Editions

Overview

Snowflake is sold in five editions, chosen on what the users or the company need. They are cumulative — each one is everything below it plus its own additions, which is why the slide reads "Standard+", "Premier+", "Enterprise+" and "Business Critical+" rather than listing features twice.

text

Virtual Private Snowflake  ── dedicated servers, own metadata store
  └ Business Critical      ── HIPAA, PCI, failover, tri-secret
      └ Enterprise         ── multi-cluster, 90-day travel, matviews
          └ Premier        ── 24x365 support, SLA with refund
              └ Standard   ── the complete SQL warehouse

read outward: each ring is the ring inside it, plus more

The first four all run on public cloud — AWS, GCP and Azure. The fifth is the one that does not.

Standard

The complete SQL data warehouse, and the floor everything else builds on.

Complete SQL data warehouse
Secure data sharing across regions and clouds
Business-hour support, Monday to Friday
1 day of time travel — and no way to go beyond it on this edition
Always-on enterprise-grade encryption, in transit and at rest
Customer-dedicated virtual warehouses
Federated authentication
Database replication

Premier

Standard, plus support terms. Nothing here changes what the engine can do — all three additions are about how Snowflake answers when something is wrong.

Premier support, 24x7 across all 365 days
Faster response time on queries raised with Snowflake than Standard gets
SLA with a refund for an outage — an outage on the account is refunded

Enterprise

Premier, plus real capability. This is the edition most companies use.

Multi-cluster warehouse
Up to 90 days of time travel
Annual rekey of all encrypted data
Materialized views
AWS PrivateLink, available for an extra fee

Business Critical

Enterprise, plus the things a regulated or sensitive workload needs. The edition to reach for when the data itself carries an obligation.

HIPAA support
PCI compliance
Data encryption everywhere — anywhere in Snowflake you need it encrypted
Tri-Secret Secure, using customer-managed keys (AWS)
AWS PrivateLink support
Enhanced security policy
Database failover and failback, for business continuity

Virtual Private Snowflake (VPS)

Business Critical, plus isolation. The other four editions run on public cloud; this is the one for running in a virtual private cloud, where the hardware is not shared.

Customer-dedicated virtual servers wherever the encryption key is in memory — a dedicated server, given only to that client
Customer-dedicated metadata store
Additional operational visibility into what is happening inside the account

What actually changes between them

Read down the list of five and the additions fall into three kinds. Knowing which kind you are buying is the whole decision.

Kind of addition	Which edition brings it	What it buys
Support terms	Premier	Response times and a refund. The engine is identical to Standard's.
Engine capability	Enterprise	Multi-cluster, 90-day time travel, materialized views — SQL that will not run on Standard.
Compliance and isolation	Business Critical, then VPS	HIPAA and PCI, customer-managed keys, failover; then dedicated servers and metadata.

Watch out: the edition boundary at Enterprise is the one that can invalidate a migration plan, because materialized views live there. This platform's capability matrix records materialized_view: ENFORCED for Snowflake with no edition dimension at all — true on Enterprise and above, and wrong on Standard or Premier, where a source materialized view has nowhere to land and should be reported as a blocker.

Why this matters to an assessment

Three of these differences are read directly by questions the assessment already asks, so the target's edition is an input to the answer rather than a procurement footnote.

Edition difference	What it decides	Where the run reads it
Materialized views (Enterprise+)	Whether a source materialized view has a target at all.	The capability matrix — which currently assumes it always does.
Time travel: 1 day vs 90 days	How far back a bad load can be undone, which is the real rollback window.	The cutover validation intake question.
HIPAA and PCI (Business Critical+)	Whether regulated data may legally land on the target.	The compliance-scope intake question, which is required.
Multi-cluster (Enterprise+)	Whether "all your users" survives concurrency, or teams queue behind each other.	The downstream-consumers intake question.
Failover and failback (Business Critical+)	Whether business continuity is a product feature or a thing you build.	Nothing yet — no question asks it.

So an assessment that never establishes the target edition is guessing on three of its own required questions. Worth asking before the report is written, not after.

Still open

Nothing in this platform models the edition. There is no field for it on a datasource, no intake question that asks it, and the capability matrix is keyed by dialect alone — so every Snowflake target is assessed as though it were Enterprise or above. That is the right default for the common case and silently wrong for a Standard account.

Where this page comes from

The five editions and their feature lists are Snowflake's own, taken from an introductory walkthrough of them. Editions are commercial packaging and the vendor moves them — features get promoted down the tiers, and tiers themselves come and go — so treat the lists as what was true when this was recorded and check the pricing page before committing to one.

The last three sections are not from that source. They are this platform's own reading of which differences change an assessment, and what it does not currently model.