Amazon Redshift vs Firebolt comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Firebolt are both solutions in the Cloud Data Warehouse category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #5 with an average rating of 7.8, while Firebolt is ranked #15 with an average rating of 9.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 7.2% mindshare in CDW, compared to Firebolt’s 0.4% mindshare. Additionally, 86% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Firebolt users who would recommend it.

Amazon Redshift

Read 70 Amazon Redshift reviews

4,588 Views
2,906 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

Firebolt

Read 1 Firebolt review

272 Views
144 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon Redshift

Firebolt

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon Redshift and Firebolt based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Microsoft, Google and others in Cloud Data Warehouse.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloud Data Warehouse Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Data Warehouse

March 2025

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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

Amazon Redshift

Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse

5th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Firebolt

Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse

15th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon Redshift is 7.2%, down from 9.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Firebolt is 0.4%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Data Warehouse

Featured Reviews

Ved Prakash Yadav

Senior Data Platform Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Works as a data warehouse system and collects data from different sources

In terms of improvement, I believe Amazon Redshift could work on reducing its costs, as they tend to increase significantly. Additionally, there are occasional issues with nodes going down, which can be problematic. We often encounter issues like someone dropping a column or changing the order of columns, which can cause synchronization problems when pushing data through our pipeline. It's a minor issue, but it can be annoying.

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Iqbal Hossain Raju

Junior Software Engineer at IQVIA

Can quickly query it to generate quick results

We have used Snowflake before. We support both. Firebolt has better performance, executing queries much quicker than Snowflake. However, Snowflake has more functionality. Depending on the client's needs, we can recommend the best option. Firebolt is a relatively new technology. Snowflake has many functionalities. Firebolt does not support unloading data to S3. There is no built-in way to do this in Firebolt. Alternatively, the data can be retrieved using API calls and loaded to S3 manually. Data can be unloaded to S3 directly using Snowflake. Firebolt significantly improves our performance over Snowflake because it takes less time to execute queries. This is especially important for our company because we use some KPIs that require fast loading times.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We have found Machine Learning use cases are very nice."

"It is very easy to dump data into the tool."

"Redshift COPY command, because much of my work involved helping customers migrate large amounts of data into Redshift."

"It allows you write complex queries and perform row by row processes."

"The processing of data is very fast."

"The product is relatively easy to use because there is no indexing and no partitions."

"Has a very user-friendly SQL editor and it's very easy to use the connectors."

"I like the cost-benefit ratio, meaning that it is as easy to use as it is powerful and well-performing."

More Amazon Redshift pros

"Firebolt is fast for analytical purposes. For example, we have analytical data in our data warehouse, and Firebolt can quickly query it to generate quick results."

Cons

"In terms of improvement, I believe Amazon Redshift could work on reducing its costs, as they tend to increase significantly. Additionally, there are occasional issues with nodes going down, which can be problematic."

"They should provide a better way to work with interim data in a structured way than to store it in parquet files locally."

"We recently moved from the DC2 cluster to the RA3 cluster, which is a different node type and we are finding some issues with the RA3 cluster regarding connection and processing. There is room for improvement in this area. We are in talks with AWS regarding the connection issues."

"The only minor issue I faced was that it took a bit longer than expected to change the cluster to have more space or storage."

"There is some missing functionality and sometimes it's so difficult to work in. We need to convert these functionalities using VACUUM inside Amazon Redshift and then it causes some complexity."

"The product must provide new indexes that support special data structures or data types like TEXT."

"The solution is unable to work fast."

"We are using third-party tools to integrate Amazon Redshift, they should create their own interface on their own for it to be easily connected on the AWS itself."

More Amazon Redshift cons

"Firebolt's engine takes a long time to start because it needs to make engine calls."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's not very pricey compared to other tools. I would rate the price as 5 out of 10."

"This solution implements the pay-as-you-use model, so no license. Pricing could be cheaper."

"At the moment, pricing is a little bit on the higher side, although it depends on the size of the company."

"If you want a fixed price, an to not worry about every query, but you need to manage your nodes personally, use Redshift."

"It's pay per use. You can have multiple models."

"For Amazon Redshift, we pay around INR 60,000 annually. The cost factor also depends on the number of existing customers."

"In comparison to the price of similar solutions, Redshift's cost is the lowest."

"Pricing for Amazon Redshift is reasonable, though it could be somewhat higher than other solutions, such as Azure. Still, when you base your comparison on the services offered and the pricing, it's the most reasonable versus its competitors, such as RDS."

More Amazon Redshift pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

65%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

How does Amazon Redshift compare with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?

Amazon Redshift is very fast, has a very good response time, and is very user-friendly. The initial setup is very straightforward. This solution can merge and integrate well with many different dat...

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What do you like most about Amazon Redshift?

The tool's most valuable feature is its parallel processing capability. It can handle massive amounts of data, even when pushing hundreds of terabytes, and its scaling capabilities are good.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Redshift?

The pricing of Amazon Redshift is expensive.

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What do you like most about Firebolt?

Firebolt is fast for analytical purposes. For example, we have analytical data in our data warehouse, and Firebolt can quickly query it to generate quick results.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Firebolt?

Firebolt's engine takes a long time to start because it needs to make engine calls. Currently, the data size of Firebolt is small. It can be increased.

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Firebolt?

One way to retrieve data from firewalls is to add query parameters to the connection string. For example, you can use the REST API to retrieve the security query. Some firewalls have been deployed ...

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Compared 10% of the time

Vertica vs Amazon Redshift

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Compared 100% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Redshift

March 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Cloud Data Warehouse

March 2025

Download Firebolt product report

Overview

Amazon Redshift is a fully administered, petabyte-scale cloud-based data warehouse service. Users are able to begin with a minimal amount of gigabytes of data and can easily scale up to a petabyte or more as needed. This will enable them to utilize their own data to develop new intuitions on how to improve business processes and client relations.

Initially, users start to develop a data warehouse by initiating what is called an Amazon Redshift cluster or a set of nodes. Once the cluster has been provisioned, users can seamlessly upload data sets, and then begin to perform data analysis queries. Amazon Redshift delivers super-fast query performance, regardless of size, utilizing the exact SQL-based tools and BI applications that most users are already working with today.

The Amazon Redshift service performs all of the work of setting up, operating, and scaling a data warehouse. These tasks include provisioning capacity, monitoring and backing up the cluster, and applying patches and upgrades to the Amazon Redshift engine.

Amazon Redshift Functionalities

Amazon Redshift has many valuable key functionalities. Some of its most useful functionalities include:

Cluster administration: The Amazon Redshift cluster is a group of nodes that contains a leader node and one (or more) compute node(s). The compute nodes needed are dependent on the data size, amount of queries needed, and the query execution functionality desired.
Cluster snapshots: Snapshots are backups of a cluster from an exact point in time. Amazon Redshift offers two types of snapshots: manual and automated. Amazon will store these snapshots internally in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) utilizing an SSL connection. Whenever a Snapshot restore is needed, Amazon Redshift will create a new cluster and will import data from the snapshot as directed.
Cluster access: Amazon Redshift provides several intuitive features to help define connectivity rules, encrypt data and connections, and control the overall access of your cluster.
IAM credentials and AWS accounts: The Amazon Redshift cluster is only accessible by the AWS account that created the cluster. This automatically secures the cluster and keeps it safe. Inside the AWS account, users access the AWS Identity and IAM protocol to create additional user accounts and manage permissions, granting specified users the desired access needed to control cluster performance.
Encryption: Users have the option to choose to encrypt the clusters for additional added security once the cluster is provisioned. When encryption is enabled, Amazon Redshift will store all the data in user-created tables in a secure encrypted format. To manage Amazon Redshift encryption keys, users will access AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS).

Reviews from Real Users

“Redshift's versioning and data security are the two most critical features. When migrating into the cloud, it's vital to secure the data. The encryption and security are there.” - Kundan A., Senior Consultant at Dynamic Elements AS

“With the cloud version whenever you want to deploy, you can scale up, and down, and it has a data warehousing capability. Redshift has many features. They have enriched and elaborate documentation that is helpful.”- Aishwarya K., Solution Architect at Capgemini

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Firebolt is a cloud-native data warehouse that enables organizations to process massive amounts of data at lightning-fast speeds. This is achieved through its unique architecture that utilizes a cloud-native approach, allowing for elastic scaling and parallel processing.

Firebolt helps organizations with a scalable and cost-effective solution for their data warehousing needs. It eliminates the need for expensive hardware and maintenance costs associated with traditional data warehouses. Firebolt's real-time analytics capabilities also enable businesses to make data-driven decisions quickly, giving them a competitive edge in their respective industries.

Firebolt

Sample Customers

Liberty Mutual Insurance, 4Cite Marketing, BrandVerity, DNA Plc, Sirocco Systems, Gainsight, Blue 449

Information Not Available

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