Complete Comparison of Snowflake vs Salesforce

In the past, CRM solutions were hosted on a company’s own server. How expensive and time-consuming would it be for companies to have their own CRM solutions? Can you imagine it? It can cost millions of dollars and months or years to build a CRM on their own. Even after implementation, they were extremely difficult to use. So what can be the best solution for this problem? Yes, building a CRM that is affordable and works like software as a service. That’s what Salesforce was all about. Salesforce was started as a software as a service platform and has now become the world’s fifth-largest company. Getting certified in Salesforce service could present a number of opportunities to job seekers and professionals like you.  But you might wonder what is snowflake then? Snowflake is also a server and this article will answer your questions about snowflake vs salesforce.

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is a solution for managing customer relationships that brings the customers and companies together. The Salesforce CRM platform provides a unique shared view of each customer for all the services of an organization like commerce, marketing, sales, and service. Initially, Salesforce was started as a software as a service company. It offers various software solutions and a platform for the users and developers for creating and distributing new customized software. Salesforce is built around a multiple tenant architecture that indicates that many customers will share common technology and all operate on the latest version. It will do the Upgrades related to application and infrastructure automatically. It allows your organization to focus mainly on innovation instead of technology management. It offers one of the best ways to communicate with business partners and customers on a single platform. It enables the companies to identify the needs of customers, solve their problems quickly and deliver the same solution in the shortest time possible.               

What is Snowflake?

Snowflake is a cloud-based data storage built on top of AWS and provides software as a service. Unlike conventional data warehouse platforms, Snowflake offers a data warehouse that is faster, easier to install, and much more flexible. As a result of its unique features, it has quickly become a leading data management solution for analytics. So Snowflake is used by many organizations to meet cloud data storage needs. As a result, the demand for talented snowflake experts is increasing with innumerable opportunities. Become an expert in Snowflake by going through Snowflake Training.

Snowflake is the first analytical database developed using the cloud and delivered as a data warehouse-as-a-service. It can work with popular providers such as Google Cloud, Azure, and AWS platforms. It doesn’t require any software or hardware for installation, configuration, or management. It entirely runs on a public cloud infrastructure. It is perfect for data lakes, data warehousing, data engineering, data science, and the development of data applications. However, one thing that makes it unbeatable is the architecture of Snowflake and its ability to share data. Though Snowflake is fairly a new company, it continues to grow steadily in the last couple of years and is gaining its market shares. In the Gartner Magic Quadrant for data management solutions for analytics, Snowflake has been listed as the leader for the last three consecutive years. Storage and Compute are scaled independently in Snowflake. The customers can pay and use the storage and computation separately. Sharing functionality of Snowflake allows the organization to share managed and secure data very quickly in real-time. Users can perform data analysis, blending, and transformations against different data structure types using a single language called SQL. 

Comparison of Snowflake vs Salesforce:

Both Snowflake and Salesforce offer Cloud-based Software-as-a-service solutions for enterprise customers. Snowflake collects and analyzes data on different computing platforms of a company and centralizes the output that can be transmitted to a data Visualization platform such as Salesforce’s Tableau. Breaking down these silos of data can improve a company by putting everybody on the same page, and as an organization develops, the cloud platform can be easy to adapt. By the end of July, Snowflake served 3117 clients, including 146 Fortune 500 companies. In addition, Salesforce’s Customer Relationship Management platform helps organizations manage customer relationships across the cloud. According to IDC, it has been the world’s leading provider of CRM software over the last seven years, and it ended last year with an 18.4% market share. Salesforce also provides additional cloud services for marketing, e-commerce, and analytics. These services enable more than 150,000 businesses to automate specific tasks, enhance their operations and decrease their overall dependency on employees.

Comparing the fundamentals of snowflake vs salesforce:

List of features:

  • Features of Salesforce Analytics Cloud – Custom analytics apps and dashboards, AI-powered predictions, Self-contained data storage, Data manager, Interactive data visualization, automatic data combination analysis, Sharing inheritance, action framework, analytics dashboard designer, embedded analytics, external data connectors, Einstein Analytics SDK and many more.
  • Features of Snowflake – database features, security features, security offerings, Integrations, and security validations.

Integrations: 

  • Salesforce Cloud Analytics offers native integrations with other salesforce products and third-party applications in AppExchange.
  • Snowflake integrates with business systems and applications like Looker, Tableau, Fivetran, Amazon Web Services, and Talend.

Company Sizes:

  • Salesforce Analytics Cloud – supports Large enterprises and Medium businesses.
  • Snowflake – supports small businesses, large enterprises, and medium businesses.

The revenue of Snowflake jumped 174% to $264.7 million in fiscal 2020 and increased 133% year-over-year to reach $242 million in the first six months of fiscal 2021. 

These growth rates are excellent, but Snowflake has a considerable deficit. Their net loss increased from $178 million to $348.5 million in 2020 and decreased marginally from $177.2 million to $171.3 million in the first six months of 2021. Salesforce revenues increased 29 percent to $17.1 billion in Fiscal 2020 and increased 30 percent to $10 billion in the first six months of 2021 despite the fact that the pandemic has disrupted many companies globally. Its net profit decreased by 89% to $126 million last year, partly as a result of its $15.7 billion takeovers by Tableau but grew almost six times annually to reach $2.7 billion in the first six months of 2020.

On a non-GAAP basis that excludes stock-based compensation, one-time costs, and other variable costs, the earnings of Salesforce increased by 9% last year and 35% in the first six months of 2020. In the second half of 2020, its non-GAAP operating margin also climbed to a peak of 20.2%. Snowflake did not provide any guidance for the remaining part of the year, but it is likely that it would double its revenues this year and remain uneconomic. As a result, Salesforce expects its revenues to increase from 21 percent to 22 percent and its non-GAAP EPS to increase from 24 percent to 25 percent for the complete year.

What makes Salesforce a better investment?

Snowflake’s revenue growth is significantly higher than Salesforce’s, but it is slowing and not clearly focused on profitability. Salesforce continues to generate impressive growth for a company aged 21 and is expected to remain profitable in the foreseeable future. Snowflake is also confronted with more direct competition from competitors like Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS Redshift Data Warehouse, while Salesforce maintains a dominant lead on the CRM marketplace.

Most importantly, the valuation of Salesforce makes sense for its growth. Stocks trade at 70 times forward profits and 11 times next year’s sales, making it considerably less expensive than a lot of other cloud stocks. Thus, although Snowflake would increase its revenues from 130% to $610 million in fiscal 2021, the share would continue to trade at more than 110 times this estimate.