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AWS Lake Formation vs Snowflake Analytics comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

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

AWS Lake Formation
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Snowflake Analytics
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
11th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Web Analytics (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of AWS Lake Formation is 3.3%, down from 5.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake Analytics is 3.6%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
AWS Lake Formation3.3%
Snowflake Analytics3.6%
Other93.1%
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Ciro Baldim Guerra - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Analytics Engineer at Itau Unibanco S.A.
Has improved data governance by enabling clear ownership and structured access across teams
In my company, Itaú, we don't utilize all AWS offerings due to rigorous security measures. We operate approximately six to eight months behind other available services. I'm uncertain if gaps exist because of this limitation, though the system functions effectively for us. AWS Lake Formation offers column-level access control for databases, but we haven't implemented this feature either because it hasn't been approved by our compliance, governance, or security areas. In our current setup, everyone from my business unit uses the same consumer account. When access is requested for a table, everyone using that business unit account receives access. This could present a security concern, though it benefits new team members who automatically receive all necessary access permissions. However, I struggle to identify specific improvements needed in AWS Lake Formation.
Hemanthreddy Vakiti - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Daily restaurant dashboards have become faster and now support simultaneous team analytics
Some of the best features of Snowflake Analytics is how it is separated for compute and storage, which allows multiple teams to run queries without performance impact. Our project has more than nine or ten teams, so if a team is working on a particular dashboard and another team wants to work on Snowflake Analytics, they can easily work on it without disturbing the work of one team, ensuring that the work can be consistent and multiple users can use the tool simultaneously. This is one of the main features I appreciate about Snowflake Analytics.The other aspect is how the query performance is high due to its columnar storage and also automatic optimization, allowing for scaling down during weekdays when there is less data and scaling up during weekends or festivals when the data can be huge. Because of this automatic scaling, if there is less data, we are using only 5 GB instead of 10 GB, which reduces the storage level, and consequently, the cost can be reduced. This automatic scaling and optimization saves us a huge amount of money for our project. Snowflake Analytics has impacted our organization positively by providing faster query performance and better scalability. Previously, we faced issues with slow queries due to traditional systems, but within Snowflake, we can assign separate virtual warehouses for reporting as well as data processing, ensuring that it does not impact tool performance and does not delay reporting to business users. Analysts can run complex queries without affecting ETL workloads due to this separation, which has improved our speed of reporting, and our business users have expressed happiness due to how fast we are generating reports during peak hours.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"In the shortest form, what I appreciated about AWS Lake Formation was that the schema definition and data cataloging were quite good."
"A favorite feature of AWS Lake Formation is that it provides us with visibility into who has access to a particular table or database in Glue."
"I can easily move data from cold storage to regular storage."
"AWS Lake Formation significantly improves the structure of the data mesh, making it superior to previous structures we used."
"We use AWS Lake Formation typically for the data warehouse."
"The solution has many features that are applicable to events such as audits."
"We have observed measurable benefits in terms of cost savings, time savings, resource savings, and efficiency improvements in our workflows."
"Every solution has its pros and cons, however, for our purposes, this solution works quite well for us."
"The solution auto-scales and provides concurrency, you can have different virtual warehouses without them impacting each other, and it's flexible and infinitely scalable because it's on the cloud."
"It's a scalable solution because you can analyze a huge amount of data in the solution."
"Snowflake Analytics is flexible in nature, allowing for the addition of more data tables without affecting the main structure."
"The performance has been good."
"One advantage is that installation is unnecessary since it's cloud-based. You subscribe to a Snowflake instance, configure it, and start using it. It's very user-friendly and allows you to scale up or down based on usage."
"The most valuable feature of Snowflake Analytics is the ability to control and manage the cost."
"It is quite a convenient tool."
"It ensures the optimization of the application development while maintaining the user-friendly nature of its UI."
 

Cons

"In our current setup, everyone from my business unit uses the same consumer account. When access is requested for a table, everyone using that business unit account receives access. This could present a security concern, though it benefits new team members who automatically receive all necessary access permissions."
"You need to have data experience to use the product."
"In our experience what could be improved are not the support, performance or monitoring, but at a managerial level, the very expensive professional services of AWS. This could be an area of improvement for them. It's too expensive to acquire their support."
"AWS Lake Formation might not be easy to learn initially, especially for technical staff, due to various underlying options."
"Despite following official documentation, configuration problems persisted, requiring weeks of support from multiple AWS engineers to resolve."
"The initial onboarding process is challenging because creating a plan takes a month to a month and a half to build out."
"Athena can be a bit clunky when writing queries, indicating a potential enhancement point for easier user interaction with query tools such as DataGrip using provided driver JARs."
"Lake Formation could enhance its capabilities in audit logs, real-time monitoring, and advanced data governance."
"The UI could be more user-friendly."
"The solution needs to consider including some updates in the future."
"If you have a lot of computations, Snowflake becomes costlier."
"Navigating the user console can be challenging, particularly when looking for details like the account ID."
"Snowflake Analytics should probably have more built-in tools for master data management."
"End-to-end execution of jobs isn't possible with Snowflake, which means we have to do some customization."
"The solution's high price can be an area of concern that needs improvement."
"Machine learning should be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"AWS Lake Formation is a bit expensive."
"The solution's pricing is affordable."
"I rate the product's licensing cost a five or six on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price, and ten is high price."
"The tool is quite expensive."
"I rate the product price a seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price, and ten is high price."
"Snowflake charges per query, which amounts to a very minor cost, such as $0.015 per query."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing a seven. The solution's pricing is high."
"Snowflake Analytics is not an expensive solution, and its pricing is average."
"It is not overly expensive. I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, with ten being expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
8%
Construction Company
16%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise23
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Lake Formation?
I don't understand much about the pricing of AWS Lake Formation, but I know how to search for the cost of Glue jobs, and I use the calculator in Amazon. I use a tool to preview the cost based on th...
What needs improvement with AWS Lake Formation?
Regarding areas of AWS Lake Formation that could be improved or enhanced, I prefer not to answer, mainly because I do not believe that I would be the most valuable person to ask, as I have not used...
What is your primary use case for AWS Lake Formation?
My usual use cases for AWS Lake Formation involved securing and governing the data resources that we configured in AWS, but we did not use the analytics or machine learning capabilities specificall...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake Analytics?
The pricing for Snowflake Analytics is reasonable, but as I am not part of the management team, I am not certain about our organization's exact costs. Overall, the return on investment for this too...
What needs improvement with Snowflake Analytics?
One improvement Snowflake Analytics could benefit from is in cost, particularly during peak hours. Sometimes, due to its automatic scalability, we think it has scaled up, but it does not always hap...
What is your primary use case for Snowflake Analytics?
I am using Snowflake Analytics because we are already using Snowflake for data engineering and data warehousing tasks, and we are using it for analytics as well as business intelligence reporting. ...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
Lionsgate, Adobe, Sony, Capital One, Akamai, Deliveroo, Snagajob, Logitech, University of Notre Dame, Runkeeper
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Lake Formation vs. Snowflake Analytics and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.