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AWS Lake Formation vs Snowflake Analytics comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

AWS Lake Formation
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
9th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Snowflake Analytics
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
12th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Web Analytics (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of AWS Lake Formation is 3.2%, down from 5.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake Analytics is 3.5%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
AWS Lake Formation3.2%
Snowflake Analytics3.5%
Other93.3%
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Ciro Baldim Guerra - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Analytics Engineer at Itau Unibanco S.A.
Has improved data governance by enabling clear ownership and structured access across teams
In my company, Itaú, we don't utilize all AWS offerings due to rigorous security measures. We operate approximately six to eight months behind other available services. I'm uncertain if gaps exist because of this limitation, though the system functions effectively for us. AWS Lake Formation offers column-level access control for databases, but we haven't implemented this feature either because it hasn't been approved by our compliance, governance, or security areas. In our current setup, everyone from my business unit uses the same consumer account. When access is requested for a table, everyone using that business unit account receives access. This could present a security concern, though it benefits new team members who automatically receive all necessary access permissions. However, I struggle to identify specific improvements needed in AWS Lake Formation.
Hemanthreddy Vakiti - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Daily restaurant dashboards have become faster and now support simultaneous team analytics
Some of the best features of Snowflake Analytics is how it is separated for compute and storage, which allows multiple teams to run queries without performance impact. Our project has more than nine or ten teams, so if a team is working on a particular dashboard and another team wants to work on Snowflake Analytics, they can easily work on it without disturbing the work of one team, ensuring that the work can be consistent and multiple users can use the tool simultaneously. This is one of the main features I appreciate about Snowflake Analytics.The other aspect is how the query performance is high due to its columnar storage and also automatic optimization, allowing for scaling down during weekdays when there is less data and scaling up during weekends or festivals when the data can be huge. Because of this automatic scaling, if there is less data, we are using only 5 GB instead of 10 GB, which reduces the storage level, and consequently, the cost can be reduced. This automatic scaling and optimization saves us a huge amount of money for our project. Snowflake Analytics has impacted our organization positively by providing faster query performance and better scalability. Previously, we faced issues with slow queries due to traditional systems, but within Snowflake, we can assign separate virtual warehouses for reporting as well as data processing, ensuring that it does not impact tool performance and does not delay reporting to business users. Analysts can run complex queries without affecting ETL workloads due to this separation, which has improved our speed of reporting, and our business users have expressed happiness due to how fast we are generating reports during peak hours.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"A favorite feature of AWS Lake Formation is that it provides us with visibility into who has access to a particular table or database in Glue."
"AWS Lake Formation significantly improves the structure of the data mesh, making it superior to previous structures we used."
"We use this to reduce latency from minutes to seconds, as we aim for real-time visibility into patient healthcare monitoring."
"The LF-Tag system with granular permissions was key to the project as a functionality of AWS Lake Formation."
"We use AWS Lake Formation typically for the data warehouse."
"The most valuable features of AWS Lake Formation were the access model itself, as it allows implementation of filters, Blueprints, and row-level and column-level security to mask data that shouldn't be accessed by certain entities, enabling granular control without exposing PII data."
"I can easily move data from cold storage to regular storage."
"The most important advantage in using AWS Lake Formation is its ability to connect the data lake to the other technologies in AWS. This is what I advise my clients."
"Deployment is straightforward as it's a SaaS product. No maintenance required."
"It is quite a convenient tool."
"What we found most valuable in Snowflake Analytics are its attributes that are very convenient for business use such as data sharing, cloning, time travel, and fail-safe. It's a good product all in all."
"Snowflake Analytics is pretty easy to use with the connectors for integration with the tools and systems in my company."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"In most cases, Snowflake improves our operational efficiency if we optimize the warehouse."
"It helps with business intelligence by providing analytics that can be reported."
"Very good flexibility and it offers computation completely decoupled from the storage."
 

Cons

"I think AWS Lake Formation could improve by enforcing the least privilege by design, moving from ad hoc grants to role-based access controls."
"In our experience what could be improved are not the support, performance or monitoring, but at a managerial level, the very expensive professional services of AWS. This could be an area of improvement for them. It's too expensive to acquire their support."
"The solution could make improvements around orchestration and doing some automation stuff on AWS front automation. It would be useful if we could use automation to build images and use hardened images which are CIS compliant."
"There are areas that could be improved in AWS Lake Formation, and functionality that could be included in future releases."
"The UI of AWS Lake Formation is not very responsive."
"Information about the pricing, cost, and setup cost of the AWS solutions would be beneficial."
"If I could improve AWS Lake Formation, I would add more integrations with SageMaker."
"For the end-users, it's not as user-friendly as it could be."
"Improvements are needed in importing and exporting large datasets to and from reporting tools."
"AIML-based SQL prompt and query generation could be an area for enhancement."
"Integration into different Python and Jupyter notebooks needs to be improved."
"The UI must be improved."
"When we insert data into a large table, it takes a lot of time."
"If you have a lot of computations, Snowflake becomes costlier."
"The product's cost is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"Snowflake Analytics should probably have more built-in tools for master data management."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"AWS Lake Formation is a bit expensive."
"The product's pricing is subjective."
"The solution's price is high and I would rate it an eight out of ten."
"Snowflake charges per query, which amounts to a very minor cost, such as $0.015 per query."
"It is an expensive solution, but the kind of usability and flexibility it proactively provides for the organizations justify the price."
"Snowflake Analytics is not an expensive solution, and its pricing is average."
"The tool is quite expensive."
"I have been using free trial version."
"The cost of Snowflake Analytics is low, any small organization can use it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Construction Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
16%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise23
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Lake Formation?
I don't understand much about the pricing of AWS Lake Formation, but I know how to search for the cost of Glue jobs, and I use the calculator in Amazon. I use a tool to preview the cost based on th...
What needs improvement with AWS Lake Formation?
Regarding areas of AWS Lake Formation that could be improved or enhanced, I prefer not to answer, mainly because I do not believe that I would be the most valuable person to ask, as I have not used...
What is your primary use case for AWS Lake Formation?
My usual use cases for AWS Lake Formation involved securing and governing the data resources that we configured in AWS, but we did not use the analytics or machine learning capabilities specificall...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake Analytics?
The pricing for Snowflake Analytics is reasonable, but as I am not part of the management team, I am not certain about our organization's exact costs. Overall, the return on investment for this too...
What needs improvement with Snowflake Analytics?
One improvement Snowflake Analytics could benefit from is in cost, particularly during peak hours. Sometimes, due to its automatic scalability, we think it has scaled up, but it does not always hap...
What is your primary use case for Snowflake Analytics?
I am using Snowflake Analytics because we are already using Snowflake for data engineering and data warehousing tasks, and we are using it for analytics as well as business intelligence reporting. ...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
Lionsgate, Adobe, Sony, Capital One, Akamai, Deliveroo, Snagajob, Logitech, University of Notre Dame, Runkeeper
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Lake Formation vs. Snowflake Analytics and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.