient data management with SQL access, multi-cloud support, cost-effective plans, and strong integration capabilities.
Amazon Redshift's performance optimization and scalability are quite helpful, providing functionalities such as scaling up and down.
Data Analytics, Ai & Automation Lead at a venture capital & private equity firm with 10,001+ employees
Scalability is also a strong point; I can scale it however I want without any limitations.
Co-Founder, Director at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
The specific features of Amazon Redshift that are beneficial for handling large data sets include fast retrieval due to cloud services and scalability, which allows us to retrieve data quickly.
Analyst at Cepstrum(EEE Students Society), IIT Guwahati
We had a comparison with Databricks and Snowflake a few months back, and this auto-scaling takes an edge within Snowflake; that's what our observation reflects.
Asset Builder at Genpact - Headstrong
I have used the Snowflake Zero-Copy Cloning feature in the past while prototyping data in lower environments. This feature is helpful as it saves a lot of time during the data replication process.
Senior Data Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Snowflake has contributed to significant cost savings.
Data Integration Developer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Redshift
Ranking in Data Warehouse
6th
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
7th
Ranking in Database Management Systems (DBMS)
8th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
73
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Snowflake
Ranking in Data Warehouse
1st
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
1st
Ranking in Database Management Systems (DBMS)
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
106
Ranking in other categories
AI Synthetic Data (1st), AI Software Development (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon Redshift is 7.0%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 15.1%, down from 18.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Snowflake15.1%
Amazon Redshift7.0%
Other77.9%
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Q&A Highlights

Padmanesh NC - PeerSpot reviewer
Big Data Solution Architect - Spatial Data Specialist at SCIERA, INC
Dec 26, 2017
 

Featured Reviews

Hemanthreddy Vakiti - PeerSpot reviewer
Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Optimized restaurant analytics has driven faster insights and streamlined daily reporting
Amazon Redshift offers massive parallel processing capability, allowing it to handle millions of records, along with integration with other AWS features such as S3 and QuickSight. The column-level storage supports high performance and easy data retrieval compared to other tools. The integration with S3 has helped my team immensely since S3 is our starting source, and the direct integration with Amazon Redshift simplifies the transformation and loading process. Columnar storage has benefited our performance significantly, allowing us to extract specific rows from tables with years of data much faster than other tools with row-level storage. Amazon Redshift has positively impacted our organization by significantly improving query performance and speed. Features such as easy integration with S3 allow us to process millions of records efficiently, ultimately saving us nearly one hour per day for our project.
SunilPatil1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Asset Builder at Genpact - Headstrong
Have prioritized security while managing multi-agent data migration and cloud adoption
We utilize Time Travel with Snowflake because this is a very useful feature. Everyone finds it crucial because in conventional data platforms, it's very difficult to handle these kinds of things. This feature is essential, though I don't have the use cases currently; it is just there for implementation. Regarding Snowflake's automated scaling and suspension features, this auto-scaling is very significant. We had a comparison with Databricks and Snowflake a few months back, and this auto-scaling takes an edge within Snowflake; that's what our observation reflects.
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Answers from the Community

Padmanesh NC - PeerSpot reviewer
Big Data Solution Architect - Spatial Data Specialist at SCIERA, INC
Dec 26, 2017
Dec 26, 2017
Interesting. Snowflake has a fundamentally different architecture in that compute and storage are completely separated allowing you to scale each dynamically and independently This makes me to get into Snowflake, Almost I am using Snowflake last 8 months. Its awesome.
2 out of 4 answers
it_user492777 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Evangelist at Snowflake Computing
Apr 20, 2017
Wow, that is a loaded question and hard to answer and not sound like a sales pitch (I will try). For one, Snowflake has a fundamentally different architecture in that compute and storage are completely separated allowing you to scale each dynamically and independently. That is as you load data the space just expands - no need to add more clusters, extents, files etc. Likewise if you need more compute power, you can resize the compute clusters on the fly using a drop down in the UI to add more nodes while the process is running. No need to put it in read only mode, export the data, then import to a bigger cluster. This is only possible because of the separation of compute and storage. Most other architectures (based on legacy systems) have the compute and storage more tightly coupled. Along with this architecture you can create multiple independent compute clusters of differing sizes and assign each to different work groups or workloads (with access to the same single data store - no data replication required). With this each group gets its own dedicated compute resource such that what one does will not impact performance of the others. This is all new code - not a refactoring of any other RDBMS code base so the founders were able to create features that take advantage of the elasticity of the cloud. In addition Snwoflake can ingest JSON data natively into relational table using a new data type designed to hold semi-structured data (which allows true schema on read using SQL). Very stable - over 400 customers to date. Some with over 1 PB of data and hundreds of users. It also has built in security -256 bit AES encryption of all data in motion and at rest by default with no impact on query performance. Pricing (I am not in sales!) - the pricing is public and on the website: https://www.snowflake.net/product/pricing/ You can check my post about my favorite features for more details: https://www.snowflake.net/top-10-cool-things-i-like-about-snowflake/ As for comparisons to RedShift you would have to talk with some real customers who have done the POCs with both of us. You might also look at some of the customer videos and case studies, but none of them really call out where we replaced RedShift as that tends to be kept confidential. https://www.snowflake.net/our-customers/
MM
Manager at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
Dec 25, 2017
Although I verified it only in a specific case, I performed performance verification with Redshift, BigQuery, Snowflake. Redshift has data redistribution occurred when searching under various conditions and performance was not good, but Snowflake holds data in small units called micro partitions, and also manages data for each column Therefore, operation like data redistribution was minimal and high performance was obtained. Snowflake can also start multiple clusters in the same database, but has an architecture in which conflicts do not occur even when accessing the same data between clusters. I recommend you to try it.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Construction Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
5%
Computer Software Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise29
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise61
 

Questions from the Community

How does Amazon Redshift compare with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?
Amazon Redshift is very fast, has a very good response time, and is very user-friendly. The initial setup is very straightforward. This solution can merge and integrate well with many different dat...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Redshift?
My experience with pricing and setup cost is satisfactory, as we have been loyal clients of Amazon since the beginning of our organization. However, I am not aware of the exact costs associated wit...
What needs improvement with Amazon Redshift?
Amazon Redshift could improve by enhancing its UI to be more user-friendly for non-technical users and by offering better cost management, as similar tools tend to be less expensive. Additionally, ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake?
I am not the person who manages pricing, setup cost, and licensing. Our team is not limited in pricing. The only experience we have had in terms of running and reprocessing a large number of histor...
What needs improvement with Snowflake?
Snowflake can be improved in terms of its recent switch to a new user interface, which feels less intuitive compared to the old one. Moving to this new interface is something that I would like to s...
What is your primary use case for Snowflake?
My main use case for Snowflake is building ETL pipelines and ad-hoc analytics on data that we have. A specific example of a pipeline and ad-hoc analytics task I have worked on using Snowflake invol...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Snowflake Computing, Snowflake Data Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Liberty Mutual Insurance, 4Cite Marketing, BrandVerity, DNA Plc, Sirocco Systems, Gainsight, Blue 449
Accordant Media, Adobe, Kixeye Inc., Revana, SOASTA, White Ops
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Redshift vs. Snowflake and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,196 professionals have used our research since 2012.