# Apache Iceberg vs Snowflake

**Leader by vioscaleAI score:** Snowflake

| Attribute | Apache Iceberg | Snowflake |
|---|---|---|
| **vioscaleAI score** | 59.5 (56% (medium)) | 68.1 (63% (medium)) |
| activity.commits_last_30d | 100 | - |
| adoption.dependent_repos | 1 | - |
| adoption.github_stars | 9,326 | - |
| adoption.package_downloads_weekly | 6,665,583 | - |
| content.faq | `[{"answer":"Apache Iceberg is a table format that enables reliable, ACID-compliant SQL operations on big data. It allows multiple query engines—such as Spark, Trino, Flink, Hive, and Impala—to safely read and write the same tables concurrently, bringing traditional database semantics to analytics workloads. It is indexed under Data Warehouse Software.","source":"https://iceberg.apache.org","question":"What is Apache Iceberg?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Apache Iceberg is open source, so it can be self-hosted and used at no licence cost. It is released under the Apache-2.0 licence. Pricing changes often, so verify at source before relying on it.","source":"https://iceberg.apache.org","question":"Is Apache Iceberg free to use?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. Apache Iceberg can be deployed self-hosted, so it does not have to run on the vendor's infrastructure.","source":"https://iceberg.apache.org","question":"Can Apache Iceberg be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed 20 integrations for Apache Iceberg, including Spark, Trino, Presto, Flink, Hive, Impala, PyArrow and DuckDB, plus 12 more. This is what we could verify from public sources, so the vendor may support others we have not indexed.","source":"https://iceberg.apache.org","question":"What does Apache Iceberg integrate with?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. Apache Iceberg is published under the Apache-2.0 licence, a permissive licence that generally allows commercial use and modification. Licence terms can change between releases, so verify against the repository for the version you intend to use.","source":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg","question":"Is Apache Iceberg open source?","confidence":0.95}]` | `[{"answer":"A fully managed cloud service that unifies data management and analytics across cloud providers, with native support for AI/ML workloads, zero-copy data sharing, and automatic scaling. It is indexed under Data Warehouse Software.","source":"https://www.snowflake.com/en/pricing-options/","question":"What is Snowflake?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Snowflake is sold across 3 plans: Standard, Enterprise and Business Critical. We have not confirmed a published price for every tier. There is no free tier. Pricing changes often, so verify at source before relying on it.","source":"https://www.snowflake.com/en/pricing-options/","question":"How much does Snowflake cost?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Snowflake supports the web, Windows, macOS and a command-line interface. Platforms we have not confirmed are simply not listed here rather than ruled out.","source":"https://www.snowflake.com/en/pricing-options/","question":"What platforms does Snowflake support?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have only confirmed a cloud / SaaS deployment for Snowflake, so it appears to be vendor-hosted. If a self-hosted option exists we have not found it documented publicly.","source":"https://www.snowflake.com/en/pricing-options/","question":"Can Snowflake be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed 9 integrations for Snowflake, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Streamlit, Apache Iceberg, PyTorch, NVIDIA and Jira, plus 1 more. This is what we could verify from public sources, so the vendor may support others we have not indexed.","source":"https://www.snowflake.com/en/pricing-options/","question":"What does Snowflake integrate with?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have independently confirmed SOC 2, ISO 27001 and GDPR for Snowflake. Certifications we do not list are ones we have not been able to verify from public sources, which is not the same as Snowflake not holding them. Always confirm compliance directly before you rely on it.","source":"https://www.snowflake.com/security","question":"What security certifications does Snowflake have?","confidence":0.7}]` |
| deployment.options | `{"self_hosted":true}` | `{"cloud":true}` |
| description.long | A table format that brings SQL capabilities to large-scale analytical datasets and enables multiple computing engines to safely and concurrently query and modify the same tables. | Snowflake is a fully managed cloud service that unifies data storage, analytics, machine learning and AI capabilities in a single platform. It enables organizations to process structured and unstructured data, build AI applications and share live data across organizations and cloud environments. |
| features.capabilities | `{"deployment":"embedded","data_sharing":true,"license_class":"permissive","table_formats":"Iceberg (Parquet, ORC, Avro, Puffin data files)","semi_structured":"first_class","federation_query":true,"streaming_ingest":true,"concurrency_scaling":"automatic"}` | `{"hosting":"cloud","in_db_ml":true,"data_model":"relational","deployment":"managed","sql_support":true,"data_sharing":true,"compute_model":"virtual_warehouse","license_class":"proprietary","managed_cloud":true,"table_formats":"Apache Iceberg","semi_structured":"first_class","federation_query":true,"streaming_ingest":true,"acid_transactions":true,"horizontal_scaling":true,"concurrency_scaling":"automatic"}` |
| integrations.count | 20 | 750 |
| integrations.list | `[{"name":"Spark"},{"name":"Trino"},{"name":"Presto"},{"name":"Flink"},{"name":"Hive"},{"name":"Impala"},{"name":"PyArrow"},{"name":"DuckDB"},{"name":"Polars"},{"name":"Pandas"},{"name":"Ray"},{"name":"Datafusion"},{"name":"BigQuery"},{"name":"SQLAlchemy"},{"name":"S3"},{"name":"GCS"},{"name":"Azure Data Lake Storage"},{"name":"Hadoop"},{"name":"Kerberos"},{"name":"Thrift"},{"name":"Avro"},{"name":"Parquet"},{"name":"ORC"}]` | `[{"name":"AWS"},{"name":"Microsoft Azure"},{"name":"Google Cloud Platform"},{"name":"Streamlit"},{"name":"Apache Iceberg"},{"name":"PyTorch"},{"name":"NVIDIA"},{"name":"Jira","native":true,"category":"development","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"GitHub","native":true,"category":"development","direction":"bidirectional"}]` |
| language.primary | Java | - |
| license.spdx | Apache-2.0 | - |
| market.availability | - | `{"primaryMarkets":[],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` |
| platform.support | `{"cli":true,"mac":true,"linux":true,"windows":true}` | `{"web":true}` |
| pricing | `{"type":"open_source","summary":"Open source, no licensing cost","sourceUrl":"https://iceberg.apache.org","retrievedAt":"2026-08-14T08:32:59.428Z"}` | `{"type":"usage","plans":[{"free":false,"name":"Standard","description":"Entry-level offering providing access to core platform functionality","contactSales":false},{"free":false,"name":"Enterprise","description":"For high-growth and large-scale customers with multi-cluster compute, governance and extended data retention","contactSales":false},{"free":false,"name":"Business Critical","description":"For highly regulated industries requiring advanced security and compliance capabilities","contactSales":true}],"currency":"USD","sourceUrl":"https://www.snowflake.com/en/pricing-options/","retrievedAt":"2026-10-05T12:39:26.501Z","billingPeriods":["month"]}` |
| pricing.free_tier | - | no |
| pricing.model | open_source | commercial |
| pricing.price_level | free | unknown |
| pricing.transparent | - | yes |
| release.cadence_days | 50 | - |
| release.history | `[{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.12.0","date":"2026-09-30T01:52:18Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.12.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.11.0","date":"2026-05-20T08:47:57Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.11.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.10.2","date":"2026-05-18T21:58:12Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.10.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.10.1","date":"2025-12-22T22:04:42Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.10.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.10.0","date":"2025-09-11T15:08:46Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.10.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.9.2","date":"2025-07-18T13:44:58Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.9.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.9.1","date":"2025-05-28T16:52:05Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.9.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.9.0","date":"2025-04-28T06:27:16Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.9.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.7.2","date":"2025-03-19T10:12:37Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.7.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.8.1","date":"2025-02-28T07:52:17Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.8.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.8.0","date":"2025-02-13T09:13:46Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.8.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.7.1","date":"2024-12-06T20:01:03Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.7.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.7.0","date":"2024-11-08T15:12:01Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.7.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.6.1","date":"2024-08-27T17:47:30Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.6.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.6.0","date":"2024-07-23T12:06:44Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.6.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.5.2","date":"2024-05-16T07:50:32Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.5.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.5.1","date":"2024-04-30T12:43:30Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.5.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.5.0","date":"2024-03-11T11:00:15Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.5.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.4.3","date":"2023-12-27T17:15:46Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.4.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.4.2","date":"2023-11-07T16:44:26Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.4.2"}]` | - |
| reliability.status_page | yes | yes |
| security.disclosure_policy | yes | yes |
| security.fedramp | - | yes |
| security.gdpr | - | yes |
| security.iso27001 | - | yes |
| security.pci | - | yes |
| security.scorecard | 7.9 | - |
| security.soc2 | - | yes |
| security.vulnerabilities | `{"count":0,"source":"https://advisories.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/advisories?ecosystem=pypi&package_name=apache-iceberg&per_page=100","last_12m":0,"max_severity":null}` | - |

## Capabilities (Data Warehouse Software)

| Capability | Apache Iceberg | Snowflake |
|---|:--:|:--:|
| **Deployment** |  |  |
| Deployment | Embedded | Managed cloud |
| **Architecture** |  |  |
| Architecture | - | - |
| Compute model | - | Virtual warehouses |
| **Query** |  |  |
| SQL dialect | - | - |
| Federation / lakehouse query-in-place | ✓ | ✓ |
| **Interoperability** |  |  |
| Table-format support | Iceberg (Parquet, ORC, Avro, Puffin data files) | Apache Iceberg |
| **Scale** |  |  |
| Concurrency scaling | Automatic | Automatic |
| **Ingestion** |  |  |
| Streaming ingest | ✓ | ✓ |
| **Data model** |  |  |
| Semi-structured (JSON/VARIANT) | First-class | First-class |
| **Analytics** |  |  |
| ML / in-DB functions | - | ✓ |
| **Sharing** |  |  |
| Data sharing / marketplace | ✓ | ✓ |
| **Licensing** |  |  |
| Licence class | Permissive OSS | Proprietary |

*Source: vioscaleAI. Generated 2026-10-16T20:08:27.305Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*