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 #6 with an average rating of 7.9, while SAP is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 7.0% 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

4,140 Views
2,857 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

SAP Business Warehouse

Read 26 SAP Business Warehouse reviews

1,415 Views
807 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: April 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Redshift vs. SAP Business Warehouse

April 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

6th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Warehouse (5th), 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 April 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon Redshift is 7.0%, down from 7.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 2.4%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Amazon Redshift	7.0%
SAP Business Warehouse	2.4%
Other	90.6%

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

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

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

"Amazon Redshift is reliable and has high availability."

"The solution's flexibility is its most valuable feature."

"The feature that we find most useful is the ability to do analytics on the fly."

"Data Science and Machine Learning are valuable features."

"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."

"Redshift has had some scaling issues, but Redshift's performance overall is excellent."

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 of this solution is the advanced structuring of data capabilities, as you can get different structures of data to suit your needs."

"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."

"We switched to SAP because the solution is more comfortable to work with."

"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."

"Predominantly, our company uses SAP Business Warehouse for reporting purposes across various departments, especially for managers to gain a quick understanding of their current standing and make informed decisions."

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

"The key element in this solution is its rapid response, because if you have a question about prices, buyers, customers, providers, or services, you need the answer in a minute or two, and that is the key benefit for us that a solution like BW gives us."

More SAP Business Warehouse pros

Cons

"There are too many limitations with respect to concurrency."

"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."

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

"Sometimes, it's difficult to get the metadata from Redshift."

"There is some missing functionality and sometimes it's so difficult to work in. We need to convert these functionalities using VACUUM inside Amazon Redshift and then it causes some complexity."

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

"Running parallel queries results in poor performance and this needs to be improved."

"It takes a lot of time to ingest and update the data."

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."

"In the next release, my suggestion would be to have user-friendly interfaces and performance issues be addressed."

"Integration with SAP Business Warehouse's ETL tools is not straightforward."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

More SAP Business Warehouse cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is comparable to Snowflake."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"The best part about this solution is the cost."

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

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

More Amazon Redshift pricing and cost advice

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

"The solution is quite expensive."

"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."

"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."

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Construction Company

Manufacturing Company

11%

Healthcare Company

10%

Retailer

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	27
Midsize Enterprise	21
Large Enterprise	29

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 14% of the time

Teradata vs Amazon Redshift

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs Amazon Redshift

Compared 6% of the time

AWS Lake Formation vs Amazon Redshift

Compared 6% of the time

IBM Db2 Warehouse on Cloud vs Amazon Redshift

Compared 5% of the time

More Amazon Redshift Competitors

BigQuery vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 12% of the time

Databricks vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 12% of the time

Snowflake vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 11% of the time

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 10% of the time

OpenText Analytics Database (Vertica) vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 3% of the time

More SAP Business Warehouse Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Redshift

April 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

April 2026

Free Report: Amazon Redshift vs. SAP Business Warehouse

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