Amazon EMR vs SAP IQ comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and SAP are both solutions in the Cloud Data Warehouse category. Additionally, 83% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 80% of SAP users who would recommend it.

Amazon EMR

Read 25 Amazon EMR reviews

1,599 Views
831 Comparison Views

83% willing to recommend

SAP IQ

Read 23 SAP IQ reviews

1,362 Views
640 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

Amazon EMR

SAP IQ

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon EMR and SAP IQ based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Cloud Data Warehouse solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon EMR vs. SAP IQ Report (Updated: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EMR vs. SAP IQ

January 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 881,082 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:

ROI

Sentiment score

4.8

Amazon EMR offers cost savings and ROI benefits, with some users experiencing up to 20% cost reduction and high returns.

Sentiment score

6.2

SAP IQ boasts high ROI with substantial hardware savings, low maintenance costs, though some users lack authorization to confirm it.

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the SAP IQ report

Customer Service

Sentiment score

7.9

Amazon EMR customer service varies, with generally responsive support despite reported delays and occasional gaps in integration assistance.

Sentiment score

5.6

Customer service is 24/7 but varies in quality; technical support lacks experts, causing slow escalation and limited advanced assistance.

I would rate the technical support from Amazon as ten out of ten.

reviewer2043696

Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We get all call support, screen sharing support, and immediate support, so there are no problems.

reviewer1343079

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

They help with billing, cost determination, IAM properties, security compliance, and deployment and migration activities.

Mirza Mujtaba Baig

Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

It seems very difficult to get proper advanced assistance on advanced or complicated problems.

Reviewer302462

Tech Director at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The quality of support from SAP is very good; if it's a known problem, they will have a knowledge base, so we will get immediate assistance.

Akhilesh Narayanan

Tech Lead, Database Section. at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the SAP IQ report

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score

7.4

Amazon EMR efficiently scales for businesses, offering customizable cluster options to manage diverse data sizes and enterprise demands.

Sentiment score

7.4

SAP IQ offers scalable solutions with Simplex and Multiplex architectures, accommodating vast data volumes across PCs or servers.

Scalability can be provisioned using the auto-scaling feature, EC2 instances, on-demand instances, and storage locations like block storage, S3, or file storage.

Mirza Mujtaba Baig

Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

We can span the read and write load into multiple nodes, and that scalability is there.

Akhilesh Narayanan

Tech Lead, Database Section. at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

If we wanted to add more servers into this entire setup, that would be fairly easy, so it's rather good when it comes to scalability.

Reviewer302462

Tech Director at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the SAP IQ report

Stability Issues

Sentiment score

7.7

Amazon EMR is praised for stability and reliability, with high ratings due to its configurability and robust features.

Sentiment score

6.0

SAP IQ is stable, effectively managing complex transactions despite occasional issues, making it a reliable choice for implementations.

Regular updates, patch installations, monitoring, logging, alerting, and disaster recovery activities are crucial for maintaining stability.

Mirza Mujtaba Baig

Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

It's usually something external, such as lack of disk space or problems arising from the integration to other systems.

Reviewer302462

Tech Director at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the SAP IQ report

Room For Improvement

Amazon EMR users face challenges with customization, stability, onboarding, cost optimization, task speed, and demand enhanced integration and security.

SAP IQ faces challenges with high costs, inadequate training, stability issues, and integration limitations, impacting performance and adoption.

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.

reviewer1343079

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

I have thoughts on what would be great to see in the product, such as AI/ML features or additional options.

reviewer2043696

Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

Mirza Mujtaba Baig

Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

It is easy to deploy SAP IQ; the implementation and installation are easy.

Akhilesh Narayanan

Tech Lead, Database Section. at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

When there is an issue, the error messaging we get is not always sufficient to do a fast and solid fix.

Reviewer302462

Tech Director at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the SAP IQ report

Setup Cost

Amazon EMR pricing is variable, potentially costly, but users can manage expenses with strategic resource and instance management.

SAP IQ is cost-effective with various licensing models, though price understanding and negotiation are essential for optimal implementation.

Cost optimization can be achieved through instance usage, cluster sharing, and auto-scaling.

Mirza Mujtaba Baig

Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs

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

reviewer2043696

Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the SAP IQ report

Valuable Features

Amazon EMR offers scalable, cost-effective big data management with integration, flexibility, security, and seamless Hadoop and Spark processing.

SAP IQ features column-based architecture, high compression, rapid queries, large-scale data handling, and integration with SAP BusinessObjects.

Amazon EMR helps in scalability, real-time and batch processing of data, handling efficient data sources, and managing data lakes, data stores, and data marts on file systems and in S3 buckets.

Mirza Mujtaba Baig

Lead AWS Data Engineer at Fission Labs

The features at Amazon EMR that I have found most valuable are fully customizable functions.

reviewer2043696

Senior Technical Engineer at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees

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

reviewer1343079

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

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon EMR report

The feature I appreciate the most about SAP IQ is the compression, which is very good; we cannot compare with any other type of EDW.

Akhilesh Narayanan

Tech Lead, Database Section. at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable feature of SAP IQ for us is that it works very effectively with the SAP BusinessObjects which we use it with.

Reviewer302462

Tech Director at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the SAP IQ report

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EMR

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Hadoop (3rd), Cloud Data Warehouse (13th)

SAP IQ

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Relational Databases Tools (24th), Data Warehouse (15th)

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.

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Akhilesh Narayanan

Tech Lead, Database Section. at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Compression performance gets high marks but user-friendly interface needs improvement

The downside of SAP IQ, from what I understood from the management side, is that the front end for the DBA, for the admin, is not that user-friendly. If you compare it with SQL Server Management Studio, it is not that user-friendly GUI for the admin. But the engine is very strong and powerful. It is easy to deploy SAP IQ; the implementation and installation are easy. The downside I see is that it doesn't allow most integrated backups; many of the marketplace players such as NetBackup, those software integrated backups are not available. So, if you want to take a backup, you need to take it locally, and then only you can back it up to any storage or anything. Those features such as integrated backup, which would allow it to stripe into an appliance or something similar, are not present. One thing I notice as a downside is that if the CPU utilization is very high, there is no direct way we can find out which query is taking the most CPU. In any other RDBMS, there are DMVs available to find out which query is taking most of the CPU, but those features are not present in SAP IQ. If our CPU is hitting at 100%, it is not easy to identify which connection is taking the most CPU.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

22%

Educational Organization

13%

Computer Software Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

36%

Comms Service Provider

Outsourcing Company

Computer Software Company

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	6
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	16

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 IQ?

IQ implementation costs about three thousand dollars. It's less expensive compared to alternatives like Teradata Base in terms of transactional efficiency.

See all answers

What needs improvement with SAP IQ?

When it comes to SAP IQ, the areas that could be improved or enhanced include the error messaging and the locking capabilities, as that's where we often encounter problems. When there is an issue, ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for SAP IQ?

Our usual use cases for SAP IQ is that we have a Software-as-a-Service architecture where this database is the foundation for our SAP BusinessObjects platform. This is where it's getting its data f...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 8% of the time

Cloudera Data Platform vs Amazon EMR

Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 11% of the time

SAP HANA vs SAP IQ

Compared 9% of the time

Snowflake vs SAP IQ

Compared 9% of the time

Oracle Database vs SAP IQ

Compared 8% of the time

OpenText Analytics Database (Vertica) vs SAP IQ

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EMR

January 2026

Download Amazon EMR product report

Buyer's Guide

SAP IQ

January 2026

Download SAP IQ product report

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic MapReduce

Sybase IQ

Overview

Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) is a web service that makes it easy to quickly and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. Amazon EMR simplifies big data processing, providing a managed Hadoop framework that makes it easy, fast, and cost-effective for you to distribute and process vast amounts of your data across dynamically scalable Amazon EC2 instances.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

SAP® IQ software delivers speed and power for extreme-scale enterprise data warehousing and analytics. Its column-oriented, grid-based massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture and patented data compression and indexing technologies enable companies to exploit the value of huge amounts of data at the speed of business.

SAP

Sample Customers

Yelp

ASR Group, Citrix, State of Indiana, PocketCard Co. Ltd.

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EMR vs. SAP IQ

January 2026

Free Report: Amazon EMR vs. SAP IQ

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EMR vs. SAP IQ and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.

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