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Alibaba Cloud vs SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 16, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Alibaba Cloud
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
10th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
12th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Alibaba Cloud is 5.2%, down from 13.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is 1.2%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Alibaba Cloud5.2%
SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud1.2%
Other93.6%
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Min HtetOo - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Marketing Officer at Soft Intelligence
The solution is useful for application development, but the user interface and user experience must be improved
The product must be made easier to use. The design is a bit tricky. When we log in to the Alibaba Cloud Marketplace and browse products, they look very small. The user experience must be improved. Alibaba Cloud must increase its partner network and brand awareness in our country. It will give our customers more opportunities to scale and save in the long run.
Salman Mukhtar Baig - PeerSpot reviewer
SAP Technical Manager at VS Furniture Middle East
Cloud access has improved reporting and sales operations across global locations
I cannot say anything about what areas of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud could be improved or enhanced because so far, we are happy with this implementation. We are not facing any problem, or I cannot say that this can be improved. Although SAP keeps improving themselves day by day, we cannot say that SAP needs to improve anything. One thing which we face, not as a problem, is the pricing. SAP pricing is a bit higher day by day. Before, it was not too much higher, but I don't know why they are increasing their price. They should see this thing, so other customers, such as SMBs customers or small and mid-sized customers, can also avail this thing. Otherwise, we don't have any problem. First, there is the limitation. If you are a SAP user, you don't feel any problem with the limitation because if you know how to use the product, you can easily implement this thing. Otherwise, if you don't know the business process or how to integrate and implement, it could be a problem. We have a limitation, but we developed some add-ons for this. So we fulfilled these requirements.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Flexibility and costs were probably the most important thing for us. The cost was one of the big factors for choosing Alibaba Cloud relative to other cloud solutions, especially in Asia"
"We use the solution's AI features for data analysis."
"Alibaba Cloud allows for easy setup of mirror sites and backup servers, ensuring data redundancy and high availability."
"The most valuable feature of Alibaba Cloud is the communication it allows between two servers."
"It's easy to use, cheaper than other solutions, and more secure."
"We use the solution to run VMs."
"Alibaba also offers a lot of flexibility compared to Google Cloud, where you can only use Google's Tools."
"ECS is the most valuable feature of the solution."
"We are very happy with this solution, and the processes and the way we take advantage and use assistance are good."
"The solution is stable and we have never had a problem. We started with one terabyte of data when the solution was first implemented and today we have around almost 600 gigabytes of data, which means means the compression works properly. Before migrating from ECC, we had nine terabytes of data."
"This solution is as good as any other S/4HANA SAP solution, and the continuous support we get is very valuable."
"The solution's initial setup process is straightforward."
"The solution is online and provides a real-time information feature, which makes a huge difference to the business, especially in reviews and meetings."
"We have a wide range of use cases for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. These include production planning, materials management, sales management, treasury, finance, appliance maintenance, real estate, and warehouse management."
"It has significantly streamlined our operations."
"One of the features that I've found most useful is that it's very simple; they take care of the technical aspects of the data, installations, patches and all those things, and I don't need to set up my data center."
 

Cons

"Customer support has a lot of room for improvement. There's just general documentation, general customer support, and general maturity of the processes are all lacking when compared to Amazon or Google."
"If you want more accuracy, stability, and 24/7 customer support, primarily relying on the SDKs and APIs, you should think twice."
"I wouldn't recommend Alibaba. I think other companies should just use Azure instead, as it's a much simpler solution."
"The solution should have more integration."
"Alibaba Cloud needs to increase availability in Thailand."
"From the improvement point of view, there are lots of issues that we are facing. In all the areas, it seems like it is not mature. For example, a customer wants to provision some VM that has many configurations. If I want to show the price to the customer, it is very challenging. The SDK that Alibaba has provided is very limited. We can have the pricing for VM, but we cannot have pricing for RDS databases or some other services. This is a big concern area for us. They should put more effort into the SDKs or APIs that they provide, for example, pricing APIs or pricing SDK. They do not provide support for most of the services they provide. For example, if I want to get the price of MongoDB, that SDK is not available from Alibaba. Similarly, robust API support is required for S3, which is OSS or Object Storage, so that we can read the data in a faster manner, for example, in chunks. We have raised many issues with the Alibaba support team, and they have been fixing the issues after we report them."
"A big area for improvement in Alibaba Cloud is its support. Another area for improvement in Alibaba Cloud is SDK-based service because sometimes, the SDKs don't work correctly. Support for API-based services also needs improvement in Alibaba Cloud because, at the moment, it's not that stable."
"From the improvement point of view, there are lots of issues that we are facing. In all the areas, it seems like it is not mature."
"SAP should adopt more rapid changes in market processes and customer needs to deliver solutions that meet new industry requirements swiftly."
"This product is not mature enough at this point in time."
"The customer has a lot of dependencies on SAP which means they don't have much flexibility to go and update the system when or if they need to. They will need to wait for the quarterly updates. It's possible to maybe raise a special request with SAP if it is absolutely necessary."
"They should probably offer more cloud services. Most of the cloud infrastructure providers we have make everything pretty transparent, you know what you're getting, you have all these metrics and measurements and everything in the dashboard. Here you have to go through the contracting negotiations and all those things."
"I would rate the stability a four out of ten. It's an area that could use improvement"
"The solution is scalable from an infrastructure point of view. However, it becomes more complex over time because technology is changing so fast."
"The stability needs to be improved to be able to handle large amounts of data."
"It’s a common challenge with applications like Microsoft and SAP that they tend to rely on engineers rather than human resources personnel for knowledge and implementation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is not that expensive."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."
"The cost of Alibaba Cloud is lower than that of AWS, but I feel that its price is on the higher end of the spectrum. Alibaba Cloud charges its users a price in dollars"
"We cut our costs significantly by migrating our infrastructure to the cloud. Alibaba Cloud employs a pay-as-you-go model, so that minimizes many costs for us."
"I don't know the exact cost. It is cheaper than AWS."
"Pricing for Alibaba Cloud is a little bit cheaper. It has reasonable pricing."
"I'm not sure about the exact pricing, but let's just say if it cost a dollar for Amazon AWS, it was closer to 70 to 80 cents for Alibaba Cloud."
"The solution's pricing is the same as AWS'."
"The price is expensive compared to the competition."
"The solution's cost is reasonable."
"The price is high compared to other databases, which is why HANA is still not widely used. Some enterprises prefer Sybase, Oracle, or other traditional databases because HANA is a little pricey. Cost is one factor SAP needs to work on to make it more competitive with other databases. Otherwise, they'll never be able to develop a mass customer base."
"The price is on little bit higher. For SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, we see roughly five crores per annum."
"It's very, very expensive."
"I rate the product's price a five out of ten."
"The licensing of the solution is on a yearly basis. The normal price of the solution is quite high, but I received a special discount by making a purchase near the end of the year."
"The solution could be less expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise17
 

Questions from the Community

Which solution do you prefer: Alibaba Cloud or Microsoft Azure?
Thanks for sharing these insights! I completely agree that Microsoft Azure provides IT administrators with strong centralized management, robust security controls through RBAC, and tools for cost o...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud?
SAP HANA Cloud can be quite costly compared to other solutions. The high licensing costs make it an expensive option, particularly for smaller customers. However, they offer solutions for mid-sized...
What needs improvement with SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud?
I cannot say anything about what areas of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud could be improved or enhanced because so far, we are happy with this implementation. We are not facing any problem, or I cannot s...
What is your primary use case for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud?
The usual use cases for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud that I work with include many tools. At the time of the integration, SAP made it very easy for the integration. The key point is that now we have a...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Schneider Electric, BorderX Lab, Royal Philips, Catchpoint, Conversant, Blogmint
FC Bayern Munich, Reuters News Agency, MEMEBOX
Find out what your peers are saying about Alibaba Cloud vs. SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,701 professionals have used our research since 2012.