This post compares the key differences and similarities between Snowflake and BigQuery, two leading cloud data warehouse solutions, by exploring their main concepts, pricing models, features, and performance. The comparison reveals distinct advantages of each platform depending on use cases, with Snowflake separating compute and storage costs and BigQuery employing a unified approach. The benchmark results show that both platforms have excellent execution speeds for ad-hoc and interactive querying, but the performance improvements over time vary between the two, with BigQuery making significant gains in 2022 compared to 2020. Ultimately, considering benchmarks alone can be misleading, and it's crucial to examine tradeoffs, ongoing development, and improvements of both platforms when making an informed decision.