From AWS to Snowflake - Data Clean Rooms are trapped between privacy and progress

Why today’s most popular clean room solutions can’t deliver both collaboration and compliance — and what it takes to break through.

Data clean rooms were supposed to bridge the gap between privacy and collaboration. But many enterprise users are discovering that this promise remains only partially fulfilled — particularly across leading platforms like AWS, Snowflake, and Databricks.

For advertisers, publishers, retailers, and data partners eager to unlock unique insights from sensitive customer data while remaining compliant with privacy regulations, the current state of clean rooms presents a dilemma: either limit what’s shared, or accept privacy risks.

So why are clean rooms still falling short — and how can we fix it?

Why data clean rooms matter more than ever

Data Insight Market forecasts that the data clean room market will grow from  $2 billion in 2025 to US $10 billion by 2033, driven by regulations like GDPR and CCPA and marketers wanting to run more effective campaigns and gain a deeper customer understanding.

As consumer expectations and regulatory demands evolve, secure data collaboration has become essential. Clean rooms offer a controlled environment where multiple parties can collaborate on and analyze first-party data or other sensitive information. Depending on the data clean room, this can be done without directly exposing raw or underlying data.

Whether optimizing advertising campaigns, improving healthcare patient experiences, or generating unique business insights, data clean rooms are meant to enable privacy-enhanced collaboration in a secure environment.

But as we hinted above, not all clean rooms are created equal.

The current landscape’s big players: AWS, Snowflake, Databricks, LiveRamp, InfoSum, and Decentriq

Let’s take a look at how today’s most well-known data clean rooms compare and where they hit roadblocks.

AWS Clean Rooms

Strengths: Deep integration with the AWS ecosystem, basic query controls, can be used cross-cloud or cross-platform.

Limitations: The burden is often on users to enforce data handling policies and ensure compliance. No-code functionalities are available only for simple queries.

Best for: Technical teams already embedded in AWS and/or Snowflake who are looking for flexible but self-managed collaboration, as well as those with some coding experience.

Snowflake data clean room

Strengths: Popular among marketers for ease-of-use; built-in features like Secure Data Sharing and object tagging for access controls.

Limitations: Snowflake’s clean room solution was primarily built for organizations already using Snowflake’s platform. As a result, it lacks native cross-cloud support, limiting collaboration across different data stacks or cloud environments. This can make it difficult for brands and media partners operating in heterogeneous infrastructures to fully collaborate without significant data movement or platform alignment.

Best for: Organizations already invested in Snowflake’s cloud platform with modest privacy requirements. 
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Learn more in our deep dive: Decentriq vs Snowflake data clean rooms

Databricks clean rooms

Strengths: Enable secure, privacy-preserving data collaboration without moving or exposing raw data. These clean rooms offer fine-grained access control and support advanced analytics across clouds and platforms.

Limitations: Databricks clean rooms are built primarily for technical users, with a focus on notebook-based workflows and Spark environments. There is no dedicated user interface for marketers or business teams, making the platform challenging to use without engineering support. This limits accessibility and slows time-to-value for non-technical collaborators who need to explore or activate data without relying on code.

Best for: Best suited for cross-company data collaboration in regulated industries like healthcare and finance. Ideal for use cases such as joint marketing analytics, secure audience matching, and shared risk or supply chain analysis—where data privacy and governance are critical.

LiveRamp

Strengths: Known for its strong identity resolution capabilities through RampID, allowing organizations to connect offline and online identifiers for accurate audience matching and activation. LiveRamp’s clean room integrates with all major cloud platforms and offers a broad partner network, enabling direct campaign activation across hundreds of destinations. Its interoperability and extensive ecosystem make it a popular choice for large-scale marketing and measurement use cases.

Limitations: LiveRamp’s clean room capabilities are largely the result of its Habu acquisition and are primarily geared toward advertising and media workflows. While strong for identity-driven marketing, it is less focused on non-marketing analytics or privacy-first architecture. This makes it less suitable for highly regulated, non-adtech collaboration scenarios.

Best for: Organizations seeking large-scale marketing activation, campaign measurement, and identity-based audience matching across a broad advertising ecosystem.

Learn more in our deep dive: Decentriq vs LiveRamp

InfoSum

Strengths: InfoSum offers a simple and easy-to-use interface, making it accessible to a wide range of teams. It is also identity-agnostic, unlike LiveRamp, which means it does not rely on a proprietary identity framework.

Limitations: InfoSum supports primarily only one-to-one data matching for standard use cases. It cannot support more complex multi-party analytics involving Python and machine learning or broader non-marketing applications.

Best for: Publishers, agencies, and brands that need to connect and activate audiences securely across partners.

Decentriq

Strengths: Built on confidential computing technology, Decentriq ensures that data remains encrypted even during processing and is never exposed — not even to the platform itself. It is designed with GDPR and Swiss/EU regulatory compliance in mind, making it well-suited for sensitive and highly regulated data environments. The platform supports both technical workflows (via Python or R) and a no-code interface for business users, enabling secure collaboration across different types of teams. Decentriq is also flexible for use cases beyond marketing, including joint analytics in healthcare, finance, and other regulated sectors.

Limitations: Decentriq focuses on privacy-first analytics and secure multi-party collaboration rather than large-scale identity resolution or advertising activation. For organizations seeking broad adtech integrations or campaign delivery capabilities, other solutions may be better aligned.

Best for: Enterprises that prioritize strong privacy guarantees, regulatory compliance, and secure analytics across multiple parties — particularly in European markets or regulated industries.

Why user experience is the real differentiator

While features like access control, encryption, and analytics support are essential, the usability of a data clean room can make or break your success with it — especially in fast-moving marketing and media environments.

Platforms like Databricks are powerful but require technical expertise to operate, often depending on notebooks, Spark, and Python workflows. Snowflake, while more accessible, still assumes users are comfortable navigating its SQL-based environment and managing roles and permissions across datasets.

In contrast, Decentriq is designed for business users first. Its no-code interface makes it easy to define analysis rules, manage collaborators, and activate insights all within a secure, governed environment. This means teams can focus on outcomes, not infrastructure, and start collaborating immediately without waiting on engineering resources.

In the end, a clean room is only as useful as it is usable — and that’s where Decentriq stands apart.

The problem: a tradeoff between privacy and progress

In each case, the core issue is the same: users must trade privacy for utility.

• Want full analytical flexibility? Then data movement and leakage risks increase
  
• Want locked-down privacy? Then you're limited to preset queries or heavily sanitized datasets
  

That tradeoff is holding back real innovation — especially in sectors like media, advertising, and retail, where data clean room collaborators need to extract actionable, granular insights while upholding strict data privacy standards.

The solution: clean rooms that don’t compromise

Decentriq is built to resolve this tension — delivering both utility and privacy in a truly secure data clean room environment.

Powered by confidential computing, Decentriq clean rooms enable parties to collaborate on sensitive data without ever revealing the underlying dataset — not even to Decentriq itself.

• Verifiable privacy: End-to-end encryption and audit trails that prove compliance.
  
• Rich analytics: Support for advanced queries, lookalike modeling, and campaign analysis.
  
• No-code UX: Built for marketers and data scientists alike. Easily define analysis rules and control query access.
  
• Flexible integrations: New audience connectors for seamless onboarding from ad platforms and CRMs.

How Samsung and IKEA are already using Decentriq

Global leaders are already proving the impact of secure, collaborative analytics with Decentriq.

• Samsung + Publicis used Decentriq to analyze cross-publisher campaign performance in a cookieless, privacy-safe way. Read the case study
  
• IKEA + willhaben launched a first-party-driven campaign and achieved significant performance improvements using Decentriq’s clean rooms. Read the case study

The takeaway: clean rooms need a reset

It’s time to move beyond the false choice between data utility and privacy. Solutions like AWS, Snowflake, and Databricks offer partial progress — but only Decentriq delivers privacy-enhanced data collaboration without compromise.

If your organization is working with consumer data, sensitive campaign results, or first-party insights — and you want confidence in both compliance and capability — it’s time to see the difference.

Ready to experience the difference?

See how Decentriq empowers media partners, data owners, and marketers to do more with clean rooms — without sacrificing privacy.

👉 Book your demo today

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