Databricks Lakehouse Platform vs. Snowflake

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Databricks Lakehouse Platform
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Databricks in San Francisco offers the Databricks Lakehouse Platform (formerly the Unified Analytics Platform), a data science platform and Apache Spark cluster manager. The Databricks Unified Data Service aims to provide a reliable and scalable platform for data pipelines, data lakes, and data platforms. Users can manage full data journey, to ingest, process, store, and expose data throughout an organization. Its Data Science Workspace is a collaborative environment for practitioners to run…
$0.07
Per DBU
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
Databricks Lakehouse PlatformSnowflake
Editions & Modules
Standard
$0.07
Per DBU
Premium
$0.10
Per DBU
Enterprise
$0.13
Per DBU
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Databricks Lakehouse PlatformSnowflake
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
Databricks Lakehouse PlatformSnowflake
Considered Both Products
Databricks Lakehouse Platform
Chose Databricks Lakehouse Platform
Databricks [Lakehouse Platform (Unified Analytics Platform)] can work with all data types in their original format while Snowflake requires additional structures to fit the data before loading it. Databricks is open source so potential is far greater.
Chose Databricks Lakehouse Platform
Compared to Synapse & Snowflake, Databricks provides a much better development experience, and deeper configuration capabilities.
It works out-of-the-box but still allows you intricate customisation of the environment.
I find Databricks very flexible and resilient at the same …
Snowflake
Chose Snowflake
We particularly liked Snowflake's security model as well as its unique storage (whereby everything is essentially a pointer to immutable micro-partitions, which is the key behind its zero-copy cloning, its secure sharing, its time travel, etc.). and also how it separates …
Chose Snowflake
Snowflake is much faster and easier to write queries and pull data. But the visualization part of Snowflake is not as good as them. Also, Snowflake only supports SQL queries but not python or other languages. So basically Snowflake is the expert in its field but not suitable …
Chose Snowflake
I evaluated Redshift and Panoply when making the choice for Snowflake. Panoply is built on Redshift, so the two are equal in drawbacks: Redshift requires a cluster to be running 24/7 for your data to live there. We produce terabytes of data every day, so this was not an option …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Databricks Lakehouse PlatformSnowflake
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Snowflake
Snowflake
Score 9.0 out of 10
Db2
Db2
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Snowflake
Snowflake
Score 9.0 out of 10
Db2
Db2
Score 8.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Databricks Lakehouse PlatformSnowflake
Likelihood to Recommend
8.4
(17 ratings)
9.3
(37 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Usability
9.4
(3 ratings)
8.7
(13 ratings)
Support Rating
8.6
(2 ratings)
9.8
(8 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
8.0
(1 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Professional Services
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Databricks Lakehouse PlatformSnowflake
Likelihood to Recommend
Databricks
If you need a managed big data megastore, which has native integration with highly optimized Apache Spark Engine and native integration with MLflow, go for Databricks Lakehouse Platform. The Databricks Lakehouse Platform is a breeze to use and analytics capabilities are supported out of the box. You will find it a bit difficult to manage code in notebooks but you will get used to it soon.
Read full review
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
Databricks
  • Process raw data in One Lake (S3) env to relational tables and views
  • Share notebooks with our business analysts so that they can use the queries and generate value out of the data
  • Try out PySpark and Spark SQL queries on raw data before using them in our Spark jobs
  • Modern day ETL operations made easy using Databricks. Provide access mechanism for different set of customers
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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
Read full review
Cons
Databricks
  • Connect my local code in Visual code to my Databricks Lakehouse Platform cluster so I can run the code on the cluster. The old databricks-connect approach has many bugs and is hard to set up. The new Databricks Lakehouse Platform extension on Visual Code, doesn't allow the developers to debug their code line by line (only we can run the code).
  • Maybe have a specific Databricks Lakehouse Platform IDE that can be used by Databricks Lakehouse Platform users to develop locally.
  • Visualization in MLFLOW experiment can be enhanced
Read full review
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
Databricks
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
Databricks
Because it is an amazing platform for designing experiments and delivering a deep dive analysis that requires execution of highly complex queries, as well as it allows to share the information and insights across the company with their shared workspaces, while keeping it secured.

in terms of graph generation and interaction it could improve their UI and UX
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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
Databricks
One of the best customer and technology support that I have ever experienced in my career. You pay for what you get and you get the Rolls Royce. It reminds me of the customer support of SAS in the 2000s when the tools were reaching some limits and their engineer wanted to know more about what we were doing, long before "data science" was even a name. Databricks truly embraces the partnership with their customer and help them on any given challenge.
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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
Databricks
Compared to Synapse & Snowflake, Databricks provides a much better development experience, and deeper configuration capabilities. It works out-of-the-box but still allows you intricate customisation of the environment. I find Databricks very flexible and resilient at the same time while Synapse and Snowflake feel more limited in terms of configuration and connectivity to external tools.
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.
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Return on Investment
Databricks
  • The ability to spin up a BIG Data platform with little infrastructure overhead allows us to focus on business value not admin
  • DB has the ability to terminate/time out instances which helps manage cost.
  • The ability to quickly access typical hard to build data scenarios easily is a strength.
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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