Nearly two in five companies using Snowflake in these interviews also name a packaged customer data platform such as Segment, Tealium or Salesforce Data Cloud — more than twice the rate among similarly sized companies without Snowflake. In the buyer accounts that describe how the systems work together, Snowflake often serves as the central data store while the CDP handles collection, identity or activation; a smaller group is using Snowflake to replace some of those functions. Warehouse activation tools such as Hightouch appear about five times as often, product analytics tools such as Amplitude and Heap about three times as often, and BI tools appear in about seven in ten Snowflake stacks. Buyers describe Snowflake as their source of truth and getting data back out to marketing tools as the harder part.
What tools do companies commonly run alongside Snowflake?
BI tools are the most commonly named category alongside Snowflake in these interviews, appearing in about seven in ten Snowflake stacks. Packaged CDPs and cross-channel messaging platforms each appear in nearly two in five, while warehouse activation tools such as Hightouch appear in about one in ten. In practice, companies using Snowflake frequently pair it with a BI tool such as Tableau, Power BI, Looker or Sigma; with a customer data platform such as Segment, Tealium, mParticle or Salesforce Data Cloud; with a warehouse activation tool such as Hightouch; with product analytics such as Amplitude or Heap; and with a cross-channel messaging platform such as Braze, Iterable or Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Some also run Databricks beside it. The exact combination varies, and buyers describe both native connections and pipelines their data teams build one at a time.
More common at Snowflake companies
About the same
Less common at Snowflake companies
Does Snowflake replace a CDP?
Usually not. Snowflake companies are more likely, not less, to also run a packaged CDP, and buyers describe different arrangements. In some stacks, Segment collects events that flow into Snowflake; other companies use CDPs or customer-data tools alongside Snowflake for activation, enrichment or access to warehouse data. The exact direction of data movement depends on the product and implementation. One buyer describes a Salesforce Data Cloud setup that holds nothing of its own — “Data Cloud will be connected though to Snowflake though, because we're not actually going to keep any of the data in Data Cloud.” Others object to CDPs that need their own copy of the data: of Adobe, one says “Real-Time CDP requires all data to be ingested into Adobe Cloud rather than syncing directly from the warehouse.”
A smaller group is using the warehouse instead. One company is reconsidering Segment “only because Snowflake can now do a lot more than what we thought it was capable of,” and another sees no room for a separate platform: “I don't think there would be budget to support adding of a CDP on top of what we already have with Snowflake, with Braze.” See what CDP buyers wish they'd known.
How do companies get data out of Snowflake into marketing tools?
Buyers describe three ways of moving Snowflake data into marketing tools: native integrations provided by downstream platforms, warehouse activation tools such as Hightouch, and custom or manual exports. Native integrations can reduce setup work when they support the required use case. Activation tools read data from Snowflake and send it to marketing destinations, while manual workflows require teams to extract and transfer audiences themselves. Hightouch is the activation tool named most, and buyers value that it works from the warehouse directly — “HighTouch is just reading off of Snowflake, not having to maintain a separate system and all of its data elsewhere.” Others pull lists by hand: “Currently, we're kind of working directly from Snowflake to extract some lists and do some cross-segmentation in there. And then we activate those lists in our CRMs, but it's quite clunky.” Some buyers report timing constraints when warehouse-based activation depends on batch processing — “it's not going to be near real time where it's just a lot more complex to try and achieve that,” one buyer says of anything run through the warehouse — though another finds “getting data from Snowflake downstream regardless of partner, it's been pretty seamless.”
Does Snowflake integration decide which marketing tools companies buy?
For some, it is the deciding test. “We don't want to go implementing something that isn't supported or doesn't support a Snowflake integration,” one buyer says, and another, choosing between a CDP and an activation tool, was “strictly looking into the integration with Snowflake.” One company chose mParticle partly because “having integration built into Snowflake and Braze, gave it an advantage.” Buyers also report being told an integration existed when it did not, which the stories below include.
Do companies run Snowflake and Databricks together?
Some do, and Databricks is about two and a half times as common at Snowflake companies as at size-matched companies. Some companies run the two together and assign them different responsibilities: one uses “Databricks and Spark to manage the pipelines to then transform that into the silver and the gold layers” before loading Snowflake, and at another, “One group uses Snowflake more frequently if it's going to be powering AI because they use Cortex AI inside Snowflake.” Other companies describe migrations between warehouse platforms: several moved onto Snowflake from older on-premise warehouses, Redshift, Oracle or Azure Synapse, and two describe moving off it, one to BigQuery and one to Databricks, citing cost — “our costs kept going up and up and up.”
The Snowflake stack, layer by layer
How often Snowflake companies name a tool in each layer, against size-matched companies, which tools they name, and how buyers describe the connection to Snowflake. How often tools appear together is separate from how well they connect, which is what the last column reports.
| Layer | Snowflake companies naming one | Tools named | How buyers describe the connection to Snowflake |
|---|---|---|---|
| BI and dashboards | about seven in ten (about 1½×) | Tableau, Power BI, Looker, Sigma | A common way for marketers to access and visualize warehouse data without writing SQL; some buyers find dashboards static or slow to change. |
| Packaged CDP | nearly two in five (over 2×) | Segment, Tealium, Salesforce Data Cloud, Adobe Real-Time CDP, mParticle, Amperity | Some CDPs feed events into Snowflake; others access warehouse data for downstream uses. Buyers differ on whether the CDP should maintain a separate copy. |
| Cross-channel messaging | nearly two in five (over 2×) | Braze, Iterable, Twilio, Adobe Campaign | Native connections such as Braze data sharing are praised; elsewhere data moves by activation tool, daily batch or manual list pulls. |
| Product analytics | about one in five (about 3×) | Amplitude, Heap, Mixpanel | Event data is often piped into Snowflake and analysed there or in BI rather than in the tool itself. |
| Other warehouses and lakes | about one in seven (Databricks alone about 2½×) | Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift | Databricks often handles pipelines and transformation beside Snowflake; other warehouses persist where a migration is unfinished. |
| Warehouse activation | about one in ten (about 5×) | Hightouch, Census | Described as reading directly from Snowflake without a second copy; some buyers report batch delays or occasional sync problems. |
| Pipelines and transformation | about one in fourteen (rarely named elsewhere) | dbt, Fivetran, RudderStack | Run by data teams; marketers name them but rarely operate them. |
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Mostly data teams. Several marketers describe depending on the warehouse without touching it — “I don't interface with it, but our work very much depends on it,” one says — and reaching its data through a data team, a BI tool or an activation tool instead: “I basically just go to our marketing tech team and ask them for the attribute we need to send to an email, and they'll sync it over.” BI is one common way marketers reach warehouse data without writing SQL; one buyer uses Tableau “to just visualize and pull data from Snowflake without having to run SQL queries.” Some see AI changing that: “Even someone like me who knows no SQL can actually get some direct access and some value out of the data lake.”
The stories behind the stack
The counter-current: when the warehouse becomes the CDP
Some companies use Snowflake as the foundation of a warehouse-native customer data stack, adding activation tools or internally built data models instead of relying on a separate packaged CDP. These arrangements can replace parts of a CDP's role, although the capabilities depend on what each company builds around the warehouse. They cite fewer copies of the data, fewer tools and pricing that separates storage from compute. The trade-offs buyers report are timing, where their syncs from the warehouse run in batches; dependence on data teams to build and maintain the models; and compute costs that some say rise as more work moves into the warehouse.
What this means for your stack
A recurring configuration in these interviews has Snowflake as the source of truth, a CDP or activation tool between it and the channels, a BI layer for reporting, and a messaging platform at the end; a smaller group builds warehouse-native customer data capabilities with Snowflake and activation tools instead of relying on a separate packaged CDP. Buyers describe getting data out of Snowflake as the harder half, and some found that an advertised connection was missing or worked differently for their setup. Our recommendation, not a practice buyers describe: before buying a tool that will read from Snowflake, confirm the connection works for your deployment and how often it syncs, test it on your own tables, and decide whether the tool needs its own copy of the data at all.
What this page does not show
It shows which tools Snowflake companies run, not which ones they should. How often tools appear together says nothing about satisfaction, and a tool appearing beside Snowflake does not mean the two are connected. Snowflake companies are compared with companies of similar size, but they may still differ in industry and in how much they invest in data teams, so part of the difference reflects the kind of company rather than the choice of Snowflake. And a connection one buyer found easy or hard depends on how their data is set up, so it may work differently elsewhere.
Common questions
What tools integrate with Snowflake?
In Alium's verified buyer interviews, companies using Snowflake commonly also name BI tools, packaged CDPs, warehouse activation tools, product analytics and messaging platforms. Not every tool appearing alongside Snowflake is directly integrated with it. The most frequently named include Tableau, Power BI, Looker and Sigma for BI; Segment, Tealium and Salesforce Data Cloud as CDPs; Hightouch for activation; Amplitude and Heap for product analytics; and Braze, Iterable and Salesforce Marketing Cloud for messaging. Each is used by a minority of Snowflake companies except BI, which about seven in ten name.
Does Snowflake replace a CDP?
Usually not, in these interviews. Companies using Snowflake are more than twice as likely as similar-sized companies to also run a packaged CDP, with the CDP handling collection, identity or activation beside the warehouse. A smaller group uses Snowflake with an activation tool such as Hightouch to replace some of a packaged CDP's functions.
What is Hightouch used for with Snowflake?
Buyers describe Hightouch syncing audiences and attributes built in Snowflake into email, CRM and advertising platforms, reading from the warehouse rather than keeping its own copy. Some use it as their CDP. Some buyers report batch-processing delays or occasional synchronization problems, depending on their implementation.
Do companies use Snowflake and Databricks together?
Some do. Databricks is about two and a half times as common at Snowflake companies as at similar-sized companies, and where both run, buyers describe Databricks handling pipelines, transformation or data science and Snowflake serving as the warehouse. One company is moving from Snowflake to Databricks, and another is assessing whether to drop Snowflake from between Databricks and its marketing tools.
Which email platforms connect to Snowflake?
Buyers in these interviews describe connecting Snowflake directly to Braze, through data sharing, to Iterable and to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and connecting Klaviyo and others through Hightouch. Some describe platforms without a ready connection, where data moved by custom builds, batch files or manual list pulls.
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