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BigQuery vs Firebolt comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

BigQuery
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Firebolt
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
17th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of BigQuery is 7.3%, up from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Firebolt is 2.2%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
BigQuery7.3%
Firebolt2.2%
Other90.5%
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Mikah Sellers - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal at Sgt Suds
Has supported detailed policy and education analysis with low-code data exploration
I do not use AWS as my main cloud provider within the company and am not currently using it with AWS. My company did not buy it through the AWS Marketplace as I'm the founder of the company. I do not use BigQuery's integration with Google Analytics for custom behavior analysis. I have not utilized the geospatial analysis capabilities with BigQuery as I'm doing mostly human capital work, so geospatial wouldn't make sense. I would rate their service on a scale of one to 10 for Google as ten. I would rate BigQuery as nine out of 10. My experience with the pricing for BigQuery was through a grant from Google. Their pricing is fairly priced and pretty comparable to Microsoft's offering. I haven't had direct experience, but I did look at the pricing of the Microsoft offering and it's pretty similar. I do not deal with Google AI tools such as Vertex.
Iqbal Hossain Raju - PeerSpot reviewer
Junior Software Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Can quickly query it to generate quick results
We have used Snowflake before. We support both. Firebolt has better performance, executing queries much quicker than Snowflake. However, Snowflake has more functionality. Depending on the client's needs, we can recommend the best option. Firebolt is a relatively new technology. Snowflake has many functionalities. Firebolt does not support unloading data to S3. There is no built-in way to do this in Firebolt. Alternatively, the data can be retrieved using API calls and loaded to S3 manually. Data can be unloaded to S3 directly using Snowflake. Firebolt significantly improves our performance over Snowflake because it takes less time to execute queries. This is especially important for our company because we use some KPIs that require fast loading times.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's a stable, reliable solution."
"The solution is very useful nowadays for keeping a huge number of records."
"Its integration with other tools like Atlan through a Google Chrome extension is highly beneficial."
"The setup is simple."
"There are some performance features like partitioning, which you can do based on an integer, and it improves the performance a lot."
"BigQuery has a very nice interface that you can easily learn if you know SQL."
"BigQuery excels at structuring data, performing predictions, and conducting insightful analyses and it leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities, powered by Google's Duarte AI."
"We like the machine learning features and the high-performance database engine."
"Firebolt is fast for analytical purposes. For example, we have analytical data in our data warehouse, and Firebolt can quickly query it to generate quick results."
 

Cons

"With what I have seen in BigQuery, I had some response times problems, but then it is an analytical database and not a transactional database, so it comes with eventual consistency."
"The product could benefit from improvements in user-friendliness, particularly in terms of the user interface."
"The process of migrating from Datastore to BigQuery should be improved."
"The main challenges are in the areas of performance and cost optimizations."
"It would be better if BigQuery didn't have huge restrictions. For example, when we migrate from on-premises to on-premise, the data which handles all ebook characters can be handled on-premise, but in BigQuery, we have huge restrictions."
"For greater flexibility and ease of use, it would be beneficial if BigQuery offered more third-party add-ons and connectors, particularly for databases that don't have built-in integration options."
"The price could be better. Compared to competing solutions, BigQuery is expensive. It's only suitable for enterprise customers, not small and medium-sized businesses, as they cannot afford this kind of solution. In the next release, it would be better if they improved their AI bot. Although machine learning and artificial intelligence are doing wonders, there is still a lot of room to enhance them."
"We'd like to see more local data residency."
"Firebolt's engine takes a long time to start because it needs to make engine calls."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"One terabyte of data costs $20 to $22 per month for storage on BigQuery and $25 on Snowflake. Snowflake is costlier for one terabyte, but BigQuery charges based on how much data is inserted into the tables. BigQuery charges you based on the amount of data that you handle and not the time in which you handle it. This is why the pricing models are different and it becomes a key consideration in the decision of which platform to use."
"The solution is pretty affordable and quite cheap in comparison to PDP or Cloudera."
"The product operates on a pay-for-use model. Costs include storage and query execution, which can accumulate based on data volume and complexity."
"The tool has competitive pricing."
"The platform is inexpensive."
"The pricing is adaptable, ensuring that organizations can tailor their usage and costs based on their specific requirements and configurations within the Google Cloud Platform."
"The product’s pricing could be more flexible for end users."
"Its cost structure operates on a pay-as-you-go model."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Media Company
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise20
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BigQuery?
I believe the cost of BigQuery is competitive versus the alternatives in the market, but it can become expensive if the tool is not used properly. It is on a per-consumption basis, the billing, so ...
What needs improvement with BigQuery?
With what I have seen in BigQuery, I had some response times problems, but then it is an analytical database and not a transactional database, so it comes with eventual consistency. I cannot have e...
What is your primary use case for BigQuery?
We are mostly dealing with Google solutions such as BigQuery, NoSQL, SQL analytical database, secrets manager, and most of the serverless infrastructure as well, databases. I run SQL queries on Big...
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Also Known As

BQ
No data available
 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Teradata, Google and others in Cloud Data Warehouse. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.