We compared Snowflake and VAST Data based on our users reviews in five parameters. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Comparison Results: Snowflake is praised for its easy setup, valuable features, and good customer service. However, it needs improvement in areas like pricing transparency, data integration, user interface, and documentation. On the other hand, VAST Data is commended for its simple and efficient setup, strong failover capability, and good customer service. It could benefit from enhancing its read/write ratio. The pricing perception and user ROI differ for both products.
"The most valuable feature has been the Snowflake data sharing and dynamic data masking."
"It requires no maintenance on our part. They handle all that. The speed is phenomenal. The pricing isn't really anything more than what you would be paying for a SQL server license or another tool to execute the same thing. We have zero maintenance on our side to do anything and the speed at which it performs queries and loads the data is amazing. It handles unstructured data extremely well, too. So, if the data is in a JSON array or an XML, it handles that super well."
"A user-friendly and reliable solution."
"They separate compute and storage. You can scale storage independently of the computer, or you can scale computing independently of storage. If you need to buy more computer parts you can add new virtual warehouses in Snowflake. Similarly, if you need more storage, you take more storage. It's most scalable in the database essentially; typically you don't have this scalability independence on-premises."
"The thing I find most valuable is that scalability, space storage, and computing power is separate. When you scale up, it is live from one second to the next — constantly available as you scale — so there is no downtime or interruption of services."
"Data sharing is a good feature. It is a majorly used feature. The elastic compute is another big feature. Separating compute and storage gives you flexibility. It doesn't require much DBA involvement because it doesn't need any performance tuning. We are not really doing any performance tuning, and the entire burden of performance tuning and SQL tuning is on Snowflake. Its usability is very good. I don't need to ramp up any user, and its onboarding is easier. You just onboard the user, and you are done with it. There are simple SQL and UI, and people are able to use this solution easily. Ease of use is a big thing in Snowflake."
"The best thing about Snowflake is its flexibility in changing warehouse sizes or computational power."
"Snowflake is scalable both in terms of the amount of data that you can run through it and the number of users that engage with it."
"The solution is useful for machine learning and scientific applications, including computer simulations."
"This has been one of the most reliable storage systems that I have ever used."
"There are some challenges with loading unstructured data and integrating some message queues or brokers. In one project, we had a problem connecting to one of the message queues and we had to take a different route altogether on Microsoft Azure."
"Every product has room for improvement, although in this case, it needs some broadening of the functionality."
"I would like to see a client version of the GUI."
"There is room for improvement in Snowflake's integration with Python. We do a lot of SQL programming in Snowflake, but we go to a different tool to program when we have to in Python."
"We would like to have an on-premises deployment option that has the same features, including scalability."
"We would like to be able to do modeling with Snowflake. It should support statistical modeling."
"Snowflake could improve migration. It should be made easier. It would be beneficial if it could offer some OLTP features. One of our customers was using Oracle for both data warehousing and OLTP workloads, and they were able to migrate their data warehousing workloads to Snowflake without major issues. However, for some of their OLTP requirements, such as needing a response time of fewer than 10 milliseconds for certain queries, Snowflake is currently unable to provide that."
"Maybe there could be some more connectors to other systems, but this is what they are constantly developing anyway."
"The write performance could be improved because it is less than half of the read performance."
"The read/write ratio is an area in the solution with some flaws and needs improvement."
Snowflake is ranked 1st in Data Warehouse with 92 reviews while VAST Data is ranked 8th in NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays with 2 reviews. Snowflake is rated 8.4, while VAST Data is rated 10.0. The top reviewer of Snowflake writes "Good usability, good data sharing and elastic compute features, and requires less DBA involvement". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VAST Data writes "Stability-wise, a device that has been up and running for years". Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and AWS Lake Formation, whereas VAST Data is most compared with Pure Storage FlashBlade, NetApp AFF, Pure Storage FlashArray, Qumulo and MinIO.
We monitor all Data Warehouse reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
