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

"Redshift COPY command, because much of my work involved helping customers migrate large amounts of data into Redshift."

"With the tools we have, Amazon Redshift has the features to query efficiently."

"This service can merge and integrate well with all databases."

"I would rate Amazon Redshift a ten on a scale of one to ten."

"The main benefit is that our portal for end users is running in AWS, so we can easily connect it to other AWS services."

"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."

"The most valuable feature is the scalability, as it grows according to our needs."

More Amazon Redshift pros

"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."

"SAP Business Warehouse is a scalable solution."

"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 warehouse is the solution's most valuable feature."

"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."

"The product is very stable."

More SAP Business Warehouse pros

Cons

"Amazon Redshift could improve the user interface support."

"In terms of improvement, I believe Amazon Redshift could work on reducing its costs, as they tend to increase significantly. Additionally, there are occasional issues with nodes going down, which can be problematic."

"I rate their support seven out of ten. It's costly when you enable support. The price is high for technical support."

"The technical support should be better in terms of their knowledge, and they should be more customer-friendly."

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

"Planting is the primary key enforcement that should be improved."

"It lacks a few features which can be very useful, such as stored procedures"

"What would make Amazon Redshift better is improvising on the pricing structure. For example, Acronis provides backups in cybersecurity, yet the pricing is a bit lesser than Amazon Redshift."

More Amazon Redshift cons

"We are very unhappy with technical support. First of all, they send their sales agents or pre-sales agents and most of them who don't know the solution as a properly trained tech would. We have an on-site SAP representative who is supposed to help us with our high priority and production issues, and they're not satisfactory to say the least."

"I get all the information quickly, but it is one day old."

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

"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."

"The way the data is stored is kind of rigid in SAP BW as a product. It could be more flexible so that when we are designing a solution, we can design our own data structures and try to improve performance."

"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."

"You can start quickly but, when you have to get a little more detailed, when you have to change something, when you have to solve problems, it's not that easy. It's easy to start but evolving is not that easy."

More SAP Business Warehouse cons

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."

"For Amazon Redshift, we pay around INR 60,000 annually. The cost factor also depends on the number of existing customers."

"The price of the solution is reasonable. According to the RA3 cluster particularly, it provides 128 GB of storage with only four nodes. If you can manage your computations processes with the help of materialized views and proper queries. I think the IP clusters are very useful and overall fair for the price."

"It's around $200 US dollars. There are some data transfer costs but it's minimal, around $20."

"BI is sold to our customer base as a part of the initial sales bundle. A customer may elect to opt for a white labeled site for an up-charge."

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

"The cost will depend on how you set up your warehouse and what kind of data you store."

"Redshift is very cost effective for a cloud based solution if you need to scale it a lot. For smaller data sizes, I would think about using other products."

More Amazon Redshift pricing and cost advice

"The solution is quite expensive."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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

18%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Media Company

Manufacturing Company

11%

Retailer

Energy/Utilities Company

Healthcare Company

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

IBM Db2 Warehouse vs Amazon Redshift

Compared 6% of the time

More Amazon Redshift Competitors

Databricks vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 17% of the time

BigQuery vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 16% of the time

SAP Business Data Cloud vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 12% of the time

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 11% of the time

Snowflake vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 10% 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

February 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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