Amazon EMR vs SAP Business Warehouse comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and SAP are both solutions in the Cloud Data Warehouse category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.0, while SAP is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 3.8% mindshare in CDW, compared to SAP’s 2.3% mindshare. Additionally, 83% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of SAP users who would recommend it.

Amazon EMR

Read 25 Amazon EMR reviews

3,476 Views
1,460 Comparison Views

83% willing to recommend

SAP Business Warehouse

Read 26 SAP Business Warehouse reviews

2,026 Views
1,175 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Amazon EMR

SAP Business Warehouse

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

Amazon EMR and SAP Business Warehouse are prominent solutions in the big data and analytics market. While Amazon EMR offers a cost-effective cloud-based approach, SAP Business Warehouse excels in integration and analytical capabilities, giving SAP Business Warehouse a slight upper hand in business data management.

Features: Amazon EMR provides advanced scalability, integration with Hadoop and HDFS, and cost-efficient cloud services using EC2 and S3. Its strengths include rapid processing speeds and substantial data storage. SAP Business Warehouse integrates seamlessly with SAP ERP, handling complex data and offering robust transformation tools tailored for financial, HR, and procurement needs.

Room for Improvement: Amazon EMR has a steep learning curve for beginners and an outdated support interface. Desired improvements include better monitoring, reduced job start times, and enhanced cost control. SAP Business Warehouse needs improved visualization tools and simpler report-building capabilities for non-developers, alongside better real-time data processing and expanded non-SAP integration options.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon EMR is renowned for its effective public cloud deployment and generally positive support, though technical support consistency is an area of concern. SAP Business Warehouse requires complex hybrid environment setups, with support quality varying, as some users report inconsistencies.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon EMR's pricing is based on resource usage, allowing scalability without extra licensing costs, though unmanaged costs can be substantial. Its ROI is generally favorable according to user feedback. SAP Business Warehouse’s pricing is complex, based on company revenue, with high licensing costs that deter smaller businesses. While ROI is positive for companies transitioning from on-premise solutions, it remains costly.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon EMR vs. SAP Business Warehouse Report (Updated: June 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EMR vs. SAP Business Warehouse

June 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 902,988 peers since 2012

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

Amazon EMR

Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse

14th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Hadoop (3rd)

SAP Business Warehouse

Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse

15th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon EMR is 3.8%, up from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 2.3%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Amazon EMR	3.8%
SAP Business Warehouse	2.3%
Other	93.9%

Cloud Data Warehouse

Featured Reviews

reviewer1343079

Senior Chief Engineer (Enterprise System Presales/Postsales) at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Has simplified ETL workflows with on-demand processing but needs improved cost efficiency and visibility

I have used AWS Glue with S3 for making tables and databases, but regarding Amazon EMR, I do not remember much as we are currently using it very minimally. This is my observation: In EKS, we have had to deploy by ourselves because EKS does not provide the Hadoop framework, Spark, Hive, and everything, but we have completed all the deployment ourselves. Whereas Amazon EMR provides all these things. The cost factor differs significantly. When you run Spark application on EKS, you run at the pod level, so you can control the compute cost. But in Amazon EMR, when you have to run one application, you have to launch the entire EC2. In Qubole, the interface was very good. I could see many details because in Amazon EMR console, very few details are available. In Qubole, at one link, you can get all the details of what is happening, how the processes are running, and the cost decreased by using Qubole. I found Qubole more user-friendly and cost-effective. From the security point of view, we had to open some access rights to Qubole, which might be a drawback in comparison to Amazon EMR which is native to AWS.

Read full review

VishnuReddy2

Consulting Enterprise Architect at R2V2.ai

Have encountered complexity with programming language while working on large-scale data integration and have experienced improved governance and reporting

The only complexity I find with the product is the programming language; people find it harder, but once you know the language, it's not that difficult. Regarding the future of SAP Business Warehouse, I would to see added features that simplify the product very well now. They are coming up with a terminology called SAP BDC where they are consolidating their tools, SAP Data Sphere for integration and SAP BW for the ETL and warehousing parts, and SAP Analytics Cloud. They are packaging these three features and calling it Business Data Cloud; they are fully coming on the cloud. We have to wait and watch; they have been speaking about BW/4HANA for quite some time now, but the customers or clients I work with are not finding great interest and it was seen as a candidate for evaluation. I have seen people looking at the latest technologies who are already on cloud who started building from scratch on cloud, such as Snowflake or Databricks, which can process very huge amounts of data and also address unstructured data, where SAP lags behind in cases where there is a need to bring in unstructured data. I have worked with SAP Data Intelligence, which earlier used to be called SAP Data Hub. The unstructured data is not greatly handled in SAP at this point in time.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Amazon EMR is a good solution that can be used to manage big data."

"It allows users to access the data through a web interface."

"In Amazon EMR it is easy to rebuild anything, easy to upgrade and has good fault tolerance."

"Less expensive than in-house hosting, much more scalable when needed to process larger volumes of data."

"Amazon EMR provides out-of-the-box functionality because we can deploy and get Spark functionality over Hadoop."

"The ability to resize the cluster is what really makes it stand out over other Hadoop and big data solutions."

"The security of the managed workflow and the managed services are the best features for us. Since we inherited their security model and it's all managed services, those are the key benefits for our clients."

"The stability of the product has been great overall."

More Amazon EMR pros

"The features that I have found most valuable are its capabilities to connect to Excel and to slice and dice."

"Technical support is good, and they were able to assist us in some specific issues we were experiencing."

"The most valuable feature of SAP Business Warehouse is its hybrid functionality, allowing users to leverage both SQL-based data warehouse capabilities from HANA and feature-based data warehousing from BW."

"Technical support is very good, and we were very satisfied with their level of support when we needed it."

"SAP Business Warehouse is a scalable solution."

"BW is our bread and butter."

"I think BW is one of the best products at the moment."

"What I like most about SAP Business Warehouse is its ability to feed data into new, multiple systems in various formats. It can open its data to any system over gateway services or a portal or application that needs to consume and analyze data."

More SAP Business Warehouse pros

Cons

"The solution can become expensive if you are not careful."

"The product must add some of the latest technologies to provide more flexibility to the users."

"One of the lacking features is good web support."

"There is room for improvement with respect to retries, handling the volume of data on S3 buckets, cluster provisioning, scaling, termination, security, and integration between services like S3, Glue, Lake Formation, and DynamoDB."

"The most complicated thing is configuring to the cluster and to ensure it's running correctly."

"Amazon EMR is continuously improving, but maybe something like CI/CD out-of-the-box or integration with Prometheus Grafana."

"The initial setup was time-consuming, and deployment took approximately 30 minutes."

"Modules and strategies should be better handled and notified early in advance."

More Amazon EMR cons

"The problem with BW, and the factor that differentiated it from the original BW, is that you only get limited functionality with your runtime license. So, you have to pay extra for extracting data."

"From a support perspective, SAP Business Warehouse is quite a complex module."

"One of our requirements is the ability to easily get answers regarding trends and exceptions. In BW, it is not that easy to get such information. I expect better trend and exception detection, better pattern detection."

"There are a lot of things that could be improved especially in terms of data cleansing, data management, data lineage, etc. The solution needs to offer more flexibility in terms of formulas and the query designer."

"What I'd like improved in SAP Business Warehouse is its setup. It could be more flexible, and it could be a configuration-based setup."

"A few things which are missing include the visualization of reports. That's where your costs and licensing become heavy. When it comes to this database compared Microsoft Warehouse, it's an expensive solution."

"Integration with SAP Business Warehouse's ETL tools is not straightforward."

"When some things go wrong, it becomes extremely unreliable."

More SAP Business Warehouse cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a small fee for the EMR system, but major cost components are the underlying infrastructure resources which we actually use."

"Amazon EMR is not very expensive."

"There is no need to pay extra for third-party software."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"You don't need to pay for licensing on a yearly or monthly basis, you only pay for what you use, in terms of underlying instances."

"Amazon EMR's price is reasonable."

"The product is not cheap, but it is not expensive."

"The cost of Amazon EMR is very high."

More Amazon EMR pricing and cost advice

"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."

"The license for SAP Business Warehouse is paid yearly, and there's no extra cost in addition to the standard licensing fees."

"It's quite pricey. SAP changed its pricing policy, so they give you one engine and then you have to buy everything next to it, like MSS, the BPC licenses, and everything else."

"SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."

"The licensing cost for SAP Business Warehouse depends on your revenue. Its licensing structure is a little bit complicated. The more your revenue is, the higher the price, but SAP does have different pricing structures for various companies. For small businesses, licensing isn't based on revenue, but for big companies, it's revenue-based. There's some agreement regarding pricing for huge companies, so it's different, and SAP Business Warehouse pricing isn't fixed. On a scale of one to ten, I'm rating the licensing cost for SAP Business Warehouse as five because it's very high. As your revenue grows, your licensing cost also increases, so you have to factor that in when calculating your cost."

"The solution is quite expensive."

"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."

"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Data Warehouse solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

902,988 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Construction Company

Healthcare Company

Manufacturing Company

12%

Construction Company

Healthcare Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	12

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	15

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EMR?

I would rate the price for Amazon EMR, where one is high and ten is low, as a good one.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon EMR?

I feel some lack of functionality in Amazon EMR. I have thoughts on what would be great to see in the product, such as AI/ML features or additional options.

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Amazon EMR?

I find it easy to integrate Amazon EMR with other AWS services like S3 or EC2 for data processing needs. I would rate this review as eight out of ten.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP Business Warehouse?

The pricing for SAP Business Warehouse is on the expensive side. I am not sure about the current costing model as such. In my experience on cloud, I did not use BW HANA Cloud. I used the cloud prod...

See all answers

What needs improvement with SAP Business Warehouse?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for SAP Business Warehouse?

I am using SAP Business Warehouse in my organization for data warehousing as well as an ETL tool. Integration with SAP Business Warehouse's ETL tools is not straightforward. Integration with SAP ER...

See all answers

Comparisons

Snowflake vs Amazon EMR

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon Redshift vs Amazon EMR

Compared 6% of the time

Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop vs Amazon EMR

Compared 6% of the time

Apache Spark vs Amazon EMR

Compared 6% of the time

HPE Data Fabric vs Amazon EMR

Compared 5% of the time

More Amazon EMR Competitors

Snowflake vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 17% of the time

BigQuery vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 12% of the time

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 12% of the time

SAP Business Data Cloud vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 8% of the time

Databricks vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 8% of the time

More SAP Business Warehouse Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EMR

June 2026

Download Amazon EMR product report

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse

June 2026

Download SAP Business Warehouse product report

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic MapReduce

No data available

Overview

Amazon EMR simplifies big data processing by offering integration with popular tools. It's scalable and cost-efficient, enabling fast processing while managing infrastructure effortlessly. It's designed for users aiming to streamline data workflows and leverage its batch processing capabilities effectively.

Amazon EMR is a managed service that provides robust features for big data processing. It integrates seamlessly with S3, EC2, Hive, and Spark to facilitate sophisticated data transformation tasks and infrastructure management. It allows organizations to run data lakes, Spark, and Hadoop clusters effortlessly, offering flexibility with on-demand execution and extensive scalability. The platform is valued for its strong processing speed and comprehensive security features, making it ideal for complex data engineering projects. It supports both batch processing and real-time workflows, designed to eliminate hardware management while maintaining cost efficiency and stability.

What are the key features of Amazon EMR?

Cluster Management: Offers intuitive control and configuration of clusters
Integration: Seamlessly integrates with S3, EC2, Spark, and more
Scalability: Provides flexible scaling to meet data demands
Batch Processing: Allows efficient handling of large data sets
Cost Efficiency: Minimizes costs with managed service offerings

What benefits and ROI should be considered?

Processing Speed: Fast performance for data processing tasks
Security: Built-in features ensure data protection
Infrastructure Simplification: Eliminates hardware management needs
Flexibility: Adapts to changing data loads with ease
Affordability: Offers economic processing power

Amazon EMR is implemented by industries such as healthcare and tech processing for complex data tasks like building data lakes or financial data processing. It supports AI-driven analytics and data engineering projects, integrating with SageMaker for predictions and maintaining workflows in public health applications, allowing professionals in different fields to manage data pipelines, resource utilization, and job execution efficiently.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

SAP Business Warehouse integrates real-time data access via HANA, with Microsoft Excel and SAP ERP for enhanced data transformation and reporting. Known for its speed and hybrid features, it meets diverse data governance needs.

SAP Business Warehouse is designed to streamline data access and transformation with its integration capabilities. Its speed and efficiency are complemented by advanced reporting features and a robust authorization model. Users benefit from drag-and-drop reporting and alert systems that enhance operational efficiency. Despite its strengths, improvements are necessary in user friendliness, data integration, and reporting speed. Users require better trend analysis tools, increased visualization capabilities, and a more flexible configuration to optimize use. Real-time data access remains an area for development.

What features define SAP Business Warehouse?

HANA Integration: Enables real-time data access
Excel and ERP Integration: Seamless interaction with popular tools
Advanced Reporting: Delivers high-quality reporting capabilities
Hybrid Functionality: Offers versatile use cases
Drag-and-Drop: Simplifies reporting and analysis tasks
Authorization Model: Ensures secure data handling

What benefits and ROI can users expect?

Operational Efficiency: Enhanced by alert and monitoring tools
Data Governance: Robust models meet diverse needs
Centralized Data: Comprehensive data storage and access
Decision-Making Support: BI tools inform strategic planning

SAP Business Warehouse plays a crucial role in industries like finance and supply chain, leveraging data warehousing, ETL processes, and powerful BI applications to enhance decision-making with tools like Business Objects, Tableau, and Power BI. It serves as a central data repository, facilitating extensive reporting and analysis capabilities.

SAP

Sample Customers

Yelp

Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EMR vs. SAP Business Warehouse

June 2026

Free Report: Amazon EMR vs. SAP Business Warehouse

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EMR vs. SAP Business Warehouse and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.

DOWNLOAD NOW

902,988 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Amazon EMR vs. SAP Business Warehouse report.

See our list of best Cloud Data Warehouse vendors.

We monitor all Cloud Data Warehouse reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.