Snowflake Reviews

We use the solution as a data warehouse for our financial services firm. 

The core feature of the platform is everything works, and that's what I like about it. Our time to market is faster, it requires less maintenance, and I can build and deploy a product exceptionally quickly.

Everything is automatic, and I don't have to do any maintenance.

I want tokenization, so they could either acquire a company that does tokenization or somehow integrate with one. If I could do tokenization in line with other development without having a third-party system, that would ease integration and security, of course.

More data governance and access control features would be a welcome addition.

We have been using Snowflake for about three and a half years. 

Snowflake is a stable platform. 

The power of Snowflake is that it scales automatically and indefinitely. We have around 500 internal users using the solution daily, and most of our applications use the product in some shape or form, so that's a few hundred thousand external users.

The support model is that we have a Snowflake rep, and if I need anything, I can reach out to him, and he can get people on board within minutes. The support is fantastic.

Positive

We weren't satisfied with our data warehouse, AWS Redshift, Oracle, and some on-prem elements such as a SQL Server. We wanted a cloud data warehouse that didn't require a lot of manual intervention and maintenance, DBAs and so on. We wanted a solution that could scale automatically and pay-as-you-go to cut down on wasteful infrastructure. Therefore, Snowflake made a lot of sense, plus compared to Redshift at the time, the separation of storage and computing was huge. That was an essential differentiator for us.

We previously used ThoughtSpot, specifically their Falcon engine, their appliance version, and it did everything on its own. We brought in Snowflake later when ThoughtSpot introduced their product called Embrace. We were among the earliest adopters to switch, and six to eight months after, we integrated with Snowflake.

The initial setup was straightforward; it was one of the easiest I've done, so I rate the solution five out of five for ease of setup.

We carried out the deployment in-house, and Snowflake is a SaaS solution, so setup was rapid. All we needed was some user account information. 

Snowflake is expensive, but when I consider what we get for that price, it's fair. I rate the solution three out of five for affordability, right in the middle. 

I rate the solution nine out of ten. 

Snowflake is ahead of the competitors because it's completely automatic and hands-off in terms of maintenance. Many of the competitor products have similar features to Snowflake, but what they call automatic still requires someone to understand it. If they give us 100 levers, somebody has to know what each of them does and when to pull them, whereas Snowflake is entirely hands-off.

My advice to potential customers is to have a team member who understands performance tuning and to figure out optimal credit usage ahead of time to avoid wasteful spending.

The implementation is essential because the solution provides a lot of power out of the box, and the initial configuration needs to be fit for purpose. If I have a relatively small use case where I don't need much power or don't have much data, the product needs to be configured for that. As opposed to an external case where I might need high power for a government job, for example, then the configuration needs to be scaled up.

Snowflake is our centralized data warehouse. We bring all of our business critical information to Snowflake. It also powers all of our dashboard's reporting and analytical models.

Snowflake has improved our organization by powering company-wide dashboards that functions use to understand and manage their business. We also have dashboards that go up to our board of directors and our C-suite. Snowflake allows us to have up-to-date, consistent, and useful reporting for the entire company.

I found Snowflake's performance to be its most valuable feature. The product is an incredibly fast and performant data warehouse. We handle a lot of semi-structured data natively with it, which is nice. 

I also appreciate Snowflake's scalability. As the company has grown, as the number of Snowflake users have grown, I have not had any issue scaling.

There is room for improvement in Snowflake's integration with Python. We do a lot of SQL programming in Snowflake, but we go to a different tool to program when we have to in Python. However, I know this is an area that Snowflake's working on.

I have been using Snowflake for a year and a half at my current company. I have an additional six years of previous experience. 

Snowflake is incredibly stable. I have never had an issue with Snowflake outages.

Snowflake is scalable both in terms of the amount of data that you can run through it and the number of users that engage with it. We have five direct users and then, because Snowflake powers all the dashboards, 250 indirect users.

We plan to increase our Snowflake usage in the future. As we send more data through it and build out more sophisticated dashboards and reporting and especially statistical modeling, we will increase our usage.

I have not had a lot of issues with Snowflake, so I haven't had to utilize technical support that much. But when I have had issues, I received a response in a couple days, not the same day. The responses sometimes help solve the issue and sometimes not. The technical support could be better. 

Neutral

I did not previously use a different solution at my current company. 

The initial setup was very straightforward. 

Our employment was done in-house. In fact, I did it myself. 

We have seen a return on investment with Snowflake. 

We spend between $30,000 and $50,000 a year for Snowflake licensing.

I did not evaluate other options. I have been using Snowflake for so long and it has been so good for me to use that didn't need to.

I think Snowflake is fantastic for both storing data and querying your data, but you should always maintain visibility into your costs. They can run up and get out of control if you're not aware of who's using Snowflake and why.

We are currently using this product for data lake and data warehouse projects. Snowflake creates our repositories and enables the view from other tools like Docker and Power BI to create that data mesh. We use the data to create a process inside the warehouse. We are customers of Snowflake and I'm the senior manager of information technology infrastructure.

Snowflake is user-friendly and reliable in creating the data warehouse and carrying out data modeling. 

I'd like to see the data science functionality improved to a degree that would enable data scientists to work together with the data engineering team. The solution is focused on SQL and some kind of language or free support would be useful and would add some functionality to the machine-learning process. 

The current API is very limited and difficult to configure. It's not easy to create an API and start changing data so some kind of API to expose the data would be good. We use Docker to check the data but if we could get an API that allows other tools to access the data that would be great. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

The scalability is good. There are around 35 people in the company using Snowflake and six engineers dealing with maintenance. 

The technical support is good. 

Positive

The initial setup was simple and took about a month. The main point is to align the data governance and integration process because you only need to click a button to start. We had a service engineer from Snowflake help with that.

If you use the tool well, you'll see ROI from your investment.

It's important to understand the licensing model because if you're paying for the software, you're not necessarily aware of the use. It's important to monitor how you're using the resources otherwise you can find yourself in a difficult situation. Licensing costs depend on the agreement you have with Snowflake.

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

We're ingesting third-party data analytics into a database held within Snowflake. We have pre-production and production environments with integration to staging and production schemas.

It has improved the way our organization functions. However, we're still pretty elementary in our understanding of how it all works and the complete capabilities of Snowflake.

The adaptation to development languages is most valuable. Our developers can SQL code or something else. It has been convenient in that regard.

The data sharing capabilities across business units within the organization should be better. There could also be better integration.

I have been using Snowflake for a year and three months.

We have high confidence in it.

We have high confidence in its scalability. In terms of its users, for our solution, we only have a team of 10, but we have plans to increase its usage.

We haven't had any technical contact. All of it has been internal for our organization.

This is a net-new solution. So, it's brand new. We chose Snowflake for a variety of reasons, but mainly, we chose it for its scalability and data sharing capabilities.

I would rate it a three out of five in terms of complexity just because we didn't have any Snowflake developers that were available. The implementation took about three months.

We implemented it on our own.

We have not yet seen an ROI.

We're based on credits. So, we're paying four and a half dollars of credit. There are no additional costs. I would rate it a two out of five in terms of pricing.

I would advise ensuring that you have the expertise with domain knowledge in Snowflake. The time from initial concept to deployment could be expedited extremely fast. Just from our internal learnings, we see that our time to production has increased month over month.

I would rate it a six out of ten just because we're unaware or naive to the full capabilities of the product. However, I would highly recommend it in terms of setting up data warehousing internally over an Azure solution, such as Synapse, or something else.

We are silver or gold partners. The main use case is that we are building a data lake. We are creating a couple of downstream applications as well that will be used by data scientists. So, we will have a single data lake that will be used across the organization by different business domain users. The data is multi-source. We have data from SAP, JDE, and some Excel files.

The speed of data loading and being able to quickly create the environment are most valuable. 

For data, it provides built-in security and compliance with different standards, such as SOC 2, ISO, etc. So, we don't have to do a separate audit for compliance.

There are some gray areas. For example, there is no clarity on where the data sits exactly. That is their proprietary information, and they are not sharing those details. 

Its price should be improved. On the cost-side, it is more expensive than others.

If they could bring in some tools for data integration, it would be really great.

I have been using this solution for almost two and a half years.

It is pretty stable. Its stability is excellent.

It is scalable. As of now, there are 500 users, but slowly, we are planning to roll out to multiple regions. It is currently in Europe, and we will be rolling it out to the APAC and USA regions. By the year-end, there will be more than 1,000 users.

They're perfect. They're excellent. It could be because we are partners.

It is straightforward. It is not that complex.

Our own team deploys it for customers, but the initial configuration is done only by the Snowflake team because that is their area. 

I have worked with multiple clouds, and cost-wise, it is a bit costlier than others, such as Redshift. Its price should be reduced.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

The solution has use cases related to retail stores and sales.

The most valuable features of Snowflake are that you have to pay per usage, and you don't have to worry about the maintenance of the data warehouse because it is on the cloud.

The solution’s pricing could be cheaper. It would be helpful if Snowflake could create good reports instead of using Power BI reports.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten for stability.

Snowflake is a scalable solution. We have four to five customers for Snowflake who use it regularly.

The solution’s initial setup is straightforward.

The solution's deployment in a development environment takes only a couple of minutes.

Users have to pay a licensing fee for the solution, which is expensive.

Snowflake is deployed on the cloud. The solution is providing HIPAA compliance, which is sufficient. Users looking for a pay-as-you-use product available on Azure or AWS should consider Snowflake.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use the solution to build the pipelines in stream sets, including data source, data warehouse, and destination endpoints.

The solution's most valuable features are storage, run time, scalability, and minimum query time compared to other vendors.

The solution's stability needs improvement.

I have been using the solution for seven or eight months.

Recently, I encountered an issue with the solution's data warehouse. The resource monitor had exceeded its quota. I rate its stability as an eight.

I rate the solution's scalability as a nine.

We use Hive and Hadoop as well. Snowflake is more stable and scalable.

The solution is more straightforward to use than the other IDBMS tools. It has a simple query process. Its computing time is less as well. One can easily have access to it. I rate it as a nine.

Basically, if at all, we wanted to have an interface for data warehouses on the cloud which worked on Azure or AWS. Snowflake, provides a more intuitive, rapid user interface where people can connect and maintain warehouses and share data among the people in the companies easily. Its pricing model and the model have made maintaining virtual warehouses simpler.

I appreciate the Snowflake marketplace, where you can drop data and allow other people throughout the world to access it. You can go to the Snowflake marketplace and connect to some data. If somebody else publishes, for example, COVID-19 data or weather data, you can sign up for new data sets and bring them into your warehouse, which I found very interesting.

You can connect to different cloud sources, including Azure and AWS. 

You can report out, and all the cloud technologies have connected to Snowflake, allowing you to move the data or get the data into Snowflake. 

The initial setup was pretty simple. 

It scales really well. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is reasonably priced. 

I don't know about GCP, if they have connected for GCP. If they don't, they should allow for it.

Overall, they're doing great. I don't have any specific complaints or improvements that need to happen.

I've used the solution for a couple of years now. 

The solution is quite stable since everything is in the cloud, and the data these days has become cheap with storage and everything in the cloud. Through clusters and warehouses, sizes can be increased or decreased based on usage, and they can be turned on and turned off. Sustainability-wise, I think it's a pretty good solution.

It is scalable. The warehouses or auto-scaling features in the warehouses are great. You can go from small to medium to large all the way up to extra large, and there are different auto-scaling tasks that can happen. You can turn it on and turn it off based on the usage or auto-turn it on and turn it off. That's a pretty nice feature to have and we find it both sustainable and scalable for sure.

I work for clients, so last time when I worked for a client, there was a group of 100 people who were actually signed up to use Snowflake. 

I've never dealt with technical support. We did have people from Snowflake working with us directly, and we never ran into any issues that needed troubleshooting. The personnel from Snowflake, of course, would resolve whatever came up. 

I come from an Azure background as well, so Microsoft also comes with Azure Synapse, where it's a similar functionality as Snowflake, where it's warehousing on the cloud. Azure Synapse is also good. I'm unaware of AWS or GCP, and I heard that Google Cloud Platform also has Big Query and big data capabilities, which are tough competitors for Snowflake and other cloud warehousing tools.

The implementation process was pretty straightforward. I didn't set it up, though. I used an already set up version. I just had to connect. I had to push data from Azure to Snowflake, create tables there, and have data loaded into those tables, and that's it. I wasn't doing anything else, so I didn't work on the infrastructure of Snowflake.

You would need a group of two or three people to maintain the product.

I work for a consulting firm, so I don't work for the client, so I really don't know what the company used for deployment.

Licensing was based on the warehouse. I don't recall it being very expensive. 

I'm a consultant and end-user.

I'm not currently using the solution right now and do not recall the last version I was on. 

Now, I'm working for a different client on a different platform altogether. My company, as such, doesn't use Snowflake since we are in consulting. We have expertise in something, and then we help the clients deliver that solution on the technology.

Potential new users should just definitely give it a shot. They should start off with a POC, proof of concept, for the data that they have, and then, if everything works well and they can migrate in a cost-effective way. 

I would recommend Snowflake to start off with since it's just picking up over the last couple of years. If I have to recommend anything, however, it would be more Microsoft tools I would recommend since that all comes as a package. You can do Synapse and Azure Data Factory, which is  for ETL. You can also do Azure Data Lake Storage. There are different things that you can do when you buy something in a package like that. That said, I definitely recommend Snowflake if someone wants to give it a shot.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.