Comparisons

SELECT vs. Capital One Slingshot

About SELECT

SELECT was founded in 2022 and is led by experienced practitioners with deep expertise in optimizing Snowflake spend. Their SaaS web application helps users monitor, control and automatically lower spend. They integrate tightly with popular data tools such as dbt, Looker, Sigma (and more...) that sit on top of Snowflake by providing cost attribution to the workloads originating from these systems. In addition, SELECT automatically lowers Snowflake customer’s compute spend by 10-20% without any effort from their end.

About Slingshot

Slingshot was founded in 2022 based on Capital One’s need to manage spend across 50 separate business units & snowflake accounts. The tool focuses on governance features required by large banks to streamline access requests as well as cost monitoring. Slingshot can help some customers lower Snowflake spend by providing them with scheduled downsizing of their oversized warehouses on nights and weekends. They also provide email alerts when usage increases.

Detailed Comparison

Cost Visibility & Allocation

CapabilitySELECTSlingshot
Out of the box spend dashboards✅✅
See costs in dollars, not credits✅✅
See cost per query✅✅
Analyze remaining contract usage and forecast✅✅
Connect multiple Snowflake accounts✅✅
Drill into cloud services cost drivers✅❌
Warehouse Utilization✅❌
Intelligent query grouping based on query similarity✅❌
Analyze Snowflake (Cortex) AI costs✅❌
See top users and queries per table✅❌
See costs by query tag✅❌
See costs by table accessed✅❌
See cost per Snowpipe✅❌
See cost by table✅❌
See query read/write costs by table✅❌
See cost per Task✅❌
See cost per Stored Procedure✅❌
See cost per Dynamic Table✅❌
See cost per dashboard✅❌
Advanced filtering capabilities✅❌
Understand total asset cost with lineage✅❌
Save frequently applied filters as views✅❌
Analyze costs by Snowflake object tags✅❌

Performance Monitoring

CapabilitySELECTSlingshot
Analyze query performance by warehouse✅✅
Analyze query queuing by warehouse✅❌
Analyze data spillage warehouse✅❌
See historical query performance✅❌
See historical query stats (data scanned, pruning efficiency, spillage, etc.)✅❌

Savings & Recommendations

CapabilitySELECTSlingshot
Automatically save costs through warehouse optimization✅✅
View and audit generated savings✅✅
Identify misconfigured warehouses✅✅
Query optimization recommendations✅✅
Underutilized warehouses✅✅
Table clustering key analysis✅❌
Workloads with high spillage✅❌
Innefficient file sizes for data loading✅❌
Query warehouse sizing recommendations✅❌
Identify unused tables, schemas and databases✅❌
Exploding join detection✅❌
Identify tables with unnecessary data retention costs✅❌
Filter recommendations by team, department, warehouse, or tags✅❌

Integrations

CapabilitySELECTSlingshot
dbt core✅❌
dbt Cloud✅❌
Looker✅❌
Sigma✅❌
Mode✅❌
Hex✅❌
Periscope✅❌
Coalesce.io✅❌
TableauComing soon...❌
PowerBIComing soon...❌

Alerting

CapabilitySELECTSlingshot
Get notified of account level cost spikes✅✅
Send alerts to Email✅✅
Send alerts to Slack✅❌
Send alerts to Teams✅❌
Send alerts to OpsGenie✅❌
Send alerts to PagerDuty✅❌
Long running query alerts✅❌
Configure alerts for warehouses, users or queries✅❌
Define alerts with custom SQL queries✅❌
Customize the alert message & contents✅❌
Send alerts to multiple destinations✅❌

Cost Allocations

CapabilitySELECTSlingshot
Allocate costs by database✅✅
Allocate costs by warehouse✅✅
Allocate costs by Snowflake user✅✅
Allocate costs using Snowflake object tags✅❌
Allocate AI costs by user, warehouse or LLM model✅❌
Allocate AI costs from query tags / query metadata✅❌
Allocate by dbt tags or resource names✅❌
Allocate costs by table/schema✅❌
Allocate costs by BI tool user✅❌
See version history of cost allocations✅❌
Manage cost allocations via JSON/YAML✅❌

Budgets

CapabilitySELECTSlingshot
Set monthly budgets✅❌
Set yearly budgets✅❌
Set a budget for spend from multiple Snowflake accounts in your organization✅❌
Set a budget for individual warehouses, or groups of warehouses✅❌
Set a budget for individual Snowflake users, or groups of users✅❌
Get alerted if budget is exceededComing soon...❌

Security

CapabilitySELECTSlingshot
Whitelisted IP address✅✅
Key-Pair Authentication Support✅✅
Flexible RBAC & roles assignment✅✅
Restrict access at the resource level✅❌
Automatically rotate keys via API✅❌
Integration with Okta SSO✅❌
Integration with Entra ID (Azure AD) SSO✅❌
Integration with OneLogin SSO✅❌
Integration with PingFed SSO✅❌
Automatically assign roles based on SSO groups✅❌

Pricing

SELECT offers flat rate pricing tailored to your Snowflake usage, at 3% of your annual Snowflake spend. You can pay with your existing Snowflake credits, and we always ensure we save you more than we charge, guaranteed.

Slingshot charges $30,000/year if under 25M queries per month and $72,000/year if over 25M queries per month.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the benefits of using SELECT?

SELECT is an end-to-end Snowflake cost management and optimization platform. SELECT powers over 200 customers, helping them:

  • Automatically save 10-20% through fully automated and real time warehouse optimizations
  • Gain unparalleled cost visibility into all Snowflake workloads and spend drivers
  • Optimize Snowflake resources through tailored insights & recommendations
  • Monitor and control spend through flexible alerting
  • Democratize spend management by providing users and teams throughout the organization with fine-grained access into their Snowflake usage

How is SELECT different than Slingshot?

SELECT and Slingshot provide similar capabilities at a high level. They both offering cost visibility, insights, and fully automated savings. The core differences come from the depth and number of features offered in each core capability. Refer to the detailed comparison above for examples.

How does SELECT's pricing compare to Capital One Slingshot's?

SELECT's ensures all of its customers receive a positive ROI through the savings generated from the product. With the exception of high spend customers (over $3M/year) SELECT will generally be less expensive than Slingshot.

What makes SELECT a better alternative to Slingshot?

Simply put: we go much deeper and provide more extensive capabilities as shown in the detailed comparison above. We encourage you to try us out and see for yourself. Of all customers who have tried both Slingshot and SELECT, all have chosen SELECT. Here is a summary of our key differentiators:

  1. Fully automated savings: SELECT helps customers automatically lower their spend by 10-20% through fully automated and real time warehouse optimizations.
  2. Detailed insights & recommendations: SELECT scans all Snowflake resources and queries for common anti-patterns and innefficiencies, and surfaces up detailed optimization recommendations to its end users, typically providing additional savings opportunities of 20-30%.
  3. Deeper cost visbility: SELECT provides much deeper visibility into Snowflake usage, highlighting the annualized costs of all Snowflake resources (tables, tasks, LLM models) and making them readily accessible within a few clicks.
  4. Integrations: SELECT integrates with common tools used on top of Snowflake that drive significant consumption (dbt, Looker, Sigma, etc.) and surfaces their costs along with optimization opportunities.
  5. Flexible & automated cost anomaly alerts: SELECT allows customers to setup flexible anomaly alerts with a few clicks and allows users to send those alerts to Email, Slack, MS Teams, or other alerting destinations like Pager Duty. SELECT's alerts can be configured at a very granular level: by team, user, query, tags, and more.
  6. Cost visibility access controls: Many Snowflake customers do not want to expose their total Snowflake bill to all users in the company. SELECT allows its customers to expose a subset of Snowflake costs from selected resources to each team/department .
  7. Battle tested: SELECT product is used and battle tested by hundreds of companies every day.

Commitment to Transparency

This comparison guide was put together based on publicly available documentation and customer references. If you spot an innaccuracy, please contact [email protected] and provide verifiable evidence to demonstrate your claim, and we will update the page accordingly.