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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
101
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (1st), Cloud Data Warehouse (1st), AI Synthetic Data (1st)
watsonx.ai
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.1
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
AI Development Platforms (20th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Snowflake and watsonx.ai aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Snowflake is designed for Cloud Data Warehouse and holds a mindshare of 17.7%, down 22.9% compared to last year.
watsonx.ai, on the other hand, focuses on AI Development Platforms, holds 0.2% mindshare.
Cloud Data Warehouse Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Snowflake17.7%
Dremio8.9%
Teradata8.5%
Other64.9%
Cloud Data Warehouse
AI Development Platforms Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
watsonx.ai0.2%
Hugging Face11.4%
Google Vertex AI10.3%
Other78.1%
AI Development Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

Snehasish Das - PeerSpot reviewer
Transformation in data querying speed with good migration capabilities
Snowflake is a data lake on the cloud where all processing happens in memory, resulting in very fast query responses. One key feature is the separation of compute and storage, which eliminates storage limitations. It also has tools for migrating data from legacy databases like Oracle. Its stability and efficiency enhance performance greatly. Tools in the AI/ML marketplace are readily available without needing development.
AmerKhan - PeerSpot reviewer
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

"The technical support on offer is excellent."
"From a data warehouse perspective, it's an excellent all-round solution. It's very complete."
"Working with Parquet files is support out of the box and it makes large dataset processing much easier."
"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."
"I like the fact that we don't need a DBA. It automatically scales stuff."
"Snowflake's most valuable features are data enrichment and flattening."
"The solution is easy to use."
"Its performance is most valuable. As compared to SQL Server, we are able to see a significant improvement in performance with Snowflake."
"The development toolkit itself and the engine that supported the agent development was flexible."
 

Cons

"It would be better if they had a data profile tool that tells me where the gaps are in my time series data."
"I would like to see more transparency in data processing, ATLs, and compute areas - which should give more comfort to the end users."
"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."
"The cost of the solution could be reduced."
"Snowflake can improve its machine learning and AI capabilities."
"It would benefit from an administration that allows you to be aware of your credit consumption once you have the service so that you may be sure how many credits you are consuming when you use the platform and to make sure that you are making the most efficient use of these resources. In other words, to improve their interface so that you may monitor the consumption of your credits on Cloud."
"It would be helpful if Snowflake could create good reports instead of using Power BI reports."
"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."
"The platform and toolkit that we use to develop agents could benefit from improvements from a user-friendliness perspective."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Snowflake is a cost-effective solution."
"It's expensive."
"I have worked with multiple clouds, and cost-wise, it is a bit costlier than others, such as Redshift. Its price should be reduced."
"Its price should be improved. It should be cheaper than Microsoft."
"Snowflake licensing is more flexible and it is cheaper than other solutions. I can use it for only 10 days for MVP, or three years, and for flexible models. I can scale up, or down, and the pricing is based on the volume and duration. There are many licensing permutation combinations available."
"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 is approximately $US 50 per DB. Terabyte is around $US 50 per month."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business28
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise56
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?
Pricing is quite high for Snowflake Data Cloud, which is an area that could be improved. Snowflake Data Cloud is still beneficial to use, but only if you can afford it. It can be cost-effective if ...
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

No data available
 

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, Google and others in Cloud Data Warehouse. Updated: October 2025.
869,771 professionals have used our research since 2012.