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 #13 with an average rating of 7.3, while Snowflake Computing is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.1. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 5.8% mindshare in CDW, compared to Snowflake Computing’s 17.8% mindshare. Additionally, 72% 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 11 AWS Lake Formation reviews

1,711 Views
1,660 Comparison Views

72% willing to recommend

Snowflake

Read 101 Snowflake reviews

10,613 Views
7,747 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

AWS Lake Formation

Snowflake

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2025

Snowflake and AWS Lake Formation are cloud data management solutions. Snowflake often leads with its scalable storage and computing features, while AWS Lake Formation is preferred for its integration with the AWS ecosystem and robust security.

Features: Snowflake offers automatic scaling, real-time data insights, and instant elasticity, allowing users to efficiently manage modern data warehousing requirements. AWS Lake Formation provides strong data governance, detailed access controls, and is seamlessly integrated with AWS services, catering to enterprises heavily invested in AWS.

Room for Improvement: Snowflake could improve in integrating seamlessly with non-native tools and optimizing initial costs for small setups. It may also enhance its data governance features. AWS Lake Formation can work on simplifying its pricing model, reducing initial setup complexity, and expanding support for non-AWS ecosystems.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Snowflake is known for its simple deployment process, rapid implementation, and efficient customer service, making it accessible for diverse organizations. AWS Lake Formation offers extensive documentation and resources within the AWS support structure, which can be beneficial but also more complex due to AWS integration.

Pricing and ROI: Snowflake provides a straightforward pricing approach, offering value through scalability and predictable costs. AWS Lake Formation's pricing can be complex, potentially high at the outset due to AWS platform dependencies, but offers significant ROI through AWS integration and feature comprehensiveness.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS Lake Formation vs. Snowflake Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

AWS Lake Formation vs. Snowflake

July 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 865,164 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

13th

Average Rating

7.8

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

7.0

Number of Reviews

101

Ranking in other categories

Data Warehouse (1st), AI Synthetic Data (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of AWS Lake Formation is 5.8%, up from 5.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 17.8%, down from 23.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Data Warehouse

Featured Reviews

Ramesh Raghavan

US South Lead, Accenture AWS Business Group at Accenture

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.

Read full review

Snehasish Das

Technology Leader at eTCaaS

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.

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

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

"AWS Lake Formation works hand in hand with other products."

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

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

"I can easily move data from cold storage to regular storage."

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

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

"There is no doubt that this place exceeded my expectations with its incredible ambiance, attentive service, and mouthwatering menu."

More AWS Lake Formation pros

"They separate compute and storage. You can scale storage independently of the computer, or you can scale computing independently of storage. If you need to buy more computer parts you can add new virtual warehouses in Snowflake. Similarly, if you need more storage, you take more storage. It's most scalable in the database essentially; typically you don't have this scalability independence on-premises."

"The product's most important feature is unloading data to S3."

"I don't think it is difficult to maintain."

"We find the data sharing and data marketplace aspects of Snowflake absolutely amazing."

"Working with Parquet files is support out of the box and it makes large dataset processing much easier."

"I like the fact that we don't need a DBA. It automatically scales stuff."

"It's user-friendly. It's SQL-driven. The fact that business can also go to this application and query because they know SQL is the biggest factor."

"The most valuable feature of Snowflake is its performance. We can access the data quickly. Additionally, it handles structured and non-structured data."

More Snowflake pros

Cons

"For the end-users, it's not as user-friendly as it could be."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"There is a scope for improvement. They don't currently support integration with some of the Azure and AWS native services. It would be good if they can enhance their product to integrate with these services."

"I have heard people having difficulty with the machine learning model, so there may be room for improvement."

"The product's performance could be improved."

"The solution should offer an on-premises version also. We have some requirements where we would prefer to use it as a template."

"Snowflake could improve migration. It should be made easier. It would be beneficial if it could offer some OLTP features. One of our customers was using Oracle for both data warehousing and OLTP workloads, and they were able to migrate their data warehousing workloads to Snowflake without major issues. However, for some of their OLTP requirements, such as needing a response time of fewer than 10 milliseconds for certain queries, Snowflake is currently unable to provide that."

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

"There is a need for improvements in the documentation, this would allow more people to switch over to this solution."

"I would like to see a client version of the GUI."

More Snowflake cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"AWS Lake Formation is a bit expensive."

"I have not been billed yet, but it should be less. I'm still running the trial version, but it seems to be less than Databricks."

"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."

"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."

"There is a license needed to use this solution. There are a few licensing options available. They have a pay-as-you-go option, but it is recommended to pay upfront."

"I have worked with multiple clouds, and cost-wise, it is a bit costlier than others, such as Redshift. Its price should be reduced."

"Snowflake is expensive, but when I consider what we get for that price, it's fair. I rate the solution three out of five for affordability, right in the middle."

"Pricing is based on usage. It is the most expensive of our data tools."

"There is a licensing for this solution and we purchased an enterprise license. Overall the solution is cost-effective."

More Snowflake pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Media Company

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Snowflake?

The best thing about Snowflake is its flexibility in changing warehouse sizes or computational power.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Snowflake?

Pricing is quite high for Snowflake Data Cloud, which is an area that could be improved. Snowflake Data Cloud is still beneficial to use, but only if you can afford it. It can be cost-effective if ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Azure Data Factory vs AWS Lake Formation

Compared 21% of the time

Amazon Redshift vs AWS Lake Formation

Compared 20% of the time

BigQuery vs AWS Lake Formation

Compared 11% of the time

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs AWS Lake Formation

Compared 7% of the time

Databricks vs AWS Lake Formation

Compared 6% of the time

More AWS Lake Formation Competitors

Azure Data Factory vs Snowflake

Compared 13% of the time

Dremio vs Snowflake

Compared 8% of the time

Teradata vs Snowflake

Compared 7% of the time

Amazon EMR vs Snowflake

Compared 7% of the time

Oracle Exadata vs Snowflake

Compared 5% of the time

More Snowflake Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

AWS Lake Formation

August 2025

Download AWS Lake Formation product report

Buyer's Guide

Snowflake

July 2025

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

July 2025

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