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BigQuery 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
4.9
BigQuery offers improved performance, cost savings, and intuitive features, with some users reporting up to 75% cost reductions.
Sentiment score
5.6
Users experience mixed ROI with Snowflake; it often improves operational efficiency, time savings, and cost control.
Snowflake Analytics has positively impacted our organization by saving about eight to ten hours per week, which we can use for advanced analytics and automation tasks.
Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.2
Customers find Google BigQuery support effective but sometimes limited, relying on documentation, forums, and expert assistance for issues.
Sentiment score
6.9
Snowflake Analytics support is often responsive and competent, but accessibility issues exist for non-major partners, despite strong community resources.
rating the customer support at ten points out of ten
Sr. Team Lead - IT at InfoStretch
I have been self-taught and I have been able to handle all my problems alone.
Chief Technical Lead at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
I would rate their customer service pretty good on a scale of one to 10, as they gave me access to the platform on a grant.
Principal at Sgt Suds
The Snowflake Analytics documentation is excellent.
Lead Analytics Consultant at a outsourcing company with 51-200 employees
Recently we had a two-day session where the Snowflake Analytics team provided a demo on Cortex AI and its features.
Associate Principal Engineer at Nagarro
The technical support for Snowflake Analytics is excellent based on what I have heard from others.
Data Governance Architect at Sterlite Technologies Ltd
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
BigQuery offers excellent scalability and efficiency, supporting vast data seamlessly, though cost and integration challenges may arise.
Sentiment score
7.7
Snowflake Analytics offers exceptional scalability through auto-scaling, cloud integration, and efficient resource management, ideal for handling large data volumes.
It is a 10 out of 10 in terms of scalability.
Chief Technical Lead at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
We have not seen problems with scaling.
Director at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
The scalability is definitely good because we are migrating to the cloud since the computers on the premises or the big database we need are no longer enough.
Expert Analyst at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Storage is unlimited because they use S3 if it is AWS, so storage has no limit.
Senior Software Architect at USEReady
It supports both horizontal and vertical scaling effectively.
Data Governance Architect at Sterlite Technologies Ltd
Maintaining security and data governance becomes easier with an entire data lake in place, and the scalability improves performance.
Associate Principal Engineer at Nagarro
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.3
BigQuery is stable and reliable, with efficient data handling, few bugs, and strong support, despite occasional slow queries.
Sentiment score
8.4
Snowflake Analytics is highly stable, supported by major cloud providers, with strong performance and minimal technical issues reported.
In the past one and a half years that I have been running with BigQuery, I have not needed to raise any technical support with BigQuery or with Google.
Director at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Snowflake Analytics has been stable and reliable in my experience.
Associate Principal Engineer at Nagarro
Snowflake Analytics is very stable; I have never experienced any crash downs or server issues.
Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Snowflake Analytics is stable, scoring around eight point five to nine out of ten.
Data Governance Architect at Sterlite Technologies Ltd
 

Room For Improvement

BigQuery struggles with cost, accessibility, scalability, and lacks data residency, needing better integration, performance, and machine learning features.
Snowflake Analytics struggles with data migration, integration, performance, cost issues, and needs better UI, job scheduling, and AWS support.
Troubleshooting requires opening each pipeline individually, which is time-consuming.
Sr. Team Lead - IT at InfoStretch
In general, if I know SQL and start playing around, it will start making sense.
Expert Analyst at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees
BigQuery is already integrating Gemini AI into the data extraction process directly in order to reduce costs.
Chief Technical Lead at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
AIML-based SQL prompt and query generation could be an area for enhancement.
Senior Software Architect at USEReady
If it offered flexibility similar to Oracle and supported more heterogeneous data sources and database connectivity, it would be even better.
Data Governance Architect at Sterlite Technologies Ltd
I would prefer Snowflake Analytics to improve their support response times, as sometimes the responses we receive are not very prompt and ticket assignments may not be timely.
Associate Principal Engineer at Nagarro
 

Setup Cost

BigQuery uses a pay-as-you-go model, balancing affordability with strategic expense management for data storage and query execution.
Snowflake Analytics uses a pay-as-you-go model, emphasizing strategic design to manage costs, often seen as competitively priced.
Being able to optimize the queries to data is critical. Otherwise, you could spend a fortune.
Chief Technical Lead at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
The price is perceived as expensive, rated at eight out of ten in terms of costliness.
Sr. Team Lead - IT at InfoStretch
Snowflake charges per query, which amounts to a very minor cost, such as $0.015 per query.
BI Developer at DivVerse LLC
Snowflake is better and cheaper than Redshift and other cloud warehousing systems.
Senior Software Architect at USEReady
Snowflake Analytics is quite economical.
Data Governance Architect at Sterlite Technologies Ltd
 

Valuable Features

BigQuery provides scalable, serverless data processing with fast query capabilities, seamless GCP integration, SQL support, and competitive pricing.
Snowflake Analytics provides scalable, secure, and user-friendly analytics with cloud integration, supporting diverse data needs and flexible data sharing.
It is really fast because it can process millions of rows in just a matter of one or two seconds.
Expert Analyst at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees
BigQuery processes a substantial amount of data, whether in gigabytes or terabytes, swiftly producing desired data within one or two minutes.
Sr. Team Lead - IT at InfoStretch
The features I find most valuable in this solution are the ability to run and handle large data sets in a very efficient way with multiple types of data, relational as SQL data.
Chief Technical Lead at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
Running a considerable query on Microsoft SQL Server may take up to thirty minutes or an hour, while Snowflake executes the same query in less than three minutes.
BI Developer at DivVerse LLC
Snowflake Analytics supports data security with a single sign-on feature and complies with framework regulations, which is highly beneficial.
Data Governance Architect at Sterlite Technologies Ltd
Previously, we faced issues with slow queries due to traditional systems, but within Snowflake, we can assign separate virtual warehouses for reporting as well as data processing, ensuring that it does not impact tool performance and does not delay reporting to business users.
Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

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
Snowflake Analytics
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
12th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Web Analytics (2nd)
 

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 Snowflake Analytics is 3.3%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
BigQuery7.3%
Snowflake Analytics3.3%
Other89.4%
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.
Garima Goel - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Principal Engineer at Nagarro
Have created secure cloud-based data lakes and improved real-time data processing using integrated AI features
There are many capabilities which Snowflake Analytics offers that I find valuable, such as the storage and compute engine that allows working with any cloud system such as AWS or Azure, alongside its efficiencies in storage computation and cost-effectiveness, which saves money compared to on-premise systems. We also have features such as pre-cached results, Time Travel, and fail-safe, which are very useful for restoring data if deleted accidentally, and the streams and data pipes that facilitate real-time ingestion are great features as well. Snowflake Analytics offers multiple new connectors, allowing me to connect it with Kafka, and with Snowpark, I can work with any programming language such as Python, Java, or Scala for data processing and analysis. The data sharing feature offered by Snowflake Analytics is good because it allows sharing specific sets of data to end customers or users from different Snowflake Analytics accounts without exposing the entire dataset for data security reasons. Snowflake Analytics' support for machine learning models and real-time insights has enhanced significantly. Originally, it wasn't strong in AI/ML, but now it has multiple models and forecasting capabilities, providing good competition to tools such as Databricks and Spark. In BI, I have worked majorly with Microsoft Power BI, and the integration with Snowflake Analytics is very easy. The way we integrate Snowflake Analytics with other on-premise systems just requires the warehouse details, username, passwords, and the account name, along with multiple options such as client ID and credentials for logging in and creating a session. The end-to-end encryption provided by Snowflake Analytics is very important because, in my previous firm, working in finance and investment management, data encryption is necessary due to the sensitive nature of customer data and the involvement of people's money. It's crucial to have encryption in transit and at rest, along with data masking features which Snowflake Analytics offers.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Media Company
7%
Construction Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise20
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise23
 

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...
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?
In my opinion, Snowflake Analytics can be improved by introducing more features, such as additional integration options. I remember using Snowflake Pro, which allows exporting direct data into the ...
What is your primary use case for Snowflake Analytics?
Snowflake Analytics' data sharing feature has been instrumental for us because we were working with huge data sizes. Our workflow involved dumping data initially into an AWS S3 bucket, then sharing...
 

Also Known As

BQ
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Lionsgate, Adobe, Sony, Capital One, Akamai, Deliveroo, Snagajob, Logitech, University of Notre Dame, Runkeeper
Find out what your peers are saying about BigQuery vs. Snowflake Analytics and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.