Snowflake
Ranked 3 of 4 cloud data warehouses by recommenders
Criticized more than recommended, mainly for high cost and lock-in; those who recommend it cite fast SQL analytics, a polished interface, and clusters that start in seconds without setup.
15 people recommended Snowflake in Hacker News comments, 10 had mixed feelings and 21 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026.
Summary written by Claude from the comments below.
46 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 15
- mixed feelings
- 10
- warn against or regret it
- 21
The record
Recommended in 8 of 12 months
In 13 different threads.
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 15 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 0.7 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 8 of 12 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
- Recommended in 13 threadsNeeds 5 or more, met.
- The biggest thread supplies 20% of its recommendersNeeds half or less, met.
The same rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. Mixed feelings count toward neither side. How the badge works
What people say about it
Reasons grouped from a sample of 40 of the 58 opinions about it, picked in proportion to how many people recommend it, have mixed feelings and criticize it. Each mark is one comment in the sample. Open a reason to read what they said.
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Expensive, costs can balloon
“I just don't find Snowflake or Redshift anywhere close to what they're selling.”
Comment from 20 Jan 2026 in “Article by article, how Big Tech shaped the EU's roll-back of digital rights” “burning $5k/mo on distributed compute clusters to process <10GB of daily logs”
Comment from 18 Jan 2026 in “Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)” “burns a fortune on snowflake every month but no one is using it”
Comment from 18 Jan 2026 in “Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)” - Comment from 19 Jun 2026 in “DuckDB Internals: Why Is DuckDB Fast? (Part 1)”
- Comment from 12 May 2026 in “Quack: The DuckDB Client-Server Protocol”
Lock-in and hard to export data
“I would rather have my data on something like Parquet/Iceberg (which Snowflake fully supports… than in the table format Snowflake has.”
Comment from 5 Nov 2025 in “Pg_lake: Postgres with Iceberg and data lake access” “The trap you end up in is you have to pay snowflake to access your data”
Comment from 5 Nov 2025 in “Pg_lake: Postgres with Iceberg and data lake access” “the most expensive ecosystems are often the ones with the most lock-in”
Comment from 15 Oct 2026 in “Creating a Garmin "MCP"” Weak fit beyond offline analytics
“try to pattern match their understanding of OLTP databases when using OLAP databases like Redshift and Snowflake and it being a complete disaster”
Comment from 13 Nov 2025 in “.NET 10” “Snowflake doesn't have adaptive indexes, and its performance would be significantly degraded as data grows”
Comment from 24 Jan 2026 in “A cloud-native database should be as elastic as the cloud itself” Complex permissions system
“The permission policies that you can define can become very complex”
Comment from 23 Oct 2026 in “Can we replace a $150k Looker with a bucket of HTML files?” “complex (and scary) permissions system built on top of Snowflake”
Comment from 19 Jun 2026 in “DuckDB Internals: Why Is DuckDB Fast? (Part 1)”
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Polished UI and fast SQL
“Snowflake, which imo has nicer UI/UX and snappier SQL execution, but the trade off is that Snowflake has a bit more lock-in”
Comment from 29 Oct 2026 in “MiniLake Is a Local Databricks API Emulator with SQL, Delta Lake and Spark” “I like Snowflake because for every query in its UI, it automatically profiles the results it returns.”
Comment from 10 Dec 2025 in “What UI do you use on top of data engineering tools to look at data?” “Snowflake and Databricks are printing money by making it a more user friendly experience”
Comment from 10 May 2026 in “I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left” - Comment from 10 Aug 2026 in “How We Pushed CDC into Postgres”
Rich built-in features and ecosystem
“All pruning techniques in Snowflake work equally well both on their proprietary format as well for Iceberg tables.”
Comment from 6 Nov 2025 in “Pg_lake: Postgres with Iceberg and data lake access” “H3 functions are built directly into Snowflake DB for example”
Comment from 4 Nov 2025 in “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger Version of Uber H3 in Rust” “Just pay snowflake for the amazing DB and ecosystem it is.”
Comment from 4 Nov 2025 in “Pg_lake: Postgres with Iceberg and data lake access” - Comment from 20 Apr 2026 in “What if database branching was easy?”
Clusters spin up in seconds
“what snowflake offers is a fleet of servers that can build your cluster in a second as opposed to minutes that you need if you…”
Comment from 14 Nov 2025 in “650GB of Data (Delta Lake on S3). Polars vs. DuckDB vs. Daft vs. Spark” “With snowflake I alone could provide an entire production ready bi stack to a company.”
Comment from 5 Nov 2025 in “Pg_lake: Postgres with Iceberg and data lake access” Saved money and simplified setup
“allows you the benefit of Snowflake without paying the cost for certain workloads (which really adds up”
Comment from 5 Nov 2025 in “Pg_lake: Postgres with Iceberg and data lake access” “We switched to Snowflake, saved money, got better performance, and had a simpler setup.”
Comment from 10 May 2026 in “I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left”
Other cloud data warehouses people recommend
The three most recommended other cloud data warehouses, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Mixed | Criticize | Approval | Months | Had for | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google BigQuery | 19 | 4 | 6 | 76% | 9 | — | Approved |
| Apache DataFusion | 16 | 1 | 2 | 89% | 8 | — | Approved |
| SnowflakeThis page | 15 | 10 | 21 | 42% | 8 | — | — |
| Amazon Athena | 8 | 5 | 5 | 62% | 5 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 58 opinions about it, picked in proportion to the three counts, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Snowflake, which imo has nicer UI/UX and snappier SQL execution, but the trade off is that Snowflake has a bit more lock-in”
“The permission policies that you can define can become very complex”
“the most expensive ecosystems are often the ones with the most lock-in”
“SaaS-only DB tech that you don't have an option to self host”
“It's been a delight using it the last few years.”
“I've been impressed so far with Snowflake's offerings of "AI + a good database”
“This sidesteps a lot of the issues in that the data is clearly already with Snowflake.”
“keep you in the Snowflake ecosystem burning credits”
“complex (and scary) permissions system built on top of Snowflake”
“My last company was spending $2M/yr on contract with Snowflake”
“Why keep paying Snowflake for bog-standard SQL query workload”
“Snowflake and Databricks are printing money by making it a more user friendly experience”
“We switched to Snowflake, saved money, got better performance, and had a simpler setup.”
“Always found that builtin mechanism pretty neat!”
“Snowflake is good but very, very expensive.”
“Snowflake and vulnerabilities are like two peas in a pod”
“if it's public the government can also see it and block it”
“Snowflake doesn't have adaptive indexes, and its performance would be significantly degraded as data grows”
“I just don't find Snowflake or Redshift anywhere close to what they're selling.”
“you would probably have the same issue with Snowflake”
“burns a fortune on snowflake every month but no one is using it”
“burning $5k/mo on distributed compute clusters to process <10GB of daily logs”
“Even Snowflake finally came out with "interactive" warehouses with this architecture.”
“I like Snowflake because for every query in its UI, it automatically profiles the results it returns.”
“what snowflake offers is a fleet of servers that can build your cluster in a second as opposed to minutes that you need if you…”
“try to pattern match their understanding of OLTP databases when using OLAP databases like Redshift and Snowflake and it being a complete disaster”
“All pruning techniques in Snowflake work equally well both on their proprietary format as well for Iceberg tables.”
“Snowflake is expensive, even compared to Databricks”
“allows you the benefit of Snowflake without paying the cost for certain workloads (which really adds up”
“I would rather have my data on something like Parquet/Iceberg (which Snowflake fully supports… than in the table format Snowflake has.”
“With snowflake I alone could provide an entire production ready bi stack to a company.”
“It's expensive to pull data out of Snowflake otherwise.”
“As long as you’re deriving value from them the partnership is still valuable no?”
“The trap you end up in is you have to pay snowflake to access your data”
“Just pay snowflake for the amazing DB and ecosystem it is.”
“my company relies heavily on Snowflake which is becoming an issue”
“Every interaction pretty much boils down to you really should not be using iceberg you should be using snowflake for storage.”
“One thing I admire about Snowflake is a real commitment to self-cannibalization”
“what on earth would make you want to move to Snowflake?”
“H3 functions are built directly into Snowflake DB for example”
Counts come from 1,791,911 Hacker News comments labeled by Claude, November 2025 to October 2026, with data through October 31, 2026. Counts updated 2 Nov 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.