No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Firebolt vs Snowflake comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 1, 2026

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

Firebolt
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
16th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Snowflake
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
108
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (1st), AI Synthetic Data (1st), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (6th), AI Software Development (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Firebolt is 2.4%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 15.4%, down from 16.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Snowflake15.4%
Firebolt2.4%
Other82.2%
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Md Saquib Siddiqui - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Engineering Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real-time dashboards have delivered millisecond insights and now drive faster decisions
From my point of view, Firebolt's best features are separate indexing, multi-tag querying, sub-second queries, decoupled compute, and price-performance optimization. Of those features, I rely the most on sparse indexing in my daily work because it scans minimal data blocks, directly speeding up queries while reducing cloud costs. One small detail I appreciate about Firebolt is that its aggregation index stands out by pre-computing repetitive metrics, ensuring instant, sub-second dashboard rendering. Regarding Firebolt's AI capabilities, I think it enforces enterprise-grade governance and security through granular role-based control and compliance frameworks, access governance, data protection, and enterprise compliance. Regarding Firebolt's AI capabilities, I find that it ensures high AI output reliability by serving as an ultra-low latency and deterministic SQL engine for Retrieval-Augmented Generations (RAG), and its sub-second sparse indexing queries and execution ground external AI models in accurate relational data without hallucinating raw calculations.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Firebolt has positively impacted my organization by reducing query latency to milliseconds, lowering cloud compute costs, and accelerating executive decision-making."
"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."
"We find the data sharing and data marketplace aspects of Snowflake absolutely amazing."
"Snowflake on cloud is the best right now."
"The solution is very easy to use."
"The most efficient way for real-time dashboards or analytical business intelligence reports to be sent to the customer."
"The distributed architecture of Snowflake has the capacity to process huge datasets faster and allows us to scale up and down according to our needs."
"Scaling is a big plus point of Snowflake."
"From my experience, Snowflake is the most stable, user-friendly, and simply the nicest tool that I have been working with, and I have had experience working with many databases and different solutions."
"From a user's standpoint, it is a good product."
 

Cons

"Beyond performance tuning, connector depth is a key area for improvement for Firebolt, including ad-hoc query flexibility, as queries without primary and aggregation indexes incur higher compute scans, making unpredictable ad-hoc workloads slower than structured dashboard queries."
"Firebolt's engine takes a long time to start because it needs to make engine calls."
"To ensure the proper functioning of Snowflake as an MDS, it relies heavily on other partner tools."
"I would like to see a client version of the GUI."
"They need to improve its ETL functionality so that Snowflake becomes an ETL product."
"They do have a native connector to connect with integration tools for loading data, but it would be much better to have the functionality built-in."
"Snowflake wasn't cheaper than BigQuery, and its affordability was the main issue."
"The aspect of it that was more complicated was stored procedures. It does not support SQL language-based stored procedures."
"They have a new console, but I couldn't figure out anything in the new console. So, if I shift to the old console, I can figure out where to create the database schema and other things, but I have no idea where to go in the new console. That's one thing they can improve. I don't know why they created a new console to confuse. The old, classic console is much better."
"From an improvement perspective, Snowflake can evolve in terms of writing costly, expensive queries with less cost and try to see if pipeline development can be made a little easier."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The price of Snowflake is quite reasonable."
"Snowflake goes by credits. For a financial institution where you have 5,000 employees, monthly costs may run up to maybe $5,000 to $6,000. This is actually based on the usage. It is mostly the compute cost. Your computing cost is the variable that is actually based on your usage. It is pay-per-use. In a pay-per-use case, you won't be spending more than $6,000 to $7,000 a month. It is not more than that for a small or medium enterprise, and it may come down to $100K per year. Storage is very standard, which is $23 a terabyte. It is not much for any enterprise. If you have even 20 terabytes, you are not spending more than $400 per month, which may turn out to be $2,000 to $3,000 per annum."
"You need to be aware of the bloating costs. It is easy to use, but if you don't use it wisely, then your monthly bill can bloat a lot. You need to be a bit aware of its consumption cost."
"The solution is costly, making it unsuitable for midsize organizations due to its price."
"Snowflake has consumption-based costs; users only pay for storage and computing."
"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."
"We use Snowflake pretty heavily. We pay a significant amount of money for the tool. I'd say we pay $300k to $400K every year."
"I am not much aware of the price, but based on what I have analyzed so far, its cost is reasonable as compared to on-prem data warehouse solutions. It provides a great deal for production."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Data Warehouse solutions are best for your needs.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise61
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake?
We find the metering and billing experience for Snowflake to be expensive because there are many limitations to what it can do. When we compared performance-wise and cost-wise to Bedrock for some o...
What needs improvement with Snowflake?
Lessons learned about our main use case or how Snowflake performed in those areas include that the sales representatives do not really understand the product, and that the solutions consultants bas...
What is your primary use case for Snowflake?
Our main use case for Snowflake was to ingest data, use it for search, analytics, and data sharing with our customers; however, in reality, those use cases did not work. When it came to our challen...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Snowflake Computing, Snowflake Data Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Accordant Media, Adobe, Kixeye Inc., Revana, SOASTA, White Ops
Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Google, Databricks and others in Cloud Data Warehouse. Updated: October 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.