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Data & Cloud Wars on Google Trends
Snowflake or Databricks? Power BI or Tableau? AWS or Microsoft Azure or maybe Google Cloud? Data engineers and analysts have been witnesses to many of these data battles when clients decide which tool to use for their needs. This discussion should be rational, with arguments, pros, and cons, but in many boardrooms it isn’t the case.
Rational arguments don’t always win in data wars
Emotions, hype, and marketing buzzwords get in the way. In the end, the main argument for why the company XYZ chose Databricks over Snowflake can be as simple as: our competitor already has Databricks. So how can you measure what clients want? We have Google Trends for that.
Well, of course we can have a longer debate about whether it’s ideal or not, but I think searching for topics on Google can be used as a proxy for demand for a product by a certain company.
I have checked statistics for the most searched data platforms and cloud providers in the last 12 months worldwide and in 6 selected countries. Let’s see what people look for when they search for data tools online.
Google Trends: How does it work?
After watching a short introduction to what you can use Google Trends for, I decided to pit a few data companies and tools against each other to see which ones customers demand, based on their search data from Google Trends. I'm not an SEO expert, but I don’t think search engine optimization is rocket science.
Let’s start with the heavy hitters in the data engineering space. I will always check Google Trends data worldwide, then split the results by the US, the UK, Germany, France, Poland, and the Czech Republic. These are the countries that I care about the most (as a European and Czech).
If you are wondering how we can compare data from countries with different population sizes, in Google Trends it works like this.
A country’s population size does not skew the results, because the data is already normalized. Google Trends does not show absolute search volumes. Instead, it uses a relative popularity metric scaled from 0 to 100.
This means we can compare the relative popularity of tools within one country, and compare how lopsided that competition is from country to country — but we can’t say one country’s raw number is ‘higher’ than another’s, since each country’s chart is scaled independently.
Data wars: Databricks vs. Snowflake
The showdown between Databricks and Snowflake is straightforward because both keywords fall under the same search category labelled as “company”.
Originally, I wanted to include Microsoft’s Fabric as well, but I found it only in the “topic” category. Therefore, I was not sure if that would be all right to compare, or if it’s more like comparing apples and oranges.
Who is better in the US and UK market? Yearly data for Snowflake and Databricks (2025 and 2026) tell us that the fight between these data platforms is quite close in both English-speaking countries. The trend is going slightly in favor of Databricks, with rising interest in 2026 in both the US and the UK and declining numbers for Snowflake in both countries.
Now, let’s head to France and Germany for the same battle of data platforms. While “croissant-eaters” look undecided about whether they prefer Databricks or Snowflake, “pretzel-eaters” go more often for Databricks.
What will the showdown between data platforms, Snowflake and Databricks, look like in the region of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)?
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While monthly averages in 2025 look even in Poland as well as in Czechia, the numbers from months this year are giving the edge to Databricks over Snowflake. The gap in favour of Databricks is bigger for dumpling-eaters than for pierogi-eaters. For those not so familiar with the cuisine of CEE countries, dumpling-eaters are citizens of Czechia, and pierogi are a typical Polish dish. (I have included some links, in case you are hungry or confused, because pierogi can also be described as filled dumplings, and Czech dumplings are not the same ones you might think of first.)
Snowflake vs Databricks: What do IT experts think?
Tanja Savic is a Serbian Data Engineer working mainly for Czech and European clients for the last 8 years. She sees the data and cloud landscape like this:
Snowflake vs Databricks was always close, and when it comes to cloud there was this trend — the US liked AWS, Europeans preferred Azure, and Australia was Google fun. I remember that in my previous company we had a saying that it’s hard to sell cloud in Germany, because they liked on premise solutions.
Ukrainian Data Engineer Vladylena Halchuk, who lives in Prague but has worked mainly on international projects, can compare Snowflake and Databricks from her own professional experience:
I first touched Snowflake during my data bootcamp in Czechitas (NGO helping women get into the IT and STEM), and it did the job fine. Some of my friends at Czech companies are still on it, and they’re happy with it.
For me though, Databricks is just it: fast, intuitive, constantly evolving, genuinely fun to work with. I’ve been using it daily for a couple of years now, and honestly, I don’t get how anyone wouldn’t love it.
Senior BI Team Leader, Petr Holik, who worked mainly for German, Dutch, and Czech clients, highlights a missing piece in this analysis:
The growing interest in Databricks makes a lot of sense considering how much traction Lakehouse architecture has been getting lately. Shame about MS Fabric not being in the comparison, though — it’s been such a big part of these data platform debates recently.
One reservation I’d keep in mind is that Google Trends data mostly picks up exploratory curiosity and people researching their options — it shouldn’t really be conflated with actual enterprise deployments or production usage.
Heavy use of MS Office gives an advantage to Azure in Europe
DevOps professional with dual nationality (French and US) and 5 years of experience with French customers, Emmanuel Girin, shared his view on cloud wars in France and the United States:
Many French companies are very slow to adopt modern tools when compared to their American counterparts. So there are still many opportunities in the French market when it comes to data management and AI adoption.
Here the traditional tools of MS Office 365 are widely implemented, which means Microsoft’s Azure takes a significant part of the cloud market for basic AD tenant needs.
Belarusian Senior Data Scientist working with Polish clients in Warsaw, Darya Petrashka, thinks it’s a good time to upskill in Databricks because, at the moment, their data platform is more demanded on projects. Even though she thinks Snowflake and Databricks are pretty close data products.
Same goes for cloud. AWS and Azure are the most popular options in Poland. There are strong tech communities around both, and sometimes people are active in both. The good thing is that cloud skills are easily transferable. If you initially studied GCP, it is not that hard to adapt to AWS if the infrastructure changes.
Cloud vendor popularity based on Google Trends
Who is winning the Cloud wars based on data from Google Trends? We are looking at the 3 cloud giants: AWS, Microsoft, and Google.
You can see in the picture below that my search terms are “Amazon Web Services”, “Microsoft Azure,” and “Google Cloud Platform”. That means Google Trends is doing a topic or entity search, not an explicit keyword. Topic groups together all related searches, misspellings, abbreviations (like “AWS”, “ MS Azure”, “GCP,” etc.), and translations across different languages.
Cloud wars: AWS vs. Azure vs. Google Cloud
Clearly, AWS is a frontrunner in the cloud war, with Microsoft’s Azure taking the silver and Google’s cloud taking the bronze, when we look at the world’s competition.
In the US and the UK, Google's cloud provider is lagging behind the duo of AWS and Azure dominating the market for cloud services.
The same picture holds in France and Germany, where AWS and MS Azure battle head-to-head. The winner of this match still looks undecided on both the French and German cloud battlefields.
Similar to French and German customers, Polish and Czech clients also didn’t have a clear cloud favorite in 2025. Of the three options, GCP was the least loved, but AWS and Azure were neck and neck.
In 2026, the Polish market is only slightly more favorable to Microsoft’s cloud services, but Czech cloud engineers seem to be strongly in favor of Azure over AWS.
