M3 vs Snowflake
M3 and Snowflake are both database software. M3 is open source under Apache-2.0, with 4.9k GitHub stars. Snowflake is a commercial product from Snowflake Inc.
Which to pick
- Pick M3 when
- You run Prometheus at very large scale and need horizontally scalable long-term metrics storage.
- Pick Snowflake when
- A company has many data sources to combine for analytics and wants a managed warehouse that scales without tuning.
Side by side
Uber's metrics platform: a distributed time-series database, aggregator and query engine usable as long-term Prometheus storage and Graphite-compatible backend.
A cloud data warehouse that separates storage from compute, for SQL analytics, data sharing and data engineering across AWS, Azure and GCP.
Complex to operate, and development has slowed; many teams choose Thanos, Mimir or VictoriaMetrics instead.
Credit-based compute costs climb quickly without controls on warehouses and queries.
Usable
Production-ready
Self-hosted server
Cloud service
Go and etcd
SQL
Open source, Apache-2.0 (permissive)
Closed source, sold by Snowflake Inc.
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
4.9k GitHub stars
6.5k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 10 years ago, latest release v1.6.0.
Not known
Other comparisons
More databases
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.