BigQuery vs Bigtable

Both are from Google. The names are so close and quite confusing, but they are totally different products.

(Note that Bigtable is NOT styled as BigTable, though the Q in BigQuery is in uppercase.)

Different use cases

• BigQuery is a data warehouse. SQL. Primarily used for offline analytics. Optimized for large-scale, ad-hoc SQL-based analysis and reporting.
• Bigtable is a wide-column database. NoSQL. Primarily used for online serving. Optimized for low latency, high throughput.

Both offered on Google Cloud Platform

• BigQuery is a service on GCP. It was developed from a Google internal query system called Dremel.
• Bigtable is the name of the database, GCP offers a version of it called Cloud Bigtable.

Competitors

• BigQuery: AWS Redshift, Snowflake, and other data warehouses.
• Bigtable: HBase, Cassandra (actually these open-source projects are based on the published Bigtable design).

Popularity

BigQuery is probably the most popular GCP product.

On DB-Engine ranking (https://db-engines.com/en/ranking):

• BigQuery is ranked 20+ and trending upwards;
• Bigtable is ranked 80+; do not expect it to rise up though, it is being replaced by Spanner.