Why Organizations Choose InterSystems
Modern data-driven enterprises require platforms that can deliver real-time insights, support AI and GenAI initiatives, and ensure secure, governed, and consistent data access—without introducing additional data silos or forcing rigid architectural decisions.
InterSystems IRIS® and InterSystems Data Fabric Studio are purpose-built to meet these needs. They unify data across silos and power high-performance, hybrid, real-time operational-analytic workloads making data immediately actionable for decision-making and AI.
Snowflake, while a strong data warehouse platform, is designed only for analytics and only on data stored in the cloud. Snowflake lacks native support for real-time, transactional, or hybrid transactional-analytic (HTAP) workloads, and often requires external tools for integration, streaming, and model deployment.
Comparison of Key Attributes
Attribute |
InterSystems IRIS |
Snowflake |
| Primary Users | Application developers, integration engineers, data engineers, analysts, data stewards | Data analysts, SQL-based data engineers |
| Primary Workloads | Real-time, high-performance operational-analytic (HTAP/translytical) workloads | Cloud data warehousing |
| AI-Ready, Single Source of Truth | Dynamic, real-time access across distributed sources via a data fabric; no data duplication required | Centralized data warehouse; often requires ETL and data duplication |
| Deployment Flexibility | On-premises, private/public cloud, and hybrid | Cloud-only (limited to AWS, Azure, GCP) |
| Real-Time and Streaming | Native support for real-time data ingestion and analytics with sub-second latency | External tools often needed (e.g., Kafka connectors); higher latency |
| Multi-Model Support | Native support for relational, object, document, key-value, and hierarchical data | Primarily structured and semi-structured formats (JSON, Parquet, Avro) |
| Performance at Scale | Extremely high performance at scale Proven in healthcare, financial services, and logistics for operational and analytical workloads | Scales adequately for analytics; less optimized for operational processing |
| Operational Simplicity | Full life-cycle API management, low code graphical process orchestration, as well as a business rules and a workflow engine to automate your enterprise-wide business processes | Snowflake Tasks feature, which is suitable for SQL-based workflows |
| Security & Governance | Unified lineage, policy enforcement, and role-based access control across sources | Role-based security and object tagging; complex in multi-cloud/hybrid scenarios |
InterSystems and Snowflake can be Complementary
