Amazon Redshift 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 #9 with an average rating of 7.9, while SAP is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 6.9% mindshare in CDW, compared to SAP’s 2.3% 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 72 Amazon Redshift reviews

3,547 Views
2,483 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

SAP Business Warehouse

Read 26 SAP Business Warehouse reviews

1,176 Views
670 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Amazon Redshift

SAP Business Warehouse

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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: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Redshift vs. SAP Business Warehouse

March 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

9th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Warehouse (5th), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (8th)

SAP Business Warehouse

Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse

14th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon Redshift is 6.9%, down from 7.0% 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 Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Amazon Redshift	6.9%
SAP Business Warehouse	2.3%
Other	90.8%

Cloud Data Warehouse

Featured Reviews

Pavan Kum

Analyst at Cepstrum(EEE Students Society), IIT Guwahati

Handles large data efficiently but initial setup can be complex

The most valuable features of Amazon Redshift include everything being integrated within Amazon, making it really easy to run queries faster, allowing us to retrieve data as soon as possible compared to other tools. Its friendly functionality connects with all tools linked to Amazon, and the data retrieval is very fast, making it a good warehousing tool. The specific features of Amazon Redshift that are beneficial for handling large data sets include fast retrieval due to cloud services and scalability, which allows us to retrieve data quickly. Scalability is the best feature of Amazon Redshift. Amazon Redshift handles scalability automatically, so we do not need to scale up or down; it is all managed by Redshift.

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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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is quite simple to use and there are no issues with creating the tables."

"Redshift has an advantage when it comes to administration, making it easier to manage and collaborate."

"A feature I find most valuable in Amazon Redshift is that it's fast."

"We imported 20 million rows of sales facts in less than 15 seconds, and the content was query-able immediately."

"It's scalable because it's on the cloud."

"Amazon Redshift offers a relatively flexible structure...I rate the technical support a nine out of ten."

"It is very easy to dump data into the tool."

"The stability of Amazon Redshift is good."

More Amazon Redshift pros

"The real-time information is great."

"SAP Business Warehouse is a scalable solution."

"The solution has functionality that makes it easy for end-users to readily extract data directly from Business Warehouse into Excel and carry on their analysis on their own."

"All our processes such as funds management, grant, payroll transactions are processed automatically through this system and BW helps to collect the data for analytic needs of the department users and board members."

"We are currently in a basic stage of analytics and the first goal we have is to make sure the numbers are correct. BW has some features that help you to build factors and ETL in such a way that it's easy to get to correct responses. That's the number one condition that you have to have in an analytic solution."

"The most useful feature is definitely the speed."

"Having the integration with the reporting tool which is provided by SAP is great."

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

More SAP Business Warehouse pros

Cons

"The explain panel in the Redshift database could be better."

"It would be useful to have an option where all of the data can be queried at once and then have the result shown."

"Infinite storage is available in Snowflake and is not available in Redshift."

"In the next release, a pivot function would be a big help. It could save a lot of time creating a query or process to handle operations."

"Should be made available across zones, like other Multi-AZ solutions."

"If you require a highly scalable solution, I would not recommend Amazon Redshift."

"In the next release, a pivot function would be a big help. It could save a lot of time creating a query or process to handle operations."

"Improvement in the immediate response and the process of getting into a call could be helpful."

More Amazon Redshift cons

"I would for sure like to see a different end solution in order to read the data and attract internal users."

"More integration with Microsoft Office products (not just Excel) would be helpful."

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

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

"What I'd like to improve in SAP Business Warehouse is its data structure, that's a little bit rigid. It could be a bit more flexible, so you can design your data structure and improve performance when creating a solution. Currently, the way data is stored in SAP Business Warehouse is rigid."

"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."

"The visualization should be improved, as well as the dashboards and advanced analytics."

"It's a product that is at the end of life so they will not improve it anymore."

More SAP Business Warehouse cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The part that I like best is that you only pay for what you are using."

"At the moment, pricing is a little bit on the higher side, although it depends on the size of the company."

"It's not very pricey compared to other tools. I would rate the price as 5 out of 10."

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

"The price of Amazon Redshift is reasonable because it depends on the usage that you use and for DWH for the long term."

"The cost must be improved."

"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."

"The product is quite expensive."

More Amazon Redshift pricing and cost advice

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

"The solution is quite 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."

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

"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."

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

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Media Company

Manufacturing Company

12%

Healthcare Company

Retailer

Marketing Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	27
Midsize Enterprise	21
Large Enterprise	28

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 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.

See all answers

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

The pricing of Amazon Redshift is expensive.

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 15% of the time

Teradata vs Amazon Redshift

Compared 10% of the time

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs Amazon Redshift

Compared 7% of the time

AWS Lake Formation vs Amazon Redshift

Compared 6% of the time

OpenText Analytics Database (Vertica) vs Amazon Redshift

Compared 6% of the time

More Amazon Redshift Competitors

Databricks vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 15% of the time

BigQuery vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 15% of the time

Snowflake vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 11% of the time

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 11% of the time

IBM Netezza Performance Server vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 4% of the time

More SAP Business Warehouse Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Redshift

March 2026

Download Amazon Redshift product report

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse

March 2026

Download SAP Business Warehouse product report

Overview

Amazon Redshift is a fully administered, petabyte-scale cloud-based data warehouse service. Users are able to begin with a minimal amount of gigabytes of data and can easily scale up to a petabyte or more as needed. This will enable them to utilize their own data to develop new intuitions on how to improve business processes and client relations.

Initially, users start to develop a data warehouse by initiating what is called an Amazon Redshift cluster or a set of nodes. Once the cluster has been provisioned, users can seamlessly upload data sets, and then begin to perform data analysis queries. Amazon Redshift delivers super-fast query performance, regardless of size, utilizing the exact SQL-based tools and BI applications that most users are already working with today.

The Amazon Redshift service performs all of the work of setting up, operating, and scaling a data warehouse. These tasks include provisioning capacity, monitoring and backing up the cluster, and applying patches and upgrades to the Amazon Redshift engine.

Amazon Redshift Functionalities

Amazon Redshift has many valuable key functionalities. Some of its most useful functionalities include:

Cluster administration: The Amazon Redshift cluster is a group of nodes that contains a leader node and one (or more) compute node(s). The compute nodes needed are dependent on the data size, amount of queries needed, and the query execution functionality desired.
Cluster snapshots: Snapshots are backups of a cluster from an exact point in time. Amazon Redshift offers two types of snapshots: manual and automated. Amazon will store these snapshots internally in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) utilizing an SSL connection. Whenever a Snapshot restore is needed, Amazon Redshift will create a new cluster and will import data from the snapshot as directed.
Cluster access: Amazon Redshift provides several intuitive features to help define connectivity rules, encrypt data and connections, and control the overall access of your cluster.
IAM credentials and AWS accounts: The Amazon Redshift cluster is only accessible by the AWS account that created the cluster. This automatically secures the cluster and keeps it safe. Inside the AWS account, users access the AWS Identity and IAM protocol to create additional user accounts and manage permissions, granting specified users the desired access needed to control cluster performance.
Encryption: Users have the option to choose to encrypt the clusters for additional added security once the cluster is provisioned. When encryption is enabled, Amazon Redshift will store all the data in user-created tables in a secure encrypted format. To manage Amazon Redshift encryption keys, users will access AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS).

Reviews from Real Users

“Redshift's versioning and data security are the two most critical features. When migrating into the cloud, it's vital to secure the data. The encryption and security are there.” - Kundan A., Senior Consultant at Dynamic Elements AS

“With the cloud version whenever you want to deploy, you can scale up, and down, and it has a data warehousing capability. Redshift has many features. They have enriched and elaborate documentation that is helpful.”- Aishwarya K., Solution Architect at Capgemini

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Reporting, analysis and interpretation of business data are crucial to preserve and enhance the competitive edge of companies by optimizing processes and enabling them to react quickly and in line with market needs. SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) provides tools and functions that enable companies to attain these goals. In SAP BW, you can integrate, transform, and consolidate relevant business information from productive SAP applications and external data sources. SAP BW provides you with a high-performance infrastructure that helps you evaluate and interpret data. Decision makers can make well-founded decisions and identify target-orientated activities on the basis of the analyzed data.

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

March 2026

Free Report: Amazon Redshift vs. SAP Business Warehouse

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