You would use Snowflake when you need easy and scalable data warehousing with built-in support for diverse data formats and collaborative features. For example, if your organization needs to analyze large volumes of JSON data alongside structured data while allowing multiple teams to share insights in real-time, Snowflake's capabilities would be particularly beneficial.
Vertica may be preferred when you need to run complex analytical queries over very large datasets with lower latency. For example, in a financial institution processing real-time transaction data for fraud detection, Vertica's performance optimizations would allow faster insights compared to Snowflake.