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AWS Lake Formation 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

AWS Lake Formation
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
13th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Snowflake Analytics
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
9th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Web Analytics (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 Analytics is 0.9%, up from 0.5% 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.
Paresh_Nayak - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables data-driven decision-making with robust features and effective scalability
The internal design engine and the columnar database are particularly valuable. These features reduce input and output memory, which is crucial in handling large data sets. The solution fulfills the business requirement for scaling and analytics. Snowflake Analytics supports data security with a single sign-on feature and complies with framework regulations, which is highly beneficial.

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 lets you see all your data and tables on one screen."
"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."
"It is seamlessly integrated within the AWS ecosystem, making it straightforward to manage access patterns for AWS-native services."
"There is no doubt that this place exceeded my expectations with its incredible ambiance, attentive service, and mouthwatering menu."
"AWS Lake Formation works hand in hand with other products."
"One of the distinctive features of Snowflake is its ability to handle large datasets efficiently."
"It helps with business intelligence by providing analytics that can be reported."
"It's a scalable solution because you can analyze a huge amount of data in the solution."
"One advantage is that installation is unnecessary since it's cloud-based. You subscribe to a Snowflake instance, configure it, and start using it. It's very user-friendly and allows you to scale up or down based on usage."
"What we found most valuable in Snowflake Analytics are its attributes that are very convenient for business use such as data sharing, cloning, time travel, and fail-safe. It's a good product all in all."
"Snowflake Analytics has a bright future and is capturing the market across various domains such as life sciences, BFSI, and supply chain."
"The Snowflake features I find most beneficial for data analysis are primarily related to analytics, particularly their features like materialized views and queues, which are especially useful for dashboarding purposes."
"The advanced features like time travel, zero copy cloning and scalability have been most useful. Snowflake requires zero maintenance for Data Warehousing on the cloud system."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"AWS Lake Formation's pricing could be cheaper."
"You need to have data experience to use the product."
"If I could improve AWS Lake Formation, I would add more integrations with SageMaker."
"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."
"There are issues while loading data from Snowflake Analytics to the Power BI reporting."
"The distribution methodology isn't as strong as Bethesda or SAP HANA. It's not as strong as other competitors."
"One area that could benefit from enhancement is the user interface for more visual ESM features."
"Snowflake could improve in the areas of advanced machine learning AML and generative AI."
"End-to-end execution of jobs isn't possible with Snowflake, which means we have to do some customization."
"Machine learning should be improved."
"When we insert data into a large table, it takes a lot of time."
"Machine learning in Snowflake isn't as advanced as in other products. I haven't heard of any successful industry-wide use cases of machine learning implemented in Snowflake. It might take a couple of years to reach the same level as Databricks."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"AWS Lake Formation is a bit expensive."
"It's not costly if you configure it properly to ensure optimal performance. People don't configure it properly, which is why costs go up."
"The tool is quite expensive."
"I have been using free trial version."
"Snowflake charges per query, which amounts to a very minor cost, such as $0.015 per query."
"The solution's price is high and I would rate it an eight out of ten."
"I rate the product price a seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price, and ten is high price."
"Snowflake Analytics is not an expensive solution, and its pricing is average."
"Snowflake Analytics is a little more costly than Azure."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Media Company
5%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Retailer
10%
Insurance Company
6%
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake Analytics?
Snowflake Analytics is quite economical. It does not appear to incur significant extra expenses beyond the solution's initial cost. However, a complete pricing analysis is still in progress.
What needs improvement with Snowflake Analytics?
The advantages of Snowflake Analytics outweigh the disadvantages. However, if it offered flexibility similar to Oracle and supported more heterogeneous data sources and database connectivity, it wo...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
Lionsgate, Adobe, Sony, Capital One, Akamai, Deliveroo, Snagajob, Logitech, University of Notre Dame, Runkeeper
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Lake Formation vs. Snowflake Analytics and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.