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Google Cloud SQL vs Snowflake 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

Google Cloud SQL
Ranking in Database Management Systems (DBMS)
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Database as a Service (DBaaS) (6th), Relational Databases Tools (19th)
Snowflake
Ranking in Database Management Systems (DBMS)
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
103
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (1st), Cloud Data Warehouse (1st), AI Synthetic Data (1st), AI Software Development (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Database Management Systems (DBMS) category, the mindshare of Google Cloud SQL is 2.0%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 5.7%, up from 4.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Database Management Systems (DBMS) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Snowflake5.7%
Google Cloud SQL2.0%
Other92.3%
Database Management Systems (DBMS)
 

Featured Reviews

VD
Database Engineer at Springer Nature
Migration to cloud eases management but needs better support for high I/O operations
Google Cloud SQL needs to improve its support for high-end I/O operations. On-prem systems with high I/O capabilities perform better, as Google Cloud SQL takes more time to handle the same tasks. There is also difficulty in changing the time zone after the database is set up. Moreover, some features available in MSSQL on-prem are missing on Google Cloud SQL, affecting migration potential.
SunilPatil1 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This is a stable solution and offers good performance."
"I found its storage and security to be the most valuable. It was a good experience. It is also very stable and scalable, and its support is perfect."
"What I like the most about Google Cloud SQL is that it handles the management, which allows us to concentrate on our applications."
"It directly provides robust data safety. It also offers various other storage options, such as Google Cloud Storage. These services ensure data security and redundancy. Furthermore, it includes different storage classes, allowing flexible data management tailored to specific needs."
"Google Cloud SQL provides complete customization options, along with a dashboarding tool and a comprehensive suite of tools that can be used to customize and build any application needed."
"Google Cloud SQL enhances our AI-driven projects by providing features like query optimization and scalability for efficiently processing large datasets."
"It's SQL. SQL is so easy if you know something about databases. It's easy to learn."
"The product is scalable."
"The solution is very easy to use."
"We find the data sharing and data marketplace aspects of Snowflake absolutely amazing."
"It helped us to build MVP (minimum viable product) for our idea of building a data warehouse model for small businesses."
"The most valuable features are the clustering, LS50, being able to change the size, the pay per use feature, the flexibility with many different sources and analytic applications."
"The integration capabilities of the product are good and you get what you pay for when it comes to Snowflake."
"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 solution is stable."
"Everything is automatic, and I don't have to do any maintenance."
 

Cons

"Google Cloud SQL still needs better connectivity to outside, existing data sources."
"For data analysis, the AI area of the product has certain shortcomings where improvements are required."
"Sometimes the sharing with third parties or configuring that in Google Cloud SQL is not the most intuitive."
"The most challenging part is dealing with legacy data from your old systems and migrating it into the new setup, but once you've completed the data migration, it becomes quite convenient to use."
"It is hard to do logging with the solution."
"The product's user interface could be more user-friendly to improve the overall user experience."
"I would appreciate more flexibility with specific extensions applicable to engines like PostgreSQL. This would enhance the capabilities of Google Cloud SQL."
"The performance compared to AWS is not as fast, and the technical support could be better as they don't have a dedicated team, but mostly AI handles the support now."
"It doesn't enforce typical relational database constraints. Quite expensive."
"The product's performance could be improved."
"I have heard people having difficulty with the machine learning model, so there may be room for improvement."
"Some SQL language functions could be included."
"This solution could be improved by offering machine learning apps."
"Snowflake has to improve their spatial parts since it doesn't have much in terms of geo-spatial queries."
"They need to improve its ETL functionality so that Snowflake becomes an ETL product. Snowpipe can do some pipelines and data ingestion, but as compare to Talend, these functionalities are limited. The ETL feature is not good enough. Therefore, Snowflake can only be used as a database. You can't use it as an ETL tool, which is a limitation. We have spoken to the vendor, and they said they are working on it, but I'm not sure when they will bring it to production."
"If you go with one cloud provider, you can't switch."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is affordable."
"While the platform’s pricing may be higher, it aligns with industry standards, considering the quality of service and features provided."
"The pricing is very much an important factor as to why we use this solution."
"It is not expensive, especially considering the significant reduction in database management time."
"It's really cheap. It wouldn't be more than, I believe it's around 50 euro per month for running a cloud SQL."
"From a financial perspective, Google Cloud SQL is on the cheaper side."
"You need to pay extra costs for backup and replication."
"Its price should be improved. It should be cheaper than Microsoft."
"Part of the problem with the pricing is that it is very difficult for businesses to get an idea of how expensive it might be until they actually start using Snowflake."
"It is pay-as-you-go. Its cost is in the medium range."
"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."
"Oracle is less expensive than Snowflake."
"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."
"The solution is expensive."
"They give a different price for every single company. I don't know if I negotiated that well, but we got the enterprise tier for $3 a credit, and the other two were a dollar-ninety a credit. I suspect we don't have almost zero compute usage, but I know that our annual contract packages are below all of their minimums."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Educational Organization
9%
University
8%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business29
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise58
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Google Cloud SQL?
The implementation part of the product was easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Cloud SQL?
We have set up automated patch management for Google Cloud SQL, and it does on a daily basis what needs to be done, so it is pretty good overall for maintaining our database security.
What needs improvement with Google Cloud SQL?
Sometimes the sharing with third parties or configuring that in Google Cloud SQL is not the most intuitive. From a user perspective, if Google Cloud SQL integrated AI directly into the query so tha...
What do you like most about Snowflake?
The best thing about Snowflake is its flexibility in changing warehouse sizes or computational power.
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 ...
What needs improvement with Snowflake?
Snowflake is currently stable, but it can be improved further. They have a couple of information schemas that can track account usage. If more connectors were brought in and more visibility feature...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Snowflake Computing, Snowflake Data Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

BeDataDriven, CodeFutures, Daffodil, GenieConnect, KiSSFLOW, LiveHive, SulAm_rica, Zync
Accordant Media, Adobe, Kixeye Inc., Revana, SOASTA, White Ops
Find out what your peers are saying about Google Cloud SQL vs. Snowflake and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.