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Amazon Redshift vs SAP Business Warehouse comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 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

Amazon Redshift
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
8th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
72
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (5th), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (9th)
SAP Business Warehouse
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
14th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon Redshift is 7.4%, up from 6.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 2.3%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon Redshift7.4%
SAP Business Warehouse2.3%
Other90.3%
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

PJ
Data Analytics, Ai & Automation Lead at a venture capital & private equity firm with 10,001+ employees
Performance optimization and scaling adaptations enable efficient data management
Amazon Redshift does not work alone and requires integration with other AWS tools like S3 and Glue for a complete ecosystem. They should bring the entire ETL data management process into Amazon Redshift. Either they should move Amazon Redshift under Glue, or Glue should be brought under Amazon Redshift. The initial setup could also be improved, particularly in terms of sizing, as it requires trial and error to get right.
VishnuReddy2 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution's speed, stability, and user concurrency have been very good."
"Changing from local servers to the cloud is very easy. It's so nice not to have to worry about physical servers."
"I found the Amazon Redshift computing services easy. I found the computing instances the most incredible in the solution."
"Has a very user-friendly SQL editor and it's very easy to use the connectors."
"It allows for the storage of huge amounts of data."
"Amazon Redshift is a really powerful database system for reporting and data warehousing."
"If the analyst knows SQL, which is comfortable and easy to use to go between all of these tool stacks, I think it's reliable. It's a secure and reliable data warehouse."
"Redshift has an advantage when it comes to administration, making it easier to manage and collaborate."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the advanced structuring of data capabilities. You can get different structures of data to suit your needs."
"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."
"With the technical support, the response has been pretty good from the SAP side."
"The best features of SAP Business Warehouse that I am fond of are how this technology handles navigational attributes and the hierarchy; these are two interesting features."
"Having the back-end data set with the right information is the best qualification for this solution."
"The most useful feature has been he ability to feed data into multiple systems in various formats."
"The warehouse is the solution's most valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature of SAP Business Warehouse is transformation, where I extract data from different sources, particularly the raw data. Then I do some transformations and store that in a format that allows me to do reporting easily."
 

Cons

"Amazon should provide more cloud-native tools that can integrate with Redshift like Microsoft's development tools for Azure."
"Sometimes, it's difficult to get the metadata from Redshift."
"We recently moved from the DC2 cluster to the RA3 cluster, which is a different node type and we are finding some issues with the RA3 cluster regarding connection and processing. There is room for improvement in this area. We are in talks with AWS regarding the connection issues."
"The refreshment rate of data reaching Redshift from other sources should be faster."
"The speed of the solution and its portability needs improvement."
"It takes a lot of time to ingest and update the data."
"During the setup, whenever we try to give any permissions, if I have a data warehouse in Amazon Redshift and want to provide access to a user to just check the data without making any changes, it is a long process to create a policy in Amazon and share it with that policy."
"AWS Snowflake has a very good feature for cloning databases. It makes it easy to clone a data warehouse, which is useful. I would like to see this feature in Redshift."
"Areas for improvement in SAP Business Warehouse include enhancing scheduling and monitoring tools, as well as improving communication about hidden features to make them more accessible to users."
"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."
"I'm not sure if our issue is related to BW or the Analysis Office. However, we're having performance issues in terms of time. It takes a long time to generate the report."
"So far, the initial setup process in our company has not been easy enough for us to understand."
"The solution could offer better connectivity with other databases."
"Integration with SAP Business Warehouse's ETL tools is not straightforward."
"SAP Business Warehouse could integrate better with other ETL tools."
"More integration with Microsoft Office products (not just Excel) would be helpful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If you want a fixed price, an to not worry about every query, but you need to manage your nodes personally, use Redshift."
"Amazon Redshift is an expensive solution. Larger organizations can afford this solution, but smaller businesses would struggle to afford it."
"The price of Amazon Redshift is reasonable because it depends on the usage that you use and for DWH for the long term."
"The part that I like best is that you only pay for what you are using."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"It is an expensive product."
"It's around $200 US dollars. There are some data transfer costs but it's minimal, around $20."
"One of my customers went with Google Big Query over Redshift because it was significantly cheaper for their project."
"The license for SAP Business Warehouse is paid yearly, and there's no extra cost in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."
"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."
"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."
"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."
"SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Media Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Retailer
10%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise28
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

How does Amazon Redshift compare with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?
Amazon Redshift is very fast, has a very good response time, and is very user-friendly. The initial setup is very straightforward. This solution can merge and integrate well with many different dat...
What do you like most about Amazon Redshift?
The tool's most valuable feature is its parallel processing capability. It can handle massive amounts of data, even when pushing hundreds of terabytes, and its scaling capabilities are good.
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...
What needs improvement with SAP Business Warehouse?
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 Warehou...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Liberty Mutual Insurance, 4Cite Marketing, BrandVerity, DNA Plc, Sirocco Systems, Gainsight, Blue 449
Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Redshift vs. SAP Business Warehouse and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,455 professionals have used our research since 2012.