AWS Lake Formation vs Snowflake comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Snowflake Computing are both solutions in the Cloud Data Warehouse category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.1, while Snowflake Computing is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.3. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 4.7% mindshare in CDW, compared to Snowflake Computing’s 15.8% mindshare. Additionally, 85% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Snowflake Computing users who would recommend it.

AWS Lake Formation

Read 21 AWS Lake Formation reviews

1,610 Views
1,385 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

Snowflake

Read 104 Snowflake reviews

9,378 Views
5,721 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

AWS Lake Formation

Snowflake

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 1, 2026

Snowflake and AWS Lake Formation are two prominent solutions for managing data storage and access in the cloud. Snowflake has a favorable edge with users for pricing and support due to its scalability and flexibility, while AWS Lake Formation is seen as superior regarding security features, integrated AWS ecosystem capabilities, and cost-effectiveness for larger infrastructure deployments.

Features: Snowflake offers seamless scalability, high-speed distributed processing, and supports diverse file formats like CSV, JSON, and GZIP. AWS Lake Formation is known for its robust security features, ease of connection within the AWS environment, and presenting a unified ecosystem for AWS-native services users.

Room for Improvement: Snowflake could enhance its spatial capabilities, streamline Snowpipe auto-ingestion, and improve pricing transparency. AWS Lake Formation could integrate better with third-party services, enhance data governance, and improve cross-account sharing capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Snowflake is praised for its scalability and ease of deployment, although its support lacks SLAs. AWS Lake Formation excels in seamless deployment within AWS but may be less flexible across non-AWS environments, with responsive customer service, facing complexities in customized support.

Pricing and ROI: Snowflake's consumption-based pricing is seen as high compared to cloud services like Redshift but offers strong ROI through productivity enhancements. AWS Lake Formation is reasonably priced within the AWS ecosystem, enhancing ROI through integration benefits and comprehensive service offerings.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS Lake Formation vs. Snowflake Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

AWS Lake Formation vs. Snowflake

March 2026

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Helped 884,933 peers since 2012

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

8th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Snowflake

Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

104

Ranking in other categories

Data Warehouse (1st), AI Synthetic Data (2nd), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (7th), AI Software Development (9th)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of AWS Lake Formation is 4.7%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 15.8%, down from 21.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Snowflake	15.8%
AWS Lake Formation	4.7%
Other	79.5%

Cloud Data Warehouse

Featured Reviews

Ciro Baldim Guerra

Sr Analytics Engineer at Itau Unibanco S.A.

Has improved data governance by enabling clear ownership and structured access across teams

In my company, Itaú, we don't utilize all AWS offerings due to rigorous security measures. We operate approximately six to eight months behind other available services. I'm uncertain if gaps exist because of this limitation, though the system functions effectively for us. AWS Lake Formation offers column-level access control for databases, but we haven't implemented this feature either because it hasn't been approved by our compliance, governance, or security areas. In our current setup, everyone from my business unit uses the same consumer account. When access is requested for a table, everyone using that business unit account receives access. This could present a security concern, though it benefits new team members who automatically receive all necessary access permissions. However, I struggle to identify specific improvements needed in AWS Lake Formation.

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SunilPatil1

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"AWS Lake Formation significantly improves the structure of the data mesh, making it superior to previous structures we used."

"The solution has many features that are applicable to events such as audits."

"It is seamlessly integrated within the AWS ecosystem, making it straightforward to manage access patterns for AWS-native services."

"The solution is quite good at handling analytics. It's done a good job at helping us centralize them."

"We use this to reduce latency from minutes to seconds, as we aim for real-time visibility into patient healthcare monitoring."

"We have observed measurable benefits in terms of cost savings, time savings, resource savings, and efficiency improvements in our workflows."

"We use AWS Lake Formation typically for the data warehouse."

"In the shortest form, what I appreciated about AWS Lake Formation was that the schema definition and data cataloging were quite good."

More AWS Lake Formation pros

"The way it is built and designed is valuable. The way the shared model is built and the way it exploits the power of the cloud is very good. Certain features related to administration and management, akin to Oracle Flashback and all that, are very important for modern-day administration and management. It is also good in terms of managing and improving performance, indexing, and partitioning. It is sort of completely automated. Everything is essentially under the hood, and the engine takes care of it all. As a data warehouse on the cloud, Snowflake stands strong on its ground even though each of the cloud providers has its own data warehouse, such as Redshift for AWS or Synapse for Azure."

"The most valuable features of Snowflake are its performance and power."

"The solution is very stable."

"The most valuable features are sharing data, Time Travel, Zero Copy Cloning, performance, and speed."

"The integration capabilities of the product are good and you get what you pay for when it comes to Snowflake."

"The overall ecosystem was easy to manage. Given that we weren't a very highly technical group, it was preferable to other things we looked at because it could do all of the cloud tunings. It can tune your data warehouse to an appropriate size for controlled billing, resume and sleep functions, and all such things. It was much more simple than doing native Azure or AWS development. It was stable, and their support was also perfect. It was also very easy to deploy. It was one of those rare times where they did exactly what they said they could do."

"Snowflake has three great features: Snowpiping is proving to be very valuable, Time Travel is excellent, and Snowpipes are another great functionality the solution has made available."

"Can be leveraged with respect to better performance, auto tuning and competition."

More Snowflake pros

Cons

"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."

"Lake Formation could enhance its capabilities in audit logs, real-time monitoring, and advanced data governance."

"If I could improve AWS Lake Formation, I would add more integrations with SageMaker."

"AWS Lake Formation's pricing could be cheaper."

"In our current setup, everyone from my business unit uses the same consumer account. When access is requested for a table, everyone using that business unit account receives access. This could present a security concern, though it benefits new team members who automatically receive all necessary access permissions."

"The main challenge we faced with AWS Lake Formation was related to cross-account sharing. Granting access to other AWS accounts for tables or databases in a different AWS account was somewhat difficult."

"I haven't seen any measurable benefits from using AWS Lake Formation, such as time saving, resource saving, or efficiency improvements."

"Athena can be a bit clunky when writing queries, indicating a potential enhancement point for easier user interaction with query tools such as DataGrip using provided driver JARs."

More AWS Lake Formation cons

"I don't think that the AI tools in Snowflake are good."

"The solution could use a little bit more UI."

"Snowflake has to improve their spatial parts since it doesn't have much in terms of geo-spatial queries."

"Snowflake is very good overall, but it could improve documentation for supporting different structures."

"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."

"I can only access Snowflake from the web. It would be better if we could have an app that we can install locally on our laptops to connect to the server without needing to go to the web page. Apart from that, it's hard to point out any limitations in the tool."

"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 aspect of it that was more complicated was stored procedures. It does not support SQL language-based stored procedures. You have to write in JavaScript. If they supported SQL language and stored procedures, it would make migration from on-prem much simpler. In most cases, if an on-prem solution has stored procedures, they're usually written in SQL. They're not written as what most on-prem DBMS would refer to as an external stored procedure, which is what these feel like to most people because they're written in a language outside of SQL."

More Snowflake cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"AWS Lake Formation is a bit expensive."

"It is hard to say because we're usually engaged in the transition as opposed to the long term. Their storage costs are easily within pennies of what AWS S3 would normally cost. Most of the clients I've been working with are in the financial sector, and they're relatively small. I would put them in an SMB connection. The first thing we have to bring up for people is that they're going to build this. They shouldn't store their data in S3. They should pipeline directly into Snowflake and use it on their storage. So, the cost is a big issue because these are small to medium size companies, and that is the biggest thing we had to price point for them."

"It is per credit. It has a use-it-as-you-go model. We bought a chunk of 20,000 credits, and they were lasting us for at least a year. We didn't have the scale of data like a much larger company to consume more credits. For us, it was very inexpensive. Their strategy is just to leverage what you've got and put Snowflake in the middle. It doesn't make it expensive because most of the organizations already have reporting tools. Now, if you were starting from scratch, it might be cheaper to go a different way."

"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."

"It is on a monthly basis. It is based on your usage. There are no additional costs from the point of the licensing fee. We do give some kind of evaluation to the customers about how much it is going to be. You can decide in Snowflake the virtual machine that you are using for customers. There are several kinds of virtual machines that you can use. It is similar to the clothing sizes: small to extra large. If you need more power in the coming month, you can decide in advance and take a more powerful machine. You can just select it from the platform. You can also decide which machine you want to take for extracting data."

"I believe that pricing is reasonable for this solution."

"The tool's pricing is based on the number of queries you want on your database. The cost is small. To get the tool's pricing, you can do the math based on the cost per query, which is $0.002. If you're running your queries frequently, your charges will be higher than running fewer queries."

"Snowflake goes by credits. For a financial institution where you have 5,000 employees, monthly costs may run up to maybe $5,000 to $6,000. This is actually based on the usage. It is mostly the compute cost. Your computing cost is the variable that is actually based on your usage. It is pay-per-use. In a pay-per-use case, you won't be spending more than $6,000 to $7,000 a month. It is not more than that for a small or medium enterprise, and it may come down to $100K per year. Storage is very standard, which is $23 a terabyte. It is not much for any enterprise. If you have even 20 terabytes, you are not spending more than $400 per month, which may turn out to be $2,000 to $3,000 per annum."

"Snowflake is cost-effective."

More Snowflake pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

19%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	15

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	30
Midsize Enterprise	20
Large Enterprise	58

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Lake Formation?

I don't understand much about the pricing of AWS Lake Formation, but I know how to search for the cost of Glue jobs, and I use the calculator in Amazon. I use a tool to preview the cost based on th...

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What needs improvement with AWS Lake Formation?

Regarding areas of AWS Lake Formation that could be improved or enhanced, I prefer not to answer, mainly because I do not believe that I would be the most valuable person to ask, as I have not used...

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What is your primary use case for AWS Lake Formation?

My usual use cases for AWS Lake Formation involved securing and governing the data resources that we configured in AWS, but we did not use the analytics or machine learning capabilities specificall...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake?

For pricing, setup cost, and licensing, everything is managed smoothly. Regarding licensing, it is inexpensive. The setup cost is low, mainly due to AWS Marketplace; we only need to pay for serverl...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Snowflake?

Snowflake is already quite improved, but they have recently introduced AI features. AI integration would be beneficial for direct data capturing from systems such as SAP and Salesforce to Snowflake...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Snowflake?

Snowflake is primarily used to handle the data warehousing part, for creating data modeling, and also keeping the raw data and creating reporting data so that it is further used for data analytics....

See all answers

Comparisons

Azure Data Factory vs AWS Lake Formation

Compared 13% of the time

Databricks vs AWS Lake Formation

Compared 12% of the time

Amazon Redshift vs AWS Lake Formation

Compared 11% of the time

BigQuery vs AWS Lake Formation

Compared 8% of the time

Amazon EMR vs AWS Lake Formation

Compared 6% of the time

More AWS Lake Formation Competitors

Teradata vs Snowflake

Compared 8% of the time

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs Snowflake

Compared 6% of the time

Amazon Redshift vs Snowflake

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Data Factory vs Snowflake

Compared 5% of the time

Dremio vs Snowflake

Compared 4% of the time

More Snowflake Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

AWS Lake Formation

March 2026

Download AWS Lake Formation product report

Buyer's Guide

Snowflake

February 2026

Download Snowflake product report

Also Known As

No data available

Snowflake Computing, Snowflake Data Cloud

Overview

AWS Lake Formation is a service that makes it easy to set up a secure data lake in days. A data lake is a centralized, curated, and secured repository that stores all your data, both in its original form and prepared for analysis.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Snowflake provides a modern data warehousing solution with features designed for seamless integration, scalability, and consumption-based pricing. It handles large datasets efficiently, making it a market leader for businesses migrating to the cloud.

Snowflake offers a flexible architecture that separates storage and compute resources, supporting efficient ETL jobs. Known for scalability and ease of use, it features built-in time zone conversion and robust data sharing capabilities. Its enhanced security, performance, and ability to handle semi-structured data are notable. Users suggest improvements in UI, pricing, on-premises integration, and data science functions, while calling for better transaction performance and machine learning capabilities. Users benefit from effective SQL querying, real-time analytics, and sharing options, supporting comprehensive data analysis with tools like Tableau and Power BI.

What are Snowflake's Key Features?

Scalability: Easily adjusts to handle growing data volumes.
Seamless Integration: Works with a wide range of platforms.
Consumption-Based Costs: Pay only for what you use.
Time Travel: Access historical data effortlessly.
Data Sharing: Secure and efficient sharing of datasets.
Time Zone Conversion: Built-in feature for global operations.
Security: Robust measures to protect sensitive information.
Compute and Storage Separation: Independent scaling for optimal performance.

What Benefits Should You Look for?

Cost Efficiency: Optimized pricing models for minimal waste.
Enhanced Performance: Fast queries and processing times.
Flexibility: Handles both structured and semi-structured data.
Analytics Capabilities: Supports advanced data analysis and reporting.

In industries like finance, healthcare, and retail, Snowflake's flexible data warehousing and analytics capabilities facilitate cloud migration, streamline data storage, and allow organizations to consolidate data from multiple sources for advanced insights and AI-driven strategies. Its integration with analytics tools supports comprehensive data analysis and reporting tasks.

Snowflake Computing

Sample Customers

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday

Accordant Media, Adobe, Kixeye Inc., Revana, SOASTA, White Ops

Buyer's Guide

AWS Lake Formation vs. Snowflake

March 2026

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