BigQuery vs Snowflake and Snowflake vs BigQuery Pricing Compared on Your Workload
Bytes scanned against warehouse-hours, priced from Google's rate card and Snowflake's consumption table, with the point at which each one becomes the cheaper warehouse. AgentSQL connects to both, so ask the live console beside this a question while you read.
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Direct answer
BigQuery on demand charges $6.25 per TiB a query scans, with the first TiB each month free, and nothing between queries. Snowflake charges $2.00 per credit on Standard and $3.00 on Enterprise, and an X-Small warehouse burns one credit for every hour it is awake. So one X-Small hour costs the same as 0.32 TiB of BigQuery scanning: if your queries read less than that per hour of warehouse time, which is true for most small and mid-sized teams, BigQuery is cheaper. Heavy dashboards that keep a warehouse busy all day over large tables tip it to Snowflake. Storage is close on paper, but BigQuery bills uncompressed bytes by default.
1,000 plain-English questions a month
The question layer only. Each answer still runs SQL on your warehouse, billed at the rates below on every option.
›_ list prices, US regions, on demand
What BigQuery and Snowflake actually charge, and what each unit covers.
Read from Google and from Snowflake's Credit Consumption Table effective 2 October 2026, both on 5 October 2026, before any negotiated discount.
| Meter | List price | What it covers | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| BigQuery on demand | $6.25 per TiB scanned | Every byte a query reads from the columns it references. The first 1 TiB a month is free per billing account, and nothing bills while no query runs. | cloud.google.com/bigquery/pricing |
| BigQuery Editions | $0.04, $0.06, $0.10 per slot-hour | Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus capacity instead of bytes, per second with a 1-minute minimum. One and three year commitments cut the rate by 10 and 20 percent. | Same page, US multi-region |
| BigQuery storage | $0.023 per GiB a month | Active logical, meaning uncompressed, bytes. Long-term logical is $0.016. Physical (compressed) billing is $0.040 active and $0.020 long-term. First 10 GiB free. | Same page |
| Snowflake credit | $2.00 Standard, $3.00 Enterprise, $4.00 Business Critical | Warehouse compute. An X-Small warehouse burns 1 credit an hour, Small 2, Medium 4, Large 8, billed per second after a one-minute minimum each time it resumes. A suspended warehouse costs nothing. | Credit Consumption Table effective 2 Oct 2026, AWS US East and GCP Iowa |
| Snowflake Gen 2 warehouse | 1.35 credits per hour at X-Small | The newer warehouse generation bills 35 percent more credits per hour on AWS and GCP than a standard warehouse of the same size, in exchange for faster queries. | Same table, Table 1(b) |
| Snowflake storage | $23.00 per TB a month | Compressed data averaged over the month, on demand in AWS US East. Capacity contracts above $1.2 million a year go lower. | Same table, Table 3(a) |
Three numbers in the articles currently ranking for this comparison are out of date, and they all flatter Snowflake. BigQuery's on-demand price is not $5 per TB; Google moved it to $6.25 per TiB in July 2023, and the flat-rate plan "from $2,000 a month for 100 slots" was retired at the same time in favor of Editions billed per slot-hour. Snowflake's on-demand storage is not $35 to $46 per TB either: its October 2026 table lists $23.00 per TB in AWS US East for on-demand accounts. The full BigQuery rate card is on our BigQuery pricing page and every Snowflake edition, region and warehouse size is on Snowflake pricing.
Snowflake adds one meter that rarely matters and one that sometimes does. Cloud Services, the layer that compiles queries and manages metadata, bills 4.4 credits an hour but is free up to 10 percent of your daily warehouse credits, so most accounts never see it. The one that does show up is the Gen 2 warehouse: it runs faster but bills 1.35 credits an hour at X-Small on AWS and GCP instead of 1, which is 35 percent more per hour. Whether it pays off depends on whether queries finish 35 percent sooner, so test it on your own workload.
›_ worked out from the rate cards
Four numbers that decide BigQuery vs Snowflake.
None of them appears in the comparison articles currently ranking for this search.
finding one
One Snowflake X-Small hour costs the same as 0.32 TiB of BigQuery scanning
At $2.00 a credit, an hour of X-Small buys what $2.00 buys on BigQuery on demand, 0.32 TiB or about 328 GiB scanned. If your queries read less than that per hour of warehouse time, BigQuery is cheaper. On Enterprise at $3.00 the line moves to 0.48 TiB.
finding two
A business-hours Snowflake warehouse equals 57 TiB of BigQuery a month
An X-Small on Standard running 176 hours a month, eight hours a day on workdays, costs $352. That pays for 56.3 TiB on BigQuery on demand plus the free first TiB. Most teams with occasional dashboards scan a fraction of that.
finding three
Equal storage prices hide a four-to-one gap
BigQuery's default logical billing counts uncompressed bytes at $0.023 per GiB, while Snowflake bills compressed data at $23 per TB. With 4 to 1 compression, 4 TiB of raw data is $94 a month on BigQuery logical, $41 on BigQuery physical and about $25 on Snowflake.
finding four
Plain-English questions are metered on Snowflake and free on BigQuery until January
Cortex Analyst bills 67 credits per 1,000 messages, $134 a month for 1,000 questions on Standard before warehouse time. Google's Conversational Analytics agent for BigQuery is in a free trial through 31 December 2026, then bills per data token.
›_ monthly compute against TiB scanned
Where paying per byte stops being the cheap option.
BigQuery on demand rises with every TiB your queries read. A Snowflake warehouse on a fixed schedule is a flat line.
A Snowflake X-Small on Standard that is awake during business hours, 176 hours a month, costs $352. BigQuery on demand reaches that figure at 57.3 TiB scanned. Keep the same warehouse awake all month and the crossover moves to 234.6 TiB, or 351.4 TiB on Enterprise.
The simpler way to read the chart is the ratio: one warehouse-hour of X-Small on Standard buys 0.32 TiB of BigQuery. Snowflake's query history shows bytes scanned per query and warehouse uptime per day, so divide one by the other for a typical week. Below 0.32 TiB per hour, BigQuery would have cost less.
What the chart cannot show is size. If an X-Small is too small for your concurrency and you run a Small or Medium, the Snowflake lines double or quadruple, and so does the break-even in TiB.
›_ four workloads, four ways to pay
What a month of compute costs on each option.
List prices, US regions, compute only, one X-Small warehouse on the Snowflake side. Add storage at roughly $23 to $25 per TB on either.
| Workload | BigQuery on demand | Snowflake Standard | Snowflake Enterprise | Gen 2 on Standard |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Startup dashboards, 3 TiB scanned, warehouse busy 60 hours | $12.50 | $120 | $180 | $162 |
| Business-hours BI, 20 TiB scanned, busy 176 hours | $118.75 | $352 | $528 | $475.20 |
| Always-on analytics, 80 TiB scanned, busy 730 hours | $493.75 | $1,460 | $2,190 | $1,971 |
| Heavy dashboards, 300 TiB scanned, busy 730 hours | $1,868.75 | $1,460 | $2,190 | $1,971 |
The first three rows are where most companies asking this question sit, and BigQuery wins all three because each warehouse-hour reads far less than 0.32 TiB: a startup scanning 3 TiB a month pays $12.50 against $120 for an X-Small awake 60 hours. Only the fourth row flips, a warehouse busy all month reading 300 TiB, about 0.41 TiB per hour, where Snowflake Standard is $1,460 against $1,868.75. Enterprise stays more expensive even there, so the edition you need for multi-cluster warehouses and 90-day Time Travel is part of the decision.
Two footnotes keep the comparison fair. BigQuery's cost depends on how much each query reads, so an unpartitioned table and a habit of SELECT * can multiply the first column several times; partitioning by date and clustering on common filters usually cuts it more than any plan change, and our BigQuery cost control for ad hoc queries guide covers the guardrails. On Snowflake, a dashboard that refreshes every five minutes keeps a warehouse awake all day even if each query takes a second, which turns the cheap first row into the expensive third one.
›_ ten dimensions, both directions
BigQuery vs Snowflake on what actually differs.
Including where each one is the weaker choice.
| Dimension | BigQuery | Snowflake |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud | Google Cloud only. BigQuery Omni can query data in AWS S3 or Azure, billed separately. | Runs on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, at the same $2.00 Standard credit in AWS US East and GCP Iowa. |
| How compute is sold | On demand per TiB scanned, or Editions capacity per slot-hour. | Credits per second of warehouse time, size picked by you, one-minute minimum per resume. |
| What a single query costs | The bytes it reads, however long it runs. Cached repeats within 24 hours are free. | Its share of the time the warehouse is awake. A query that wakes a suspended warehouse bills at least a minute. |
| Idle cost | Zero on demand. | Zero once the warehouse suspends; auto-suspend after 60 seconds is the usual setting. |
| Concurrency | Up to 2,000 slots shared per project on demand, no setup. | Multi-cluster warehouses on Enterprise add clusters under load and bill each one. |
| Cost guardrails | Maximum bytes billed per query, daily quotas per user or project, dry runs that show bytes first. | Resource monitors that notify or suspend at a credit quota, per warehouse or account. |
| Tuning | Partitioning and clustering cut bytes scanned, which cuts the bill directly. | Right-sizing warehouses and auto-suspend matter most; clustering keys on very large tables. |
| Time Travel and recovery | Up to 7 days of time travel plus a 7-day fail-safe. | 1 day on Standard, up to 90 days on Enterprise, plus 7 days of fail-safe. |
| Data sharing | Analytics Hub listings and dataset permissions inside Google Cloud. | Secure Data Sharing and Marketplace across accounts, regions and clouds without copying. |
| Plain-English questions | Conversational Analytics agent and Gemini in BigQuery, free trial through 31 Dec 2026, then per data token. | Cortex Analyst at 67 credits per 1,000 messages, or Cortex Agents billed in AI Credits. |
The row buyers underweight is the cloud. If your company runs on AWS or Azure, BigQuery means paying egress to move data into Google Cloud or querying it through Omni at separate prices, and that usually settles the decision before any per-query math. If you are already on Google Cloud, Snowflake is still available there at the same credit price, so the choice really is about the billing model and features like cross-company data sharing, where Snowflake is the stronger product.
If the shortlist also includes AWS's warehouse, the same time-against-bytes logic runs through BigQuery vs Redshift and Snowflake vs Redshift, and the lakehouse alternative is priced in Snowflake vs Databricks.
›_ the part of the bill nobody else prices
What it costs to let 10 business users ask 1,000 questions a month.
List prices, US dollars, per month, on top of warehouse compute.
Once the data is loaded, the next request is always the same: can sales, finance and operations get answers without filing a ticket? Snowflake and Google both sell a plain-English layer for that, priced in completely different ways. Here is the same modest team, ten managers asking about a hundred questions each a month, on each option.
| Option | Per month | How that number is built |
|---|---|---|
| Snowflake Cortex Analyst, Standard | $134 | 67 credits per 1,000 successful messages at $2.00, so 1,000 questions is 67 credits. The warehouse that runs each generated query bills on top, and you build and maintain a semantic model for it to read. |
| Snowflake Cortex Analyst, Enterprise | $201 | The same 67 credits at $3.00. Business Critical is $268. Through Cortex Agents the bill is model tokens in AI Credits at $2.00 instead, and negotiated Platform Credit discounts do not apply to those. |
| BigQuery Conversational Analytics agent | $0 until 31 Dec 2026 | Free trial of all Data Cloud agents through 31 December 2026. After that $3 per million input and $20 per million output data tokens, with no per-question figure published. BigQuery bytes scanned bill as usual. |
| AgentSQL Team, either warehouse | $59 | Flat, billed yearly, up to 10 seats and 1,500 questions a month, no semantic model to build and no per-token charge. Connects read-only to Snowflake and BigQuery; your warehouse still runs the SQL. |
Snowflake's number is predictable and Google's is not, at least not yet. Cortex Analyst is one of the few AI features in this market with a published unit price, 67 Platform Credits per 1,000 successful messages through its API, so you can budget it to the dollar; the catch is the semantic model it needs, a YAML description of your tables that someone has to write and keep current. Google's Conversational Analytics agent costs nothing until 31 December 2026 and then bills $3 per million input and $20 per million output data tokens, with no per-question estimate, so a pilot this quarter is free and the first real bill is a forecast. The full Cortex math, including AI Credits, is in our Snowflake Cortex Analyst pricing breakdown.
How each vendor's natural-language option compares with a separate read-only tool is covered for Google's side in querying BigQuery without writing SQL, and every vendor's meter sits side by side on conversational analytics pricing.
›_ pick by how the warehouse is used
Three situations, three different right answers.
Choose BigQuery if you are on Google Cloud and query unevenly
Your data already lands in Google Cloud, the query load comes in bursts, and nobody wants to size or schedule a warehouse. BigQuery bills nothing between queries, the first TiB is free, and partitioning a few large tables is the only tuning that moves the bill.
Choose Snowflake if you need more than one cloud or share data
Your company runs on AWS or Azure, you share live data with customers or partners, or dashboards keep a warehouse busy all day over big tables. Snowflake runs everywhere at the same credit price, and a busy warehouse turns heavy scanning into a predictable hourly cost.
Measure the ratio before you migrate
Moving from Snowflake to BigQuery saves money only if your warehouse-hours read less than 0.32 TiB each on Standard, or 0.48 TiB on Enterprise. Snowflake's QUERY_HISTORY and WAREHOUSE_METERING_HISTORY views give you both numbers in two queries. Run them before anyone scopes a migration.
›_ whichever warehouse you choose
AgentSQL answers plain-English questions on BigQuery and Snowflake alike.
We build AgentSQL, so read this as interested rather than neutral, but this is the one warehouse comparison where we have no stake in the answer: it connects to both. Give it a read-only service account on BigQuery or a read-only role on Snowflake and it reads the live schema, turns a typed question into GoogleSQL or Snowflake SQL, runs it and returns the number, a chart and the exact query so an analyst can check it. There is no semantic model to write and no per-question or per-token charge: Team is $59 a month billed yearly for up to 10 seats and 1,500 questions, and Scale is $179 with role-based access and an audit log of every question.
Because every answer shows its SQL, you can see which tables it reads, which keeps BigQuery bytes and Snowflake warehouse time in check. If you later move warehouses, the same workspace connects to the new one and your users keep asking questions the same way. It never trains on your data. Setup takes a few minutes and is described on the BigQuery connection page and the Snowflake connection page, and how the SQL generation works is on text to SQL.
›_ frequently asked
BigQuery vs Snowflake questions, answered.
Is BigQuery cheaper than Snowflake?
Usually, for small and mid-sized teams. BigQuery on demand costs $6.25 per TiB scanned with the first TiB free, and one Snowflake X-Small hour on Standard costs $2.00. If your queries read less than about 0.32 TiB per hour of warehouse time, BigQuery is cheaper. Heavy, always-on dashboards over large tables tip it toward Snowflake.
Is BigQuery better than Snowflake?
BigQuery is better for teams on Google Cloud that want nothing to size and pay only for the bytes they query. Snowflake is better for teams that need to run on AWS or Azure, share data across companies, or want predictable warehouse-hour billing for steady workloads. Price your own monthly scan volume before deciding.
What is the difference between BigQuery and Snowflake?
BigQuery is Google Cloud's serverless warehouse that bills by the bytes each query reads, or by slot-hours on Editions. Snowflake runs on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud and bills credits for the time your virtual warehouses are running. BigQuery allocates compute for you; in Snowflake you pick the warehouse size and its auto-suspend.
Is Snowflake faster than BigQuery?
Neither is reliably faster. Snowflake speed depends on the warehouse size you pay for, and a bigger warehouse doubles the credits per hour at each step. BigQuery borrows up to 2,000 slots per project on demand and is quick on large ad hoc scans. Run your ten slowest real queries on both before trusting any benchmark.
Why is Snowflake more expensive than BigQuery?
It often is not, but Snowflake bills for warehouse time, so a warehouse left awake, sized too large, or woken every few minutes by a dashboard refresh costs money even when queries are tiny. BigQuery bills nothing between queries. Set auto-suspend to 60 seconds and add a resource monitor before comparing bills.
Can Snowflake run on Google Cloud?
Yes. Snowflake runs on Google Cloud as well as AWS and Azure, and its October 2026 rate card lists GCP US Central 1 (Iowa) at the same $2.00 Standard, $3.00 Enterprise and $4.00 Business Critical credit as AWS US East. Running Snowflake on GCP does not make it BigQuery; they remain separate products and bills.
How hard is it to migrate from Snowflake to BigQuery?
It is a project of weeks to months. Tables move through Cloud Storage exports or BigQuery Data Transfer Service, and Google's SQL translation service converts most Snowflake SQL, but stored procedures, tasks, streams, data shares and every dashboard connection still need rework. Compare the target bill on your real scan volume before you start.
Can business users query BigQuery or Snowflake without SQL?
Yes. Snowflake sells Cortex Analyst at 67 credits per 1,000 messages, about $0.13 a question on Standard. Google's Conversational Analytics agent for BigQuery is free through 31 December 2026. AgentSQL connects read-only to either warehouse, writes and runs the SQL and shows it, for $59 a month for up to 10 users.
Pricing, read from the vendor
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