No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Microsoft Fabric 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

Microsoft Fabric
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Data Management Platforms (DMP) (7th)
Snowflake
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
104
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (1st), Cloud Data Warehouse (1st), AI Synthetic Data (1st), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (7th), AI Software Development (11th)
 

Featured Reviews

PK
Analyst at Cepstrum(EEE Students Society), IIT Guwahati
Unified data platform has enabled consistent analytics and rapid visualization for all teams
The most valuable and useful feature I have found in Microsoft Fabric is data consistency, which is the top thing. We use the cloud, so it is very fast because we do not use other servers such as Redshift or any other database servers. We just stage the data in Data Lake, which is their central cloud storage, and from there we pull; the retrieval speed and processing speed are very fast, which is an advantage. The integration with Power BI in Microsoft Fabric has influenced my data visualization by making it very simple; you just click on Power BI, select your Data Lake that is available, and from there, you can create your visualization. It would be very rapid compared to other sources or if you use the DirectQuery mode or import mode, which would be slower when compared to the Data Lake mode of pulling the data. I usually evaluate the effectiveness of Microsoft Fabric's data integration capabilities by comparing it to other services. When I do all the things on Microsoft Fabric, I feel it is better in integration because all different analysts or persons working on data simply come to Microsoft Fabric, get that license, and can do whatever they want; whether they want to do BI reporting, analyze, or create models, it would be on the same platform, making it really easy for them to perform their tasks. The integration across all applications is very comfortable for users.
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

"The most valuable and useful feature I have found in Microsoft Fabric is data consistency, which is the top thing."
"The Time Travel feature is helpful for accessing historical data and the ability to clone external tables is useful."
"It helped us to build MVP (minimum viable product) for our idea of building a data warehouse model for small businesses."
"The solution is easy to use."
"Snowflake is a modern version of Informatica which is 100 percent in the cloud."
"Snowflake is a great solution if you have substantial data volume."
"We find the data sharing and data marketplace aspects of Snowflake absolutely amazing."
"Snowflake is a data lake on the cloud where all processing happens in memory, resulting in very fast query responses."
"The syntax is advanced which reduces the time to write code."
 

Cons

"I think the Copilot usage in Microsoft Fabric can be improved."
"If you go with one cloud provider, you can't switch."
"They need to incorporate some basic OLAP capabilities in the backend or at the database level. Currently, it is purely a database. They call it purely a data warehouse for the cloud. Currently, just like any database, we have to calculate all the KPIs in the front-end tools. The same KPIs again need to be calculated in Snowflake. It would be very helpful if they can include some OLAP features. This will bring efficiency because we will be able to create the KPIs within Snowflake itself and then publish them to multiple front-end tools. We won't have to recreate the same in each project. There should be the ability to automate raised queries, which is currently not possible. There should also be something for Exception Aggregation and things like that."
"We are yet to figure out how to integrate tools, such as Liquibase, to release changes to our data warehouse model."
"Support needs improvement, as it can take several days before you get some initial support."
"There is a need for improvements in the documentation, this would allow more people to switch over to this solution."
"Support needs improvement, as it can take several days before you get some initial support."
"The solution could use a little bit more UI."
"The complexity of the initial setup of Snowflake depends on the use case. However, it does tend to get complex because we have a lot of semi-structured data which we need to handle in Snowflake."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It is not cheap."
"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."
"You pay based on the data that you are storing in the data warehouse and there are no maintenance costs."
"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."
"Snowflake is cost-effective. However, the cost can depend on how it's being used and how efficiently the code is written. If engineers don't write efficient code and usage is billed based on processing, it can become costly. If they write optimal code and choose the best solution, it can reduce costs in comparison to other options, such as Oracle."
"Comparing Snowflake to on-prem options such as Oracle or SAP, it seemed more cost-effective."
"The price for the solution's license depends on the use cases."
"It's expensive."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Management Platforms (DMP) solutions are best for your needs.
892,776 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
6%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise58
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Microsoft Fabric?
I think the Copilot usage in Microsoft Fabric can be improved. Across all Microsoft Fabric platforms such as Power BI or data engineering and Azure Data Factory, they have integrated this Copilot, ...
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Fabric?
My usual use cases for Microsoft Fabric involve using it as a unified platform where we perform all data engineering tasks, all data analysis tasks, and all data ML models on the same platform beca...
What advice do you have for others considering Microsoft Fabric?
In assessing Microsoft Fabric's security features, I think we never have a chance to manage the security features directly, but that would be taken care of by the Microsoft admins or the platform a...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake?
For pricing, setup cost, and licensing, everything is managed smoothly. Regarding licensing, it is inexpensive. The setup cost is low, mainly due to AWS Marketplace; we only need to pay for serverl...
What needs improvement with Snowflake?
Snowflake is already quite improved, but they have recently introduced AI features. AI integration would be beneficial for direct data capturing from systems such as SAP and Salesforce to Snowflake...
What is your primary use case for Snowflake?
Snowflake is primarily used to handle the data warehousing part, for creating data modeling, and also keeping the raw data and creating reporting data so that it is further used for data analytics....
 

Also Known As

No data available
Snowflake Computing, Snowflake Data Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Accordant Media, Adobe, Kixeye Inc., Revana, SOASTA, White Ops
Find out what your peers are saying about Palantir, Informatica, Cloudera and others in Data Management Platforms (DMP). Updated: April 2026.
892,776 professionals have used our research since 2012.