vs

Amazon Redshift vs Snowflake

Amazon Redshift: AWS's MPP columnar data warehouse, available as provisioned RA3 clusters or Serverless. Snowflake: Fully managed cloud data warehouse with separate storage and compute, now spanning AI and apps.

key differences

  • Only Snowflake has full-text search, vector search, change data capture, time travel, branching.

choose amazon-redshift for

  • +Enterprise data warehouse on AWS
  • +BI dashboards over curated marts
  • +Lakehouse queries over S3 with Spectrum
  • +Near-real-time analytics on Aurora data via zero-ETL

best at · Warehouse, OLAP, Lakehouse

choose snowflake for

  • +Enterprise data warehouse
  • +ELT pipelines with dbt
  • +Cross-company data sharing
  • +BI and reporting at scale

best at · Warehouse, OLAP, Lakehouse

overview
Primary model
Columnar / OLAP
Columnar / OLAP
Also supports
Relational, Document, Spatial
Relational, Document, Vector, Spatial
Type
Managed service
Managed service
Status
Active
Active
Developer
Amazon Web Services
Snowflake Inc.
First release
2012
2014
Latest version
–
–
License
ProprietaryProprietary
ProprietaryProprietary
Free tier
—
—
popularity
WhichDB Score
55.8
74.4
Rank
#21
#7
GitHub stars
–
–
Stack Overflow questions
8.8K
12.2K
scale & guarantees
Comfortable data size
Massive (Multi-PB)
Massive (Multi-PB)
Horizontal scaling
Native
Native
Multi-region
Read replicas
Read replicas
ACID
Full
Full
Consistency
Strong
Strong
Schema
Strict
Flexible
Architecture
Distributed, Shared storage, Serverless
Distributed, Shared storage, Serverless
deployment
Self-hosted
—
—
Vendor-managed cloud
✓
✓
Serverless
✓
✓
Embedded
—
—
Edge
—
—
Clouds
AWS
AWS, Azure, Google Cloud
capabilities
Transactions
✓
✓
Joins
✓
✓
Secondary indexes
—
—
Full-text search
—
✓
Vector search
—
✓
Geospatial
✓
✓
JSON
✓
✓
Change data capture
—
✓
Triggers
—
—
Stored procedures
✓
✓
Materialized views
✓
✓
TTL / expiry
—
—
Pub/Sub
—
—
Columnar storage
✓
✓
In-memory
—
—
Durable persistence
✓
✓
Compression
✓
✓
Encryption at rest
✓
✓
Role-based access
✓
✓
Time travel
—
✓
Branching
—
✓
Online schema changes
✓
✓
Streaming ingest
✓
✓
Offline sync
—
—
Runs in WebAssembly
—
—
interfaces
Query languages
SQL (PostgreSQL dialect), PL/pgSQL
SQL, Snowflake Scripting, Python (Snowpark), JavaScript
Client languages
Python, Java, JavaScript, Go, .NET, C
Python, Java, JavaScript, Go, .NET, C, PHP
Best for
Warehouse, OLAP, Lakehouse
Warehouse, OLAP, Lakehouse

Amazon Redshift vs Snowflake: FAQ

What is the difference between Amazon Redshift and Snowflake?

Amazon Redshift: AWS's MPP columnar data warehouse, available as provisioned RA3 clusters or Serverless. Snowflake: Fully managed cloud data warehouse with separate storage and compute, now spanning AI and apps. Only Snowflake has full-text search, vector search, change data capture, time travel, branching.

When should I choose Amazon Redshift over Snowflake?

Choose Amazon Redshift for enterprise data warehouse on AWS, BI dashboards over curated marts and lakehouse queries over S3 with Spectrum. Choose Snowflake for enterprise data warehouse, ELT pipelines with dbt and cross-company data sharing.

Is Amazon Redshift or Snowflake more popular?

Snowflake ranks #7 on the WhichDB Score (74.4/100) and Amazon Redshift ranks #21 (55.8/100). Popularity is not fit: check the requirements that matter for your project.

Are Amazon Redshift and Snowflake open source?

No. Amazon Redshift is proprietary, closed-source software. No. Snowflake is proprietary, closed-source software.