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AWS Lake Formation vs Snowflake comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

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

AWS Lake Formation
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
13th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Snowflake
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
100
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (1st), AI Synthetic Data (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of AWS Lake Formation is 5.5%, up from 5.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 18.9%, down from 23.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Ramesh Raghavan - PeerSpot reviewer
Centralized repository, offers various cataloging mechanisms for quick data retrieval but data governance capabilities could be better
There are a couple of areas for improvement with Lake Formation. One of the main challenges, especially when dealing with rich media content, like in MarTech (Marketing Technology) or ad agencies, is its versatility. Some clients feel that Lake Formation doesn’t meet their needs and they tend to prefer competitor products for those specific use cases. The second area for improvement is in data governance. Specifically, Lake Formation could enhance its capabilities in audit logs, real-time monitoring, and advanced data governance. This includes managing the entire data lineage—where the data originated, how it moves, and where it’s currently stored. The visibility of the data as it evolves is crucial, and that’s where more advanced governance capabilities would be beneficial.
Snehasish Das - PeerSpot reviewer
Transformation in data querying speed with good migration capabilities
Snowflake is a data lake on the cloud where all processing happens in memory, resulting in very fast query responses. One key feature is the separation of compute and storage, which eliminates storage limitations. It also has tools for migrating data from legacy databases like Oracle. Its stability and efficiency enhance performance greatly. Tools in the AI/ML marketplace are readily available without needing development.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is quite good at handling analytics. It's done a good job at helping us centralize them."
"We use AWS Lake Formation typically for the data warehouse."
"AWS Lake Formation lets you see all your data and tables on one screen."
"The most important advantage in using AWS Lake Formation is its ability to connect the data lake to the other technologies in AWS. This is what I advise my clients."
"AWS Lake Formation works hand in hand with other products."
"It is seamlessly integrated within the AWS ecosystem, making it straightforward to manage access patterns for AWS-native services."
"The solution has many features that are applicable to events such as audits."
"I can easily move data from cold storage to regular storage."
"The technical support is pretty good, particularly if you are a more technical user."
"The most valuable feature is the snapshot database. In one second, you can just take a snapshot of the database for test purposes."
"We find the data sharing and data marketplace aspects of Snowflake absolutely amazing."
"Everything is automatic, and I don't have to do any maintenance."
"The solution is stable."
"The solution's customer service is good."
"Once you have finished your designs they can be easily imported to Snowflake and the information can be readily accessed without an IT expert."
"As long as you don't need to worry about the storage or cost, this solution would be one of the best ones on the market for scalability purposes."
 

Cons

"It falls short when it comes to more granular access control, such as cell-level or row-level entitlements which is a significant drawback for organizations that require precise control over who can access specific rows of data."
"For the end-users, it's not as user-friendly as it could be."
"Lake Formation could enhance its capabilities in audit logs, real-time monitoring, and advanced data governance."
"You need to have data experience to use the product."
"The solution could make improvements around orchestration and doing some automation stuff on AWS front automation. It would be useful if we could use automation to build images and use hardened images which are CIS compliant."
"If I could improve AWS Lake Formation, I would add more integrations with SageMaker."
"AWS Lake Formation's pricing could be cheaper."
"In our experience what could be improved are not the support, performance or monitoring, but at a managerial level, the very expensive professional services of AWS. This could be an area of improvement for them. It's too expensive to acquire their support."
"The scheduling system can definitely be better because we had to use external airflow for that. There should be orchestration for the scheduling system. Snowflake currently does not support machine learning, so it is just storage. They also need some alternatives for SQL Query. There should also be support for Spark in different languages such as Python."
"The UI could improve because sometimes in the security query the UI freezes. We then have to close the window and restart."
"It would be helpful if Snowflake could create good reports instead of using Power BI reports."
"The solution could improve the user interface and add functionality to the system."
"In future releases, it can also support full unstructured data."
"In a future release we would like to have a link which would allow us to connect to an external database and create certain views in your own database. This is because it is becoming hard for us to compare the data between multiple sources."
"They do have a native connector to connect with integration tools for loading data, but it would be much better to have the functionality built-in."
"Maybe there could be some more connectors to other systems, but this is what they are constantly developing anyway."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"AWS Lake Formation is a bit expensive."
"Part of the problem with the pricing is that it is very difficult for businesses to get an idea of how expensive it might be until they actually start using Snowflake."
"The price of Snowflake is very reasonable."
"On average, with the number of queries that we run, we pay approximately $200 USD per month."
"Pricing is approximately $US 50 per DB. Terabyte is around $US 50 per month."
"The pricing for Snowflake is competitive."
"We use Snowflake pretty heavily. We pay a significant amount of money for the tool. I'd say we pay $300k to $400K every year."
"I believe that pricing is reasonable for this solution."
"I am not much aware of the price, but based on what I have analyzed so far, its cost is reasonable as compared to on-prem data warehouse solutions. It provides a great deal for production."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
5%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Educational Organization
14%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about AWS Lake Formation?
It is seamlessly integrated within the AWS ecosystem, making it straightforward to manage access patterns for AWS-native services.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Lake Formation?
The pricing is expensive compared to OpenStack, but cheaper than other cloud environments. It's middle-of-the-road for regular storage yet very cost-effective when using Amazon Glacier for data.
What needs improvement with AWS Lake Formation?
If I could improve AWS Lake Formation, I would add more integrations with SageMaker. I would have built-in functions that provide statistics for the data when using the GUI, such as SageMaker Insig...
What do you like most about Snowflake?
The best thing about Snowflake is its flexibility in changing warehouse sizes or computational power.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake?
It is complicated to understand how requests impact warehouse size. Unlike competitors such as Microsoft and Databricks ( /products/databricks-reviews ), Snowflake lacks transparency in estimating ...
What needs improvement with Snowflake?
There is a need for a tool to help me estimate the cost of using Snowflake. Enhancements in user experience for data observability and quality checks would be beneficial, as these tasks currently r...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Snowflake Computing
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
Accordant Media, Adobe, Kixeye Inc., Revana, SOASTA, White Ops
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Lake Formation vs. Snowflake and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,579 professionals have used our research since 2012.