Snowplow vs RudderStack
How does RudderStack – a customer data platform (CDP) – compare to Snowplow customer data infrastructure (CDI)?
Customization
Snowplow offers more customization options, allowing you to tailor your data strategy to meet specific needs, unlike RudderStack's limited capabilities.
Real-time Processing
Snowplow excels in real-time processing. Only Snowplow, with its optimized components like Kinesis and PubSub, supports very low latency applications, unlike Rudderstack which is limited by using Postgres.
Data Ownership
Snowplow provides full data ownership, ensuring privacy and security, whereas RudderStack offers limited control over data.
“Snowplow provides all of our event data in a data model we own end-to-end, and can easily shape to fit our organizational needs. Snowplow has really helped accelerate our analytics; now we can quickly answer questions that would have required a tremendous amount of engineering effort.”
Darren Haken, Head of Data Engineering
AutoTrader
A True Warehouse-First Solution
Rudderstack, a Customer Data Platform (CDP), is designed to send data to multiple downstream systems, bypassing central storage. Their recent "warehouse first" messaging contradicts the core CDP functionality, as CDP data isn't meant for central storage consumption. This approach may offer short-term convenience but lacks data governance and discoverability, leading to a data swamp and long-term technical debt exacerbated by vendor lock-in. In contrast, Snowplow's Behavioural Data Platform (BDP) provides clean, rich, and complete behavioral data, ready for AI and BI, and is genuinely designed to be warehouse and lake-first.
Data discovery and evolution
Snowplow centralizes all data in a single "atomic events" table, simplifying complex queries. In contrast, Rudderstack creates a separate table for each event, resulting in thousands of joins for complex queries, which becomes unmanageable at scale.
Snowplow's schemas support effective versioning and documentation, facilitating communication across teams. Rudderstack lacks proper documentation and event schemas, making versioning impractical.
Ineffective data discovery with Rudderstack slows down data teams and hinders an agile self-serve culture.
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