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Snowflake vs watsonx.ai 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

Snowflake
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), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (5th), AI Software Development (10th)
watsonx.ai
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.1
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
AI Development Platforms (25th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions, they serve different purposes. Snowflake is designed for Cloud Data Warehouse and holds a mindshare of 16.1%, down 22.5% compared to last year.
watsonx.ai, on the other hand, focuses on AI Development Platforms, holds 0.5% mindshare.
Cloud Data Warehouse Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Snowflake16.1%
Databricks9.2%
Teradata8.5%
Other66.2%
Cloud Data Warehouse
AI Development Platforms Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
watsonx.ai0.5%
Google Vertex AI8.1%
Hugging Face7.9%
Other83.5%
AI Development Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

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.
AmerKhan - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Director - Head of Solution Engineering at Osol tech (Private) Limited
Experience gains better customer interactions and user-friendliness but requires more efficient agent development
The development toolkit itself and the engine that supported the agent development was flexible. The features include support for RAG and support for generative AI. What we're looking to do is provide a human-like interface where natural language comes into play to serve HR data. Our users interact in a narrative fashion and get their queries answered. It has increased our serving of HR requests by 30%. It is user friendly, and our user base was able to work with it quite conveniently.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's ultra-fast at handling queries, which is what we find very convenient."
"Time travel is one feature that really helps us out."
"The reduced infrastructure management is the big difference compared to on-prem warehousing with Snowflake Data Cloud."
"The features I found most valuable with this solution are sharing options and built-in time zone conversion."
"The most valuable features of Snowflake are its performance and power."
"The solution is very stable."
"The solution is easy to use."
"Snowflake has evolved significantly over time. Initially, they started with scalability, but more recently, they have introduced streaming capabilities, real-time and dynamic tables, along with various connectors."
"The development toolkit itself and the engine that supported the agent development was flexible."
 

Cons

"If more connectors were brought in and more visibility features were added, particularly around cost tracking in the FinOps area, it would be beneficial."
"The pricing of the solution should be much easier to calculate or find by yourself."
"We would like to see more security including more masking and more encryption at the database level."
"Improvement is needed in integrating external tools, such as data catalogs, which can be complicated due to differing formats and usage across departments."
"There are a lot of features that they need to come up with. A lot of functions are missing in Snowflake, so we have to find a workaround for those. For example, OUTER APPLY is a basic function in SQL Server, but it is not there in Snowflake. So, you have to write complex code for it."
"Getting data out of the tool to third-party applications is difficult."
"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."
"The platform and toolkit that we use to develop agents could benefit from improvements from a user-friendliness perspective."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's expensive."
"The whole licensing system is based on credit points. You can also make a license agreement with the company so that you buy credit points and then you use them. What you do not use in one year can be carried over to the next year."
"We're based on credits. So, we're paying four and a half dollars of credit. There are no additional costs. I would rate it a two out of five in terms of pricing."
"Pricing is based on usage. It is the most expensive of our data tools."
"Snowflake is a cost-effective solution."
"Snowflake is cost-effective."
"There is a license needed to use this solution. There are a few licensing options available. They have a pay-as-you-go option, but it is recommended to pay upfront."
"Pricing can be confusing for customers."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business29
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise58
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What needs improvement with watsonx.ai?
Improving on the development toolkit would help. The platform and toolkit that we use to develop agents could benefit from improvements from a user-friendliness perspective. Making it more user-fri...
What is your primary use case for watsonx.ai?
We are looking to develop HR agents on it, HR-based bots. We integrated it with our HR system, HRIS.
What advice do you have for others considering watsonx.ai?
This solution is highly recommended. On a scale of 1-10, I rate watsonx.ai a seven out of ten.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Snowflake Computing, Snowflake Data Cloud
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Accordant Media, Adobe, Kixeye Inc., Revana, SOASTA, White Ops
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Microsoft, Teradata and others in Cloud Data Warehouse. Updated: December 2025.
880,255 professionals have used our research since 2012.