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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
9th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
73
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (6th), 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
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon Redshift is 7.0%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 2.3%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon Redshift7.0%
SAP Business Warehouse2.3%
Other90.7%
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Hemanthreddy Vakiti - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
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 most valuable feature is its scalability."
"The valuable features are performance, data compression, and scalability."
"Redshift is a major service of Amazon and is very scalable. It enables faster recalculations and data management, helping to retrieve data quickly."
"We earned back our investment in Amazon Redshift within the first year, as the team went from 25 employees for development to only four maintaining Redshift daily, saving significant resources and allowing us to use the saved time for other tasks."
"It's very easy to migrate from other databases to Redshift. There are migration tools dedicated for this purpose, enabling migration from other databases like MS SQL directly to Redshift. The majority of the scripts will be automatically transposed."
"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."
"The most valuable features are that it's easy to set up and easy to connect the many tools that connect to it."
"Redshift's Excel features are handy. Redshift spectrum allows you to directly query the data on an Excel sheet. Now, SQL Server also allows this, but Redshift has many more features."
"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."
"Having the back-end data set with the right information is the best qualification for this solution."
"With the technical support, the response has been pretty good from the SAP side."
"SAP Business Warehouse is a scalable solution."
"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."
"I like that it integrates to open-source."
"Now, because of the HANA integration, the hard disk and RAM are together, and because of that, the output is very quick and very fast actually."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"It is not easy to deal with queries in Amazon Redshift and see the same data."
"In our experiments, the handling of unstructured data was not very smooth."
"It would be nice if we could turn off an instance. However, it would retain the instance in history, thus allowing us to restart without beginning from scratch."
"Compatibility with other products, for example, Microsoft and Google, is a bit difficult because each one of them wants to be isolated with their solutions."
"Amazon Redshift does not work alone and requires integration with other AWS tools like S3 and Glue for a complete ecosystem."
"When some things go wrong, it becomes extremely unreliable."
"It takes more work to get the data, including reporting on that data, because some coding is required, and a significant level of transformation is needed when using SAP Business Warehouse."
"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."
"So far, the initial setup process in our company has not been easy enough for us to understand."
"People are getting frustrated as they have to spend lots of time - 10 minutes to 15 minutes - generating the report."
"SAP Business Warehouse could integrate better with other ETL tools."
"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."
"They should reduce the product’s installation package size for easier downloading."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing for Amazon Redshift is reasonable, though it could be somewhat higher than other solutions, such as Azure. Still, when you base your comparison on the services offered and the pricing, it's the most reasonable versus its competitors, such as RDS."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"One of my customers went with Google Big Query over Redshift because it was significantly cheaper for their project."
"The solution has very competitive pricing."
"The solution is available at a mid-range price compared to other vendors."
"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."
"The cost is comparable to Snowflake."
"In comparison to the price of similar solutions, Redshift's cost is the lowest."
"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."
"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."
"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."
"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."
"The license for SAP Business Warehouse is paid yearly, and there's no extra cost in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Construction Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Construction Company
9%
Healthcare Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise29
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 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...
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, ...
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...
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...
 

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: June 2026.
903,147 professionals have used our research since 2012.