Hightouch
Composable Customer Data Platform and AI decisioning for marketing
Snowplow
Turn event-level data into governed, AI‑ready customer insights
Snowplow provides a scalable, glass‑box data pipeline that captures, validates, enriches, and streams event‑level customer data to any warehouse or lake, enabling real‑time analytics and AI applications.
Overview
Overview
Snowplow is designed for data engineering teams at digital‑first enterprises that need granular, real‑time visibility into customer behavior. It offers a transparent, "glass‑box" architecture that can ingest billions of events daily and deliver them securely to your chosen storage layer.
Capabilities
The platform includes over 20 SDKs for web, mobile, and server‑side collection, schema‑driven validation for high data fidelity, and more than 15 enrichments that add context such as geo‑location, device details, and user identifiers. Data can be streamed to any warehouse, lakehouse, or SaaS destination, making it ready for BI, advanced analytics, and AI/ML pipelines.
Deployment
Snowplow can be self‑hosted on cloud or on‑premise environments and integrates with popular data platforms like Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, and Azure Synapse. Comprehensive documentation and an active community support implementation and ongoing operation.
Highlights
Glass‑box architecture processes billions of events daily
Over 20 SDKs for web, mobile, and server‑side collection
Schema‑driven validation ensures high‑quality, governed data
15+ enrichments and flexible streaming to any destination
Pros
- High data fidelity and governance
- Real‑time processing at massive scale
- Extensible SDK ecosystem
- Strong community and documentation
Considerations
- Requires engineering effort to deploy and maintain
- Complexity may be overkill for small datasets
- Limited out‑of‑the‑box UI for data exploration
- License changes may affect long‑term support
Managed products teams compare with
When teams consider Snowplow, these hosted platforms usually appear on the same shortlist.
Looking for a hosted option? These are the services engineering teams benchmark against before choosing open source.
Fit guide
Great for
- Enterprises needing granular, real‑time customer behavior data
- Teams building AI/ML models that require high‑quality event streams
- Organizations with existing data warehouses seeking unified ingestion
- Companies that value data governance and schema enforcement
Not ideal when
- Startups with minimal data engineering resources
- Use cases that only need aggregated metrics
- Projects requiring a fully managed SaaS analytics platform
- Teams unwilling to manage self‑hosted infrastructure
How teams use it
Real‑time personalization engine
Feeds validated event streams to recommendation models, enabling instant, context‑aware product suggestions.
Customer churn prediction
Aggregates enriched behavioral data into a data lake for ML pipelines that forecast churn with high accuracy.
Fraud detection in e‑commerce
Streams transaction events through enrichments to a monitoring system that flags suspicious activity instantly.
Unified analytics dashboard
Collects web, mobile, and server events into a warehouse, providing analysts with a single source of truth for cohort analysis.
Tech snapshot
Scala47%
PLpgSQL24%
Shell9%
Python7%
JavaScript7%
Thrift3%
Frequently asked questions
What programming languages are supported for data collection?
Snowplow offers SDKs in more than 20 languages, including JavaScript, iOS/Swift, Android/Kotlin, Java, Python, and server‑side options.
Can Snowplow integrate with any data warehouse?
Yes, the pipeline can stream data to popular warehouses and lakehouses such as Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Azure Synapse, and also to custom destinations via HTTP.
How does Snowplow ensure data quality?
It uses schema definitions and validation at ingestion, plus a suite of enrichments that add context and correct common issues before data reaches storage.
Is there a managed cloud service?
Snowplow provides a managed offering, but the core pipeline is also available for self‑hosted deployment on cloud or on‑premise environments.
What impact do the recent license changes have?
Versions released before January 2024 will no longer receive security patches; users of newer versions should contact Snowplow to discuss licensing and support options.
Project at a glance
Stable- Stars
- 6,995
- Watchers
- 6,995
- Forks
- 1,185
LicenseApache-2.0
Repo age13 years old
Last commit8 months ago
Primary languageScala
Last synced 3 hours ago