Databricks and Snowflake are two of the biggest and fastest growing companies in the cloud-based big data analytics space. While there are some similarities between the two rivals, there are also important differences in their offerings that prospective customers should consider. Snowflake offers a data warehouse delivered via the software-as-a-service (SaaS) method, while Databricks offers a data lakehouse delivered via the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) method. Databricks began as an implementation of Apache Spark in the cloud and continues to excel in providing large-scale data processing, while Snowflake supports structured and semi-structured data.