Amazon Athena vs. Snowflake

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Athena
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can point Athena at their data stored in S3 and begin using standard SQL to run ad-hoc queries and get results in seconds. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to setup or manage, and customers pay only for the queries they run. You can use Athena to process logs, perform ad-hoc analysis, and run…
$5
per TB of Data Scanned
Snowflake
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
The Snowflake Cloud Data Platform is the eponymous data warehouse with, from the company in San Mateo, a cloud and SQL based DW that aims to allow users to unify, integrate, analyze, and share previously siloed data in secure, governed, and compliant ways. With it, users can securely access the Data Cloud to share live data with customers and business partners, and connect with other organizations doing business as data consumers, data providers, and data service providers.N/A
Pricing
Amazon AthenaSnowflake
Editions & Modules
Price per Query
$5.00
per TB of Data Scanned
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon AthenaSnowflake
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon AthenaSnowflake
Features
Amazon AthenaSnowflake
Database-as-a-Service
Comparison of Database-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Athena
8.6
4 Ratings
0% above category average
Snowflake
-
Ratings
Automatic software patching8.22 Ratings00 Ratings
Database scalability9.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated backups7.73 Ratings00 Ratings
Database security provisions9.22 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring and metrics8.04 Ratings00 Ratings
Automatic host deployment9.22 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon AthenaSnowflake
Small Businesses
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon AthenaSnowflake
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(4 ratings)
8.9
(43 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(1 ratings)
9.3
(19 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.9
(8 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon AthenaSnowflake
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
If you are looking to take a lot of the traditional "database administration" work off someone's plate, going with Amazon Athena certainly has "no code" options to optimize lots of database tasks. I would say this option is less appropriate if you have other Microsoft things at play, such as Power BI.
Read full review
Snowflake Computing
Snowflake is well suited when you have to store your data and you want easy scalability and increase or decrease the storage per your requirement. You can also control the computing cost, and if your computing cost is less than or equal to 10% of your storage cost, then you don't have to pay for computing, which makes it cost-effective as well.
Read full review
Pros
Amazon AWS
  • Nested Schemas like JSON data structure
  • Ability to adapt the data model to fit your queries better
  • Performance Improvement
Read full review
Snowflake Computing
  • Snowflake scales appropriately allowing you to manage expense for peak and off peak times for pulling and data retrieval and data centric processing jobs
  • Snowflake offers a marketplace solution that allows you to sell and subscribe to different data sources
  • Snowflake manages concurrency better in our trials than other premium competitors
  • Snowflake has little to no setup and ramp up time
  • Snowflake offers online training for various employee types
Read full review
Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Response caching can be improved.
  • Data Partitioning is tricky and understanding of the same could be improved.
Read full review
Snowflake Computing
  • Add constraints for views and not just for tables
  • Do not force customers to renew for same or higher amount to avoid loosing unused credits. Already paid credits should not expire (at least within a reasonable time frame), independent of renewal deal size.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Snowflake Computing
SnowFlake is very cost effective and we also like the fact we can stop, start and spin up additional processing engines as we need to. We also like the fact that it's easy to connect our SQL IDEs to Snowflake and write our queries in the environment that we are used to
Read full review
Usability
Amazon AWS
Easy to use. Scalable. Gets the job of data warehousing setup done. Using the datalake on S3 has become super convenient.
Read full review
Snowflake Computing
Because the fact that you can query tons of data in a few seconds is incredible, it also gives you a lot of functions to format and transform data right in your query, which is ideal when building data models in BI tools like Power BI, it is available as a connector in the most used BI tools worldwide.
Read full review
Support Rating
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Snowflake Computing
We have had terrific experiences with Snowflake support. They have drilled into queries and given us tremendous detail and helpful answers. In one case they even figured out how a particular product was interacting with Snowflake, via its queries, and gave us detail to go back to that product's vendor because the Snowflake support team identified a fault in its operation. We got it solved without lots of back-and-forth or finger-pointing because the Snowflake team gave such detailed information.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
Read full review
Snowflake Computing
I have had the experience of using one more database management system at my previous workplace. What Snowflake provides is better user-friendly consoles, suggestions while writing a query, ease of access to connect to various BI platforms to analyze, [and a] more robust system to store a large amount of data. All these functionalities give the better edge to Snowflake.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • The query speeds help us make more decisions in a day (speed).
  • If you need more horsepower for specific times in the day this option helps scale.
  • The security of your environment is well protected too.
Read full review
Snowflake Computing
  • With separate compute and storage feature, the queries get executed quickly and it improves our overall productivity.
  • Earlier we were using a different product for analytical purposes, but with Snowflake's in-built analytical feature we are now able to save money.
  • Snowflake is cost efficient, features like auto suspend for compute resources helped to control the costs.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Snowflake Screenshots

Screenshot of Snowflake Installation