Snowflake alternatives

3 tools to consider instead of Snowflake, shown against it.

Snowflake Google BigQuery Amazon Redshift Databricks
Vendor Snowflake Inc. Google LLC (Google Cloud) Amazon Web Services, Inc. Databricks, Inc.
Pricing model Usage-based Usage-based Usage-based Usage-based
Free tier No Yes Yes Yes
Deployment Cloud Cloud Cloud Cloud
Open source No No No No
Best for Teams wanting a fully managed, multi-cloud SQL warehouse with strong concurrency isolation and native data sharing. Teams already on Google Cloud who want a serverless warehouse with no cluster management. AWS-centric teams wanting a managed warehouse tightly integrated with the rest of the AWS data stack. Organizations wanting a single managed platform spanning data engineering, SQL analytics and machine learning on Spark.
Pricing

Billed in per-second Snowflake credits whose price depends on edition (Standard, Enterprise, Business Critical, VPS), plus separate storage charges; a free trial is offered but there is no ongoing free tier.

Standard $2.00 per credit
Enterprise $3.00 per credit
Business Critical $4.00 per credit

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

On-demand queries are billed per tebibyte scanned with 1 TiB free per month; capacity pricing bills per slot-hour by edition (Standard, Enterprise, Enterprise Plus); storage is billed separately per GiB, discounted after 90 days of inactivity.

On-demand queries $6.25 per TiB
Standard edition slots $0.04 per slot-hour
Enterprise edition slots $0.06 per slot-hour
Active logical storage $0.000031507 per GiB-hour

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Provisioned clusters are billed hourly per node type; Redshift Serverless bills per RPU-hour with a per-second minimum; new Serverless users get trial credits and provisioned clusters offer a limited free-tier trial.

RA3 provisioned (example) $3.26/hr for 4x ra3.4xlarge
Redshift Serverless $0.375 per RPU-hour
Managed storage $0.024/GB-month
New Serverless users $300 trial credit

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Pay-as-you-go pricing metered in Databricks Units (DBUs) per second, varying by workload type and tier, plus separate underlying cloud infrastructure costs; committed-use contracts offer discounts. A limited free Community Edition exists.

Checked on the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026: no prices are published. Expect to be quoted.

Features
  • Storage-compute separation with independently scalable virtual warehouses
  • Multi-cluster warehouses for concurrency scaling
  • Snowpark for Python, Java, and Scala pipelines
  • Native cross-account and cross-cloud data sharing
  • Time Travel and Fail-safe for data recovery
  • Automatic query optimization and result caching
  • Semi-structured data support (JSON, Avro, Parquet) via VARIANT
  • Support for external tables over cloud object storage
  • Serverless architecture with automatic compute allocation
  • On-demand (per-TiB) or capacity (per-slot) pricing models
  • BigQuery ML for in-warehouse model training via SQL
  • BI Engine in-memory acceleration for dashboards
  • BigQuery Omni for federated queries over other clouds
  • Native streaming ingestion via the Storage Write API
  • Materialized views and automatic query result caching
  • Fine-grained IAM, column-level security, and row-level access policies
  • Provisioned (RA3) or auto-scaling Serverless (RPU-based) deployment
  • Redshift Spectrum for querying S3 data lakes directly
  • Zero-ETL integrations from Aurora, RDS, and DynamoDB
  • Concurrency scaling for bursty query workloads
  • Materialized views and automatic query result caching
  • Machine learning via Redshift ML (SageMaker integration)
  • Federated querying across other AWS databases
  • Managed Apache Spark clusters with the Photon execution engine
  • Unity Catalog for governance and lineage
  • Delta Lake open table format
  • Notebook-based collaborative workspace
  • MLflow for experiment tracking and model deployment
  • Databricks SQL for warehouse-style BI workloads

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