Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) vs. Snowflake

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon EMR
Score 8.7 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 8.8 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 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cloudera Manager
Cloudera Manager
Score 9.9 out of 10
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Analytics Engine
IBM Analytics Engine
Score 7.6 out of 10
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce)Snowflake
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(19 ratings)
8.9
(43 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(4 ratings)
9.3
(19 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(3 ratings)
9.9
(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.
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
  • EMR does well in managing the cost as it uses the task node cores to process the data and these instances are cheaper when the data is stored on s3. It is really cost efficient. No need to maintain any libraries to connect to AWS resources.
  • EMR is highly available, secure and easy to launch. No much hassle in launching the cluster (Simple and easy).
  • EMR manages the big data frameworks which the developer need not worry (no need to maintain the memory and framework settings) about the framework settings. It's all setup on launch time. The bootstrapping feature is great.
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
  • It would have been better if packages like HBase and Flume were available with Amazon EMR. This would make the product even more helpful in some cases.
  • Products like Cloudera provide the options to move the whole deployment into a dedicated server and use it at our discretion. This would have been a good option if available with EMR.
  • If EMR gave the option to be used with any choice of cloud provider, it would have helped instead of having to move the data from another cloud service to S3.
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
Documentation is quite good and the product is regularly updated, so new features regularly come out. The setup is straightforward enough, especially once you have already established the overall platform infrastructure and the aws-cli APIs are easy enough to use. It would be nice to have some out-of-the-box integrations for checking logs and the Spark UI, rather than relying on know-how and digging through multiple levels to find the informations
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
I give the overall support for Amazon EMR this rating because while the support technicians are very knowledgeable and always able to help, it sometimes takes a very long time to get in contact with one of the support technicians. So overall the support is pretty good for Amazon EMR.
Read full review
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
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.
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
  • It was obviously cheaper and convenient to use as most of our data processing and pipelines are on AWS. It was fast and readily available with a click and that saved a ton of time rather than having to figure out the down time of the cluster if its on premises.
  • It saved time on processing chunks of big data which had to be processed in short period with minimal costs. EMR solved this as the cluster setup time and processing was simple, easy, cheap and fast.
  • It had a negative impact as it was very difficult in submitting the test jobs as it lags a UI to submit spark code snippets.
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