Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Databricks VS Snowflake

Compare Databricks VS Snowflake and see what are their differences

Databricks logo Databricks

Databricks provides a Unified Analytics Platform that accelerates innovation by unifying data science, engineering and business.‎What is Apache Spark?

Snowflake logo Snowflake

Snowflake is the only data platform built for the cloud for all your data & all your users. Learn more about our purpose-built SQL cloud data warehouse.
  • Databricks Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-14
  • Snowflake Homepage
    Homepage //
    2024-07-19

Databricks features and specs

  • Unified Data Analytics Platform
    Databricks integrates various data processing and analytics tools, offering a unified environment for data engineering, machine learning, and business analytics. This integration can streamline workflows and reduce the complexity of data management.
  • Scalability
    Databricks leverages Apache Spark and other scalable technologies to handle large datasets and high computational workloads efficiently. This makes it suitable for enterprises with significant data processing needs.
  • Collaborative Environment
    The platform offers collaborative notebooks that allow data scientists, engineers, and analysts to work together in real-time. This enhances productivity and fosters better communication within teams.
  • Performance Optimization
    Databricks includes various performance optimization features such as caching, indexing, and query optimization, which can significantly speed up data processing tasks.
  • Support for Various Data Formats
    The platform supports a wide range of data formats and sources, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, making it versatile and adaptable to different use cases.
  • Integration with Cloud Providers
    Databricks is designed to work seamlessly with major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, allowing users to easily integrate it into their existing cloud infrastructure.

Possible disadvantages of Databricks

  • Cost
    Databricks can be expensive, especially for large-scale deployments or high-frequency usage. It may not be the most cost-effective solution for smaller organizations or projects with limited budgets.
  • Complexity
    While powerful, Databricks can be complex to set up and manage, requiring specialized knowledge in Apache Spark and cloud infrastructure. This might lead to a steeper learning curve for new users.
  • Dependency on Cloud Providers
    Being heavily integrated with cloud providers, Databricks might face issues like vendor lock-in, where switching providers becomes difficult or costly.
  • Limited Offline Capabilities
    Databricks is primarily designed for cloud environments, which means offline or on-premise capabilities are limited, posing challenges for organizations with strict data governance policies.
  • Resource Management
    Efficiently managing and allocating resources can be challenging in Databricks, especially in large multi-user environments. Mismanagement of resources could lead to increased costs and reduced performance.

Snowflake features and specs

  • Scalability
    Snowflake offers virtually unlimited scalability. It separates compute and storage, so both can scale independently according to the needs of the workload.
  • Performance
    Snowflake's architecture is optimized for performance, offering automatic clustering and parallel processing which enable faster query execution.
  • Ease of Use
    The platform provides a user-friendly interface and automates many maintenance tasks, such as indexing and partitioning, making it easier for both data engineers and analysts to use.
  • Data Sharing
    Snowflake enables seamless data sharing among different accounts without the need to duplicate data, improving collaboration and data management.
  • Security
    Snowflake includes comprehensive security features such as end-to-end encryption, role-based access control, and VPC/VPN network policies.
  • Multi-Cloud Support
    Snowflake supports multiple cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, giving organizations flexibility in choosing their infrastructure.

Possible disadvantages of Snowflake

  • Cost
    While powerful, Snowflake can become expensive, especially if not managed properly, due to its pay-as-you-go pricing model.
  • Vendor Lock-In
    Once an organization is deeply integrated with Snowflake, switching to another solution can be complex and costly, contributing to vendor lock-in.
  • Learning Curve
    Though easier than many traditional databases, there is still a learning curve associated with mastering Snowflake’s unique architecture and features.
  • Third-Party Ecosystem
    While Snowflake integrates well with many third-party tools, it may not support all the tools and services you are currently using, requiring additional effort for integration.
  • Network Performance
    Snowflake's performance can be impacted by network latency, especially if large datasets are being transferred over the internet between Snowflake and on-premises systems.

Databricks videos

Introduction to Databricks

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Azure Databricks Tutorial | Data transformations at scale
  • Review - Databricks - Data Movement and Query

Snowflake videos

No Snowflake videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Databricks and Snowflake)
Data Dashboard
81 81%
19% 19
Big Data
54 54%
46% 46
Database Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Data Warehousing
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Databricks and Snowflake

Databricks Reviews

Jupyter Notebook & 10 Alternatives: Data Notebook Review [2023]
Databricks notebooks are a popular tool for developing code and presenting findings in data science and machine learning. Databricks Notebooks support real-time multilingual coauthoring, automatic versioning, and built-in data visualizations.
Source: lakefs.io
7 best Colab alternatives in 2023
Databricks is a platform built around Apache Spark, an open-source, distributed computing system. The Databricks Community Edition offers a collaborative workspace where users can create Jupyter notebooks. Although it doesn't offer free GPU resources, it's an excellent tool for distributed data processing and big data analytics.
Source: deepnote.com
Top 5 Cloud Data Warehouses in 2023
Jan 11, 2023 The 5 best cloud data warehouse solutions in 2023Google BigQuerySource: https://cloud.google.com/bigqueryBest for:Top features:Pros:Cons:Pricing:SnowflakeBest for:Top features:Pros:Cons:Pricing:Amazon RedshiftSource: https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/Best for:Top features:Pros:Cons:Pricing:FireboltSource: https://www.firebolt.io/Best for:Top...
Top 10 AWS ETL Tools and How to Choose the Best One | Visual Flow
Databricks is a simple, fast, and collaborative analytics platform based on Apache Spark with ETL capabilities. It accelerates innovation by bringing together data science and data science businesses. It is a fully managed open-source version of Apache Spark analytics with optimized connectors to storage platforms for the fastest data access.
Source: visual-flow.com
Top Big Data Tools For 2021
Now Azure Databricks achieves 50 times better performance thanks to a highly optimized version of Spark. Databricks also enables real-time co-authoring and automates versioning. Besides, it features runtimes optimized for machine learning that include many popular libraries, such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras, etc.

Snowflake Reviews

Top 6 Cloud Data Warehouses in 2023
Snowflake accommodates data analysts of all levels since it does not use Python or R programming language. It is also well known for its secure and compressed storage for semi-structured data. Besides this, it allows you to spin multiple virtual warehouses based on your needs while parallelizing and isolating individual queries boosting their performance. You can interact...
Source: geekflare.com
Top 5 Cloud Data Warehouses in 2023
Snowflake is one of the most popular data warehousing solutions on the market and delivers an incredible experience across multiple public clouds. By using Snowflake, companies can pull data from various business intelligence tools to do reporting and analytics without any database administration, thus avoiding high overhead costs. Unlike other data warehousing services,...
Top 5 BigQuery Alternatives: A Challenge of Complexity
Plus, Snowflake doesn’t include data integrations, so teams will have to bolt on an ETL tool to pipe their data into the warehouse. Those third-party pipelines add extra cost and overhead in the form of setup and maintenance that some teams may not want to absorb.
Source: blog.panoply.io
Top Big Data Tools For 2021
This platform can be used for data warehousing, data science, data engineering, sharing, and application development. It enables you to easily secure your data and execute various analytic workloads. Snowflake also ensures a seamless experience when working with multiple public clouds.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Databricks should be more popular than Snowflake. It has been mentiond 18 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Databricks mentions (18)

  • Platform Engineering Abstraction: How to Scale IaC for Enterprise
    Vendors like Confluent, Snowflake, Databricks, and dbt are improving the developer experience with more automation and integrations, but they often operate independently. This fragmentation makes standardizing multi-directional integrations across identity and access management, data governance, security, and cost control even more challenging. Developing a standardized, secure, and scalable solution for... - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • dolly-v2-12b
    Dolly-v2-12bis a 12 billion parameter causal language model created by Databricks that is derived from EleutherAI’s Pythia-12b and fine-tuned on a ~15K record instruction corpus generated by Databricks employees and released under a permissive license (CC-BY-SA). Source: about 2 years ago
  • Clickstream data analysis with Databricks and Redpanda
    Global organizations need a way to process the massive amounts of data they produce for real-time decision making. They often utilize event-streaming tools like Redpanda with stream-processing tools like Databricks for this purpose. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • DeWitt Clause, or Can You Benchmark %DATABASE% and Get Away With It
    Databricks, a data lakehouse company founded by the creators of Apache Spark, published a blog post claiming that it set a new data warehousing performance record in 100 TB TPC-DS benchmark. It was also mentioned that Databricks was 2.7x faster and 12x better in terms of price performance compared to Snowflake. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
  • A Quick Start to Databricks on AWS
    Go to Databricks and click the Try Databricks button. Fill in the form and Select AWS as your desired platform afterward. - Source: dev.to / about 3 years ago
View more

Snowflake mentions (4)

  • DeWitt Clause, or Can You Benchmark %DATABASE% and Get Away With It
    Snowflake, a data warehousing company founded by ex-Oracle and ex-VectorWise experts, responded with a blog post that critically reviewed Databricks' findings, reported different results for the same benchmark, and claimed comparable price/performance to Databricks. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
  • Personal Support at Internet Scale
    Snowflake: Snowflake is fast, and works well as a product analytics database. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
  • Less than 1TB of data what tools should I get better at?
    If you just go to snowflake.com you can sign up for a demo account for free for a month and I'm fairly certain you can get more than one of these accounts (I would recycle emails doing it all the time.) Once you have an account there's lots of docs and videos out there either using the Database via their UI or via python using their connector. They also have a pyspark connector but you might want to just learn... Source: over 3 years ago
  • *BOMATO*
    Early stage funding & VCs clearly demarcate between tech companies and tech enabled companies. But, once the PE comes into the picture at the scale of BlackStone, the border between doordash.com and snowflake.com starts to blur. The motivation is to make some bucks by going to IPO and they know how to get it done. Source: over 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Databricks and Snowflake, you can also consider the following products

Google BigQuery - A fully managed data warehouse for large-scale data analytics.

Looker - Looker makes it easy for analysts to create and curate custom data experiences—so everyone in the business can explore the data that matters to them, in the context that makes it truly meaningful.

Qubole - Qubole delivers a self-service platform for big aata analytics built on Amazon, Microsoft and Google Clouds.

Jupyter - Project Jupyter exists to develop open-source software, open-standards, and services for interactive computing across dozens of programming languages. Ready to get started? Try it in your browser Install the Notebook.

Amazon EMR - Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that makes it easy to quickly process vast amounts of data.

Presto DB - Distributed SQL Query Engine for Big Data (by Facebook)