Compare
LakehouseBox and Snowflake Open Catalog and Horizon
Snowflake serves Iceberg tables to outside engines through its Horizon Catalog; its managed Polaris service, Open Catalog, no longer takes new customers. LakehouseBox is a catalog and its storage, nothing else.
Side by side
Their column is what their own pages said on 12 October 2026 (sources below); prices are theirs, in their currency, before tax.
| Snowflake | LakehouseBox | |
|---|---|---|
| Who operates it, where | Snowflake (a US company), on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud in the region you choose | Lakehousebox, S.L. (Spain, in formation); tables and files stored at Hetzner in Nuremberg, Germany; a locked backup copy in France |
| To start | A Snowflake account; a 30-day trial needs no card. New customers cannot sign up for Open Catalog and are pointed to Horizon Catalog | An agent needs no account: lhbox new gives it a catalog it can write for 72 hours, until a person claims it. A person: a free account, 5 GB, no card |
| Price | Horizon's Iceberg REST API: 0.5 credit per million calls, billing scheduled from the second half of 2026; storage and compute billed by Snowflake | Free up to 5 GB. Only storage is metered: no request, egress or compute fees. Paid storage is not open yet (announced at €0.10 per GB-month) |
| Catalog and credentials | Horizon Catalog Iceberg REST API with vended credentials; personal access tokens, key pairs, external OAuth | Iceberg REST catalog; each engine gets storage credentials for one table at a time, valid for an hour |
| Engines | Spark, Flink, Trino, DuckDB, Dremio, StarRocks, Doris, PyIceberg read and write Snowflake-managed tables | DuckDB 1.5.5+, PyIceberg 0.12, Spark 3.5 (status per engine) |
| Iceberg v3 | Yes, v2 and v3 | Yes: DuckDB 1.5.5 writes format-version 3, geometry columns included |
| Maintenance | Bundled for tables only Snowflake writes | Compaction, snapshot expiry and orphan-file cleanup every 6 hours, included |
| Compute | Snowflake's warehouses, or your engine | Yours: your agent or laptop runs the engine. Server-side read-only SQL (20 s per query) through the API and MCP |
| SLA | Yes, Snowflake's | None yet; one site, no standby |
Which one
Choose Snowflake when you run Snowflake and want one governed catalog for Snowflake SQL and outside engines, with its role-based access, compute and SLA.
Choose LakehouseBox when you don't run Snowflake and want a catalog your agent can start and write without a contract or a warehouse; storage is the one meter; the operator is European. To read LakehouseBox tables from Snowflake today, Snowflake Support must allow it for your account (see Engines).
Start with LakehouseBox: let your agent start without an account, or sign up free. Other comparisons: all of them.
Sources
Checked 12 October 2026. Something out of date? Write to hello@lakehousebox.com and we correct it.
- Snowflake Open Catalog overview
- Horizon Catalog: Iceberg tables from external engines
- Snowflake storage for Iceberg tables
- Snowflake trial accounts
Ours: pricing, sovereignty, engines, capabilities.