Most Snowflake-to-Databricks migrations get sold on cost and delivered on something else. The credit line item is what gets the project funded, but the teams that finish happy are usually the ones that moved for a different reason: they wanted ML, streaming and GenAI workloads living next to the analytics data instead of shuttling between two platforms. If your only justification is the bill, read the breakeven section below before you commit — the honest number is longer than the deck says.
We're a Databricks shop, and we've written elsewhere about how to choose between the two platforms if you haven't committed yet. This post assumes you have.
What actually changes underneath
The two platforms look similar from a SQL console and are structurally different behind it. The mapping worth internalising before planning anything:
Layer
