Amazon Redshift vs SAP Business Warehouse comparison

Why PeerSpot?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and SAP are both solutions in the Cloud Data Warehouse category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.2, while SAP is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 7.1% mindshare in CDW, compared to SAP’s 2.4% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of SAP users who would recommend it.

Amazon Redshift

Read 73 Amazon Redshift reviews

7,278 Views
4,658 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

SAP Business Warehouse

Read 26 SAP Business Warehouse reviews

2,775 Views
1,610 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Amazon Redshift

SAP Business Warehouse

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

Amazon Redshift and SAP Business Warehouse both operate in the data warehousing space. Redshift appears to have an advantage in speed and scalability, while SAP BW excels in data structuring and integration capabilities.

Features: Amazon Redshift is equipped with extensive scalability, distributed architecture for enhanced performance, and flexible node size scalability without hardware changes. It supports multiple file formats and offers VPC configuration for added security. SAP Business Warehouse is noted for its integration capabilities, seamless data feeding into systems, and built-in connectors for straightforward data management.

Room for Improvement: Amazon Redshift users have expressed the need for faster snapshot restoration, enhanced database integrations, and simplified data import processes. There is also a call for better SQL function support and real-time integrations. SAP Business Warehouse users suggest improvements in trend detection, visualization, and connectivity, alongside a more intuitive interface and improved data integration capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon Redshift is largely deployed on the public cloud, providing flexibility and smooth integration within the AWS ecosystem, though customer support can vary with subscription levels. SAP Business Warehouse is often deployed on-premises or in private clouds, enabling comprehensive integration with SAP systems but featuring a complex licensing model and less transparent pricing. SAP BW users value its stable and consistent technical support more highly than Redshift's.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon Redshift offers a pay-as-you-go model which is viewed as cost-effective for varying workloads, though some users criticize it as expensive compared to competitors like BigQuery, partly due to pricing transparency issues. SAP Business Warehouse's pricing is tied to company revenue, with various optional features adding complexity and potential costs for larger organizations. Users must consider specific business needs when evaluating cost-effectiveness, with Redshift known for flexibility and scalability and SAP BW praised for comprehensive integration.

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

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Redshift vs. SAP Business Warehouse

September 2026

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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

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Warehouse (7th), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (8th)

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 October 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon Redshift is 7.1%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 2.4%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Amazon Redshift	7.1%
SAP Business Warehouse	2.4%
Other	90.5%

Cloud Data Warehouse

Featured Reviews

Hemanthreddy Vakiti

Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Optimized restaurant analytics has driven faster insights and streamlined daily reporting

Amazon Redshift offers massive parallel processing capability, allowing it to handle millions of records, along with integration with other AWS features such as S3 and QuickSight. The column-level storage supports high performance and easy data retrieval compared to other tools. The integration with S3 has helped my team immensely since S3 is our starting source, and the direct integration with Amazon Redshift simplifies the transformation and loading process. Columnar storage has benefited our performance significantly, allowing us to extract specific rows from tables with years of data much faster than other tools with row-level storage. Amazon Redshift has positively impacted our organization by significantly improving query performance and speed. Features such as easy integration with S3 allow us to process millions of records efficiently, ultimately saving us nearly one hour per day for our project.

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

"Easy to build out our snowflake design and load data."

"Changing from local servers to the cloud is very easy. It's so nice not to have to worry about physical servers."

"The most valuable feature of Redshift is its cluster."

"Data Science and Machine Learning are valuable features."

"The stability of Amazon Redshift is good."

"We have found Machine Learning use cases are very nice."

"Redshift is a major service of Amazon and is very scalable. It enables faster recalculations and data management, helping to retrieve data quickly."

"The most valuable features of Amazon Redshift are that its fast and efficient, as we have lots of TBs of data and it's very fast."

More Amazon Redshift pros

"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."

"The most valuable feature is the new version of Business Explorer Analyzer, which is a very good version because there are a lot of analytical features of Excel also."

"With the technical support, the response has been pretty good from the SAP side."

"The Real-time InfoCube is quite useful in terms of getting information fast when we need it."

"Having the back-end data set with the right information is the best qualification for this solution."

"Getting high volume data is most valuable for us; it is really fast and it has great integration with SAP ERP or a non-SAP system."

"SAP Business Warehouse is a scalable solution."

"The fact that it can integrate with Microsoft Excel is the solution's most valuable feature."

More SAP Business Warehouse pros

Cons

"For people who struggle with IAM or role-based management, the setup isn't easy."

"It would be nice if it was a bit cheaper to retain data long-term."

"Redshift's GUI could be more user-friendly. It's easier to perform queries and all that stuff in Azure Synapse Analytics."

"There might be some limitations from a business intelligence perspective, but nothing we can't find a workaround for."

"It is difficult to work with unstructured data and JSON documents."

"Pricing is one of the concerns that I have because if you compare Snowflake with Redshift, it provides some of the same services, but at a much cheaper rate."

"The initial setup is a complex process, especially for someone who is not familiar with nodes and configuring terms like RPUs."

"The managing updates, deletes, and role-level change performance is very low. For example, while you are doing inserts, updates, deletes, and amalgamates, the performance is very, very poor."

More Amazon Redshift cons

"People are getting frustrated as they have to spend lots of time - 10 minutes to 15 minutes - generating the report."

"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."

"So far, the initial setup process in our company has not been easy enough for us to understand."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The solution could offer better connectivity with other databases."

"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."

More SAP Business Warehouse cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is reasonable."

"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing a seven."

"This solution implements the pay-as-you-use model, so no license. Pricing could be cheaper."

"I have heard complaints about the solution’s pricing, and thus I rate it as a five."

"It is an expensive product."

"The solution has very competitive pricing."

"The product is cheap considering what it provides; I rate it five out of five for affordability."

"One of my customers went with Google Big Query over Redshift because it was significantly cheaper for their project."

More Amazon Redshift pricing and cost advice

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Construction Company

11%

Outsourcing Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Construction Company

10%

Outsourcing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	28
Midsize Enterprise	20
Large Enterprise	30

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

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...

See all answers

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

My experience with pricing and setup cost is satisfactory, as we have been loyal clients of Amazon since the beginning of our organization. However, I am not aware of the exact costs associated wit...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon Redshift?

Amazon Redshift could improve by enhancing its UI to be more user-friendly for non-technical users and by offering better cost management, as similar tools tend to be less expensive. Additionally, ...

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 Redshift

Compared 12% of the time

Teradata vs Amazon Redshift

Compared 8% of the time

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs Amazon Redshift

Compared 6% of the time

IBM Db2 Warehouse on Cloud vs Amazon Redshift

Compared 5% of the time

Amazon EMR vs Amazon Redshift

Compared 5% of the time

More Amazon Redshift Competitors

Snowflake vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 17% of the time

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 11% of the time

BigQuery vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 8% of the time

SAP Business Data Cloud vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 6% of the time

Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 3% of the time

More SAP Business Warehouse Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Redshift

October 2026

Download Amazon Redshift product report

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse

September 2026

Download SAP Business Warehouse product report

Overview

Amazon Redshift is a dynamic data warehousing and analytics platform offering scalability and seamless AWS integration for high-performance query processing and diverse data management.

Amazon Redshift provides robust data integration capabilities with AWS services like S3 and QuickSight, enabling efficient data warehousing and analytics. It is known for fast query performance due to its columnar storage and can handle diverse file formats. With a user-friendly SQL interface, Redshift supports data compression and offers a strong cost-performance ratio. Its secure VPC configurations and compatibility with data science tools enhance its functionality, although there is room for improving snapshot restoration, dynamic scaling, and processing large datasets.

What are the key features of Amazon Redshift?

Scalability: Allows growth with business needs, accommodating increasing data volumes.
Massive Parallel Processing: Speeds up query performance through parallel data processing.
Seamless AWS Integration: Connects smoothly with services like S3 and QuickSight for enhanced functionality.
Columnar Storage: Enhances query performance by storing data in columns.
User-friendly SQL Interface: Simplifies data query and manipulation.
Data Compression: Efficiently compresses data to reduce storage costs.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Cost-Performance Ratio: Offers competitive pricing with high processing efficiency.
Fast Query Performance: Delivers quick data retrieval and processing speeds.
Security Features: Ensures data security through VPC configurations.
Integration Flexibility: Easily integrates with data science tools and BI platforms.

In industries, Amazon Redshift is essential for managing extensive datasets for business intelligence, operational insights, and reporting. It supports data integration from ERPs and S3, handles SQL queries for comprehensive analysis, and facilitates data storage and transformation. Companies use it for predictive modeling and connect with BI tools like Tableau and Power BI to derive actionable insights.

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

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

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Redshift vs. SAP Business Warehouse

September 2026

Free Report: Amazon Redshift vs. SAP Business Warehouse

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