Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) vs. Snowflake

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon EMR
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Amazon EMR is a cloud-native big data platform for processing vast amounts of data quickly, at scale. Using open source tools such as Apache Spark, Apache Hive, Apache HBase, Apache Flink, Apache Hudi (Incubating), and Presto, coupled with the scalability of Amazon EC2 and scalable storage of Amazon S3, EMR gives analytical teams the engines and elasticity to run Petabyte-scale analysis.N/A
Snowflake
Score 9.0 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 EMR (Elastic MapReduce)Snowflake
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon EMRSnowflake
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 EMR (Elastic MapReduce)Snowflake
Considered Both Products
Amazon EMR
Chose Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)
Snowflake is a lot easier to get started with than the other options. Snowflake's data lake building capabilities are far more powerful. Although Amazon EMR isn't our first pick, we've had an excellent experience with EC2 and S3. Because of our current API interfaces, it made …
Chose Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)
Amazon EMR (Elastic Map Reduce) compares well against GCP and Azure - but you need to be careful of the costs involved in spinning up such a cluster. It is easy to configure however and it is my preferred platform to deploy our solutions because of its ease of use.
Chose Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)
Amazon EMR is faster, cheaper, easier, and enjoyed more by our employees compared to Azure HDInsight. We selected Amazon because we saw an advertisement and wanted to try it out to see how it was. We will continue to use it until it is not around or until we find something that …
Snowflake

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)Snowflake
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cloudera Manager
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Score 9.7 out of 10
Db2
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Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Analytics Engine
IBM Analytics Engine
Score 8.8 out of 10
Db2
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Score 8.7 out of 10
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User Ratings
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)Snowflake
Likelihood to Recommend
8.4
(19 ratings)
9.3
(37 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(3 ratings)
8.7
(13 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(3 ratings)
9.8
(8 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)Snowflake
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
We are running it to perform preparation which takes a few hours on EC2 to be running on a spark-based EMR cluster to total the preparation inside minutes rather than a few hours. Ease of utilization and capacity to select from either Hadoop or spark. Processing time diminishes from 5-8 hours to 25-30 minutes compared with the Ec2 occurrence and more in a few cases.
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Snowflake Computing
I am over our HR data, and we use Workday for our HR management system. I have a script in place that runs reports on Workday and saves the results as CSVs. I can then use stages in Snowflake to insert these CSVs into Snowflake, then I can insert or truncate and replace these staged tables into a final schema. Then once these are in a schema I can reference them and build out my data models. In addition to ingesting CSVs, Snowflake has the ability to write a CSV file to our Amazon S3 bucket. Ingesting these CSVs, transforming the data, then delivering it to a destination would've involved so much more coding than my current process if we were on any other platform.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • Amazon Elastic MapReduce works well for managing analyses that use multiple tools, such as Hadoop and Spark. If it were not for the fact that we use multiple tools, there would be less need for MapReduce.
  • MapReduce is always on. I've never had a problem getting data analyses to run on the system. It's simple to set up data mining projects.
  • Amazon Elastic MapReduce has no problems dealing with very large data sets. It processes them just fine. With that said, the outputs don't come instantaneously. It takes time.
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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
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Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Sometimes bootstrapping certain tools comes with debugging costs. The tools provided by some of the enterprise editions are great compared to EMR.
  • Like some of the enterprise editions EMR does not provide on premises options.
  • No UI client for saving the workbooks or code snippets. Everything has to go through submitting process. Not really convenient for tracking the job as well.
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Snowflake Computing
  • This tool is very much technical and proper knowledge is required, so mostly you have to hire an IT team.
  • I wish if various videos could be available for basic quires like its initiation, then I think it would act as a guideline and would help the beginners a lot.
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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
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Usability
Amazon AWS
I give Amazon EMR this rating because while it is great at simplifying running big data frameworks, providing the Amazon EMR highlights, product details, and pricing information, and analyzing vast amounts of data, it can be run slow, freeze and glitch sometimes. So overall Amazon EMR is pretty good to use other than some basic issues.
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Snowflake Computing
The interface is similar to other SQL query systems I've used and is fairly easy to use. My only complaint is the syntax issues. Another thing is that the error messages are not always the easiest thing to understand, especially when you incorporate temp tables. Some of that is to be expected with any new database.
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Support Rating
Amazon AWS
There's a vast group of trained and certified (by AWS) professionals ready to work for anyone that needs to implement, configure or fix EMR. There's also a great amount of documentation that is accessible to anyone who's trying to learn this. And there's also always the help of AWS itself. They have people ready to help you analyze your needs and then make a recommendation.
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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.
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
Snowflake is a lot easier to get started with than the other options. Snowflake's data lake building capabilities are far more powerful. Although Amazon EMR isn't our first pick, we've had an excellent experience with EC2 and S3. Because of our current API interfaces, it made more sense for us to continue with Hadoop rather than explore other options.
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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.
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Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • Positive: Helped process the jobs amazingly fast.
  • Positive: Did not have to spend much time to learn the system, therefore, saving valuable research time.
  • Negative: Not flexible for some scenarios, like when some plugins are required, or when the project has to be moved in-house.
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Snowflake Computing
  • Positive impact: we use Snowflake to track our subscription and payment charges, which we use for internal and investor reporting
  • Positive impact: 3 times faster query speed compared to Treasure Data means that answers to stakeholders can be delivered quicker by analysts
  • Positive impact: recommender systems now source their data from Snowflake rather than Spark clusters, improving development speed, and no longer require maintainence of Spark clusters.
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ScreenShots

Snowflake Screenshots

Screenshot of Snowflake Installation