Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Amazon EMR vs Snowflake comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
5.4
Amazon EMR delivers significant cost savings and efficiency, with some users achieving up to 20% savings and positive ROI.
Sentiment score
6.8
Snowflake users praise its scalability and ease of use, though financial gains vary and may require longer usage periods.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.7
Amazon EMR support is generally proactive and responsive, though user experiences vary, especially during open-source integrations.
Sentiment score
5.7
Snowflake support is responsive and helpful, with high user satisfaction, despite occasional slower response times and ticketing reliance.
We get all call support, screen sharing support, and immediate support, so there are no problems.
They help with billing, cost determination, IAM properties, security compliance, and deployment and migration activities.
I received great support in migrating data to Snowflake, with quick responses and innovative solutions.
The technical support from Snowflake is very good, nice, and efficient.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
Amazon EMR is scalable and versatile, though some face resource speed issues and performance differences between environments.
Sentiment score
7.8
Snowflake offers excellent scalability, adaptable to varying needs, with minimal challenges but requires cost and resource management attention.
Scalability can be provisioned using the auto-scaling feature, EC2 instances, on-demand instances, and storage locations like block storage, S3, or file storage.
Snowflake is very scalable and has a dedicated team constantly improving the product.
The billing doubles with size increase, but processing does not necessarily speed up accordingly.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Amazon EMR is stable and reliable, with high availability, but could improve slightly to address occasional concerns.
Sentiment score
8.2
Snowflake offers high stability and reliability with minimal downtime, rapid recovery, and seamless failover across platforms, especially AWS.
Regular updates, patch installations, monitoring, logging, alerting, and disaster recovery activities are crucial for maintaining stability.
Snowflake is very stable, especially when used with AWS.
Snowflake as a SaaS offering means that maintenance isn't an issue for me.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon EMR requires improved user-friendliness, stability, monitoring, integration, and pricing adjustments to enhance performance, scalability, and compatibility.
Snowflake needs interface improvements, better ETL, machine learning features, pricing clarity, advanced tools, and enhanced documentation and security.
The cost factor differs significantly. When you run Spark application on EKS, you run at the pod level, so you can control the compute cost. But in Amazon EMR, when you have to run one application, you have to launch the entire EC2.
There is room for improvement with respect to retries, handling the volume of data on S3 buckets, cluster provisioning, scaling, termination, security, and integration between services like S3, Glue, Lake Formation, and DynamoDB.
Enhancements in user experience for data observability and quality checks would be beneficial, as these tasks currently require SQL coding, which might be challenging for some users.
Cost reduction is one area I would like Snowflake to improve.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EMR pricing is usage-based, perceived higher, but optimizable through instance management and auto-scaling for Big Data tasks.
Snowflake offers competitive pay-as-you-go pricing with some concerns over transparency, predictability, and potential cost escalation.
Costs are involved based on cluster resources, data volumes, EC2 instances, instance sizes, Kubernetes, Docker services, storage, and data transfers.
Snowflake's pricing is on the higher side.
Snowflake lacks transparency in estimating resource usage.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EMR offers scalable, cost-effective data processing with easy integration, advanced features, and robust management on a cloud-based infrastructure.
Snowflake excels in scalability, efficiency, ease of use, AI/ML capabilities, security, and seamless third-party integration, enhancing user experience.
Amazon EMR helps in scalability, real-time and batch processing of data, handling efficient data sources, and managing data lakes, data stores, and data marts on file systems and in S3 buckets.
The compute demand has decreased and it has reduced the cost significantly.
Snowflake is a data lake on the cloud where all processing happens in memory, resulting in very fast query responses.
Being able to perform AI and Machine Learning in the same location as the data is quite advantageous.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EMR
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
13th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (3rd)
Snowflake
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
101
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (1st), AI Synthetic Data (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon EMR is 3.3%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 17.7%, down from 22.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Snowflake17.7%
Amazon EMR3.3%
Other79.0%
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Prashant  Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamless data integration enhances reporting efficiency and an easy setup
Amazon EMR has multiple connectors that can connect to various data sources. The service charges are based on processing only, depending on the resources used, which can help save money. It is easy to integrate with other services for storage, allowing data to be shifted to cheaper storage based on usage.
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.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Data Warehouse solutions are best for your needs.
869,785 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
12%
Educational Organization
12%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business28
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise56
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon EMR?
Amazon EMR is a good solution that can be used to manage big data.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EMR?
Compared to others, Amazon seems efficient and is considered good for Big Data workloads. Costs are involved based on cluster resources, data volumes, EC2 ( /products/amazon-ec2-reviews ) instances...
What needs improvement with Amazon EMR?
There is room for improvement with respect to retries, handling the volume of data on S3 ( /products/amazon-s3-reviews ) buckets, cluster provisioning, scaling, termination, security, and integrati...
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 ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic MapReduce
Snowflake Computing, Snowflake Data Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Yelp
Accordant Media, Adobe, Kixeye Inc., Revana, SOASTA, White Ops
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EMR vs. Snowflake and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,785 professionals have used our research since 2012.