Snowflake Alternative

Get the speed you need, without breaking the bank

Looking for sub-second analytics? Dealing with Snowflake cost overruns?
Snowflake is a general purpose cloud data warehouse built on a de-coupled storage and compute architecture. Snowflake provides Enterprise class functionality with features such as Time Travel, Data sharing and others.
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While feature rich, Snowflake struggles to deliver sub-second latency needed for today’s data apps. Firebolt's highly efficient query engine combined with its unique “F3” file format consistently delivers sub-second latencies over a modern decoupled storage & compute architecture. Customer facing analytics or data apps on Snowflake can benefit by moving onto Firebolt. Firebolt offers SaaS convenience with granular provisioning to optimize costs.

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Architecture

Pricing Model

Low Latency Analytics

Cluster Sizing

High Concurrency

Materialized Views

Compare Snowflake to Firebolt

Architecture

Snowflake was designed as a SaaS data warehouse with de-coupled storage and compute architecture. Compute, in the form of a virtual warehouse, is offered only in fixed sizes ranging from X-Small to 6X-Large.

Firebolt SaaS data warehouse was designed from the ground up to provide the fastest data experiences on top of a de-coupled storage and compute architecture. Compute, in the form of scale-out Engines, is granular allowing combinations of vcpu, memory and storage.

Pricing Model

Snowflake charges customers for compute, storage, serverless operations and tiered uplift for functionality in the form of Standard, Enterprise and Business Critical tiers. Serverless operations add unpredictability and can result in higher cloud spend.

Firebolt provides a simple, transparent pricing model based on compute and storage consumption. No tier uplifts for additional functionality. No serverless add-ons.

Low Latency Analytics

Driving low latency analytics requires fast access to granular data. Snowflake’s granularity of data access stops at the micro partition level and is, typically, not suitable for low latency analytics. Snowflake uses clustering keys and search optimization service for point queries. However, there are additional costs for these services.

Firebolt leverages highly efficient “F3” file format which is sorted, indexed and compressed. Sparse Indexes reduce data access down to granular data ranges, providing order of magnitude performance improvement enabling sub-second analytics. All at no additional cost.

Cluster Sizing

Snowflake does not provide granular instance choices or node counts for cluster growth. Only option to grow a cluster is to double its size. This can result in over provisioning and higher costs.

Firebolt provides choice of over 30+ specialized instances that map to various workload types. Additionally, flexible cluster sizing serves to control costs.

High Concurrency

Snowflake leverages the multi-cluster warehouse feature to scale concurrency for an existing cluster. Multi-cluster warehouses will require cache warm-up and can cause inconsistent performance. Scaling can result in higher costs.

A single Firebolt engine supports hundreds of concurrent queries, eliminating the need for additional engines and associated costs.

Materialized Views

Snowflake materialized views are a convenient way to pre-aggregate data and provide fast results. However, materialized views require uplift from Standard to Enterprise Tier resulting in additional costs. Further, materialized views incur serverless processing costs and are recommended for tables that do not change frequently.

Firebolt’s aggregating indexes are defined once, incrementally auto-synced at ingest and data can be queried at index speed immediately without rewriting queries. No additional software uplifts needed. There is no charge for additional materialized view maintenance as aggregating indexes are updated at ingest time.

Snowflake Alternative

Get the speed you need, without breaking the bank

Architecture

Pricing Model

Low Latency Analytics

Cluster Sizing

High Concurrency

Materialized Views

Compare Snowflake to Firebolt

Architecture

Pricing Model

Low Latency Analytics

Cluster Sizing

High Concurrency

Materialized Views

Firebolt Performance Advantage

Key Benefits of Firebolt

Performance

Transparent pricing

SaaS

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