Estuary

Your Blueprint for Right-Time Snowflake Pipelines

A comprehensive guide on data integration for Snowflake

Choose the right ingestion method, at the right time, for the right cost.

Modern teams don't just need "real-time" or "batch": they need the right latency for each workflow. This guide walks Snowflake leaders through designing right-time pipelines, comparing native and third-party ingestion options, and avoiding the hidden costs of the wrong architecture.

  • Understand the right-time data mindset and where your org sits on the maturity model

  • Compare Snowflake-native ingestion: COPY INTO, Snowpipe, Snowpipe Streaming, and Openflow

  • Evaluate third-party platforms like Estuary, Airbyte, and Fivetran for your Snowflake stack

  • Learn how right-time data impacts total cost of ownership and Snowflake credit spend

  • See how leading companies use Estuary and Snowflake to reduce costs and increase freshness

What you'll learn

This isn't just another Snowflake 'getting started' doc. It's a practical framework for choosing the right ingestion strategy, balancing cost and latency, and designing flexible architectures that support both analytics and AI.

The Right-Time Data Manifesto

Why 'real-time vs batch' is the wrong question—and how to choose the right latency for each workflow.

Snowflake Ingestion Options, Explained

Clear breakdown of COPY INTO, Snowpipe, Snowpipe Streaming (Classic & High Performance), and Openflow, including trade-offs in latency and complexity.

Total Cost of Ownership & Hidden Costs

How ingestion choices affect Snowflake credits, engineering time, and opportunity cost over the long term.

Native vs Third-Party Integrations

Side-by-side look at Snowflake-native tools versus platforms like Estuary, Airbyte, and Fivetran—and when to choose which.

Trusted by data leaders

  • Coalesce avatar

    Coalesce


    Estuary is the only system we’ve found that can seamlessly replicate large scale Firestore data for analytics. After months of research and trying everything, we can confidently say that Estuary is the only company that can help us get easy, accurate analytics on our data within Snowflake when replicating from Firestore data.

  • Together AI avatar

    YuTong (Julia) Zhang

    Senior Software Engineer, Together AI
    Together AI avatar

    For AI systems like ours, freshness of data is everything. Estuary gives us sub-second latency without the complexity of maintaining streaming infrastructure ourselves. That reliability means our teams can focus on advancing AI models instead of pipelines.

  • Glossier avatar

    Brandon Besash

    Director, Business Intelligence, Glossier
    Glossier avatar

    Estuary enabled us to finally implement our ERP’s new data endpoint with all our inventory transactions, purchasing, and shipping data. We can now unlock data blocked by cost before, and sync times are much faster and are always being improved by the Estuary team.

    Read the Success Story
  • Xometry avatar

    Andrew Woelfel

    Senior Manager, Data Engineering and Analytics, Xometry
    Xometry avatar

    “Estuary has been a pleasure to work with and has significantly modernized our data infrastructure, delivering real-time and scalable processes that will significantly impact company-wide operations. Every data-driven organization should be looking at Estuary today.”

    Read the Success Story
  • Cosuno avatar

    Maximilian Seifert

    CTO, Cosuno
    Cosuno avatar

    Estuary just works. We’ve never had an incident, and it cut our data movement costs in half.

    Read the Success Story
  • Shippit avatar

    Keat Min Woo


    We didn’t want to be locked into a system where faster syncs meant higher bills. Estuary gives us real-time pipelines without pricing games or the burden of running Kafka ourselves.

    Read the Success Story
  • Livble avatar

    Uri Vinetz

    Director of Data, Livble
    Livble avatar

    We needed something self-serve, fast, and reliable, and Estuary delivered exactly that. It’s a huge unlock for our operations, reporting, and machine learning.

    Read the Success Story
  • Resend avatar

    Jonni Lundy

    COO, Resend
    Resend avatar

    Estuary Flow transformed how we operationalize our data for fraud, security, support, and beyond.. Instead of unreliable, expensive backfills, we have real-time visibility into platform activity. The proactive support and hands-on approach make all the difference.

    Read the Success Story
  • Recart avatar

    Istvan Kovacs

    CTO, Recart
    Recart avatar

    Estuary became our real-time data backbone without the cost or complexity of traditional solutions. We replaced a fragile, high-maintenance pipeline with a managed system that just works and scales.?

    Read the Success Story
  • Headset avatar

    Scott Vickers

    CTO, Headset
    Headset avatar

    Estuary has been a game-changer for Headset’s data infrastructure. Compared to our previous solutions, it has dramatically improved reliability while reducing our overall costs significantly.

    Read the Success Story
  • Revunit avatar

    Revunit


    Estuary is our preferred CDC solution for importing data from application databases into BigQuery for analytics. It offers a transparent pricing structure, timely support responses, and an intuitive CLI tool for bulk configuration tasks. In contrast, other market solutions often have ambiguous pricing and fewer options for precise data replication across environments. This makes choosing to use Estuary an obvious decision.

  • PDI. avatar

    PDI.


    Estuary Flow makes tough data transformation problems a piece of cake with its intuitive user interface and incredible breadth of features.

  • OneCommerce avatar

    OneCommerce


    Estuary Flow is the only SaaS tool that we found which can do a simple loop and calculate COGS from an array of objects nested in a property. We love to write transformations in typescript because it's in the same codebase and super easy to maintain and read. It's a true game changer.

  • Minima Global avatar

    Minima Global


    Getting #MINIMA real-time data replication out to the Postgres database was not fun until we found @EstuaryDev it is the best materialization.

  • Seattle Data Guy avatar

    Ben Rogojan

    Owner, Seattle Data Guy
    Seattle Data Guy avatar

    Estuary makes working with real-time data more cost effective and just as simple as working with batch data.

  • Pompato avatar

    Pompato


    This tool is 1000x times better than LogStash or Elastic Enterprise Data Ingestion Tool.

  • DeepSync avatar

    DeepSync


    Estuary Flow allows us to integrate low-latency CDC and connect to SaaS apps across our entire reporting stack and it’s the only solution that we’ve found that lets us do both.

  • Fenestra avatar

    Fenestra


    We needed a platform to help us optimize marketing campaigns with low-latency. Estuary provided an unparalleled solution to do that at terabyte scale.

  • Flashpack avatar

    Flashpack


    We're a big fan of Estuary's real-time, no code model. It's magic that we're getting real time data without much effort and we don't have to spend time thinking about broken pipelines. We've also experienced fantastic support by Estuary.

    About Estuary

    Estuary is the Right-Time Data Platform for Snowflake customers who need both sub-second streaming and predictable batch pipelines. With automatic schema evolution, hundreds of high-quality connectors, and flexible deployment options (including BYOC), Estuary helps teams reduce ingestion costs, simplify architecture, and deliver data at exactly the cadence each workflow demands.

    Learn more about Estuary