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 #15 with an average rating of 8.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 6.8% mindshare in CDW, compared to SAP’s 2.2% 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: 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

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

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 6.8%, down from 6.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 2.2%, 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	6.8%
SAP Business Warehouse	2.2%
Other	91.0%

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

"You can copy JSON to the column and have it analyzed using simple functions."

"I like the cost-benefit ratio, meaning that it is as easy to use as it is powerful and well-performing."

"The product is relatively easy to use because there is no indexing and no partitions."

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

"Its simplicity in configuration, cost-effectiveness due to being in the cloud and close to our data sources, and the fact that it's a managed service that is scalable and reliable are highly valuable."

"The initial setup of this solution is straightforward."

"The valuable features are performance, data compression, and scalability."

"I am satisfied with the performance of the product."

More Amazon Redshift pros

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

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

"My advice would be if you have a data block and if you really want a big solution on the reporting side of it with slicing and dicing, definitely go ahead with BW when it comes to SAP related data."

"In terms of stability, comparatively, the solution is quite stable."

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

"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."

"SAP Business Warehouse is a scalable solution."

"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

"It is not easy to deal with queries in Amazon Redshift and see the same data."

"Amazon Redshift is a stable solution. However, there are many times the environment configuration changes very quickly without any intimidation and it creates a lot of problems for running our codes."

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

"We are using third-party tools to integrate Amazon Redshift, they should create their own interface on their own for it to be easily connected on the AWS itself."

"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."

"I rate the solution as an eight out of ten because it is not 100 percent, as there is much service-related maintenance required."

"The speed of the solution and its portability needs improvement."

"We recently moved from the DC2 cluster to the RA3 cluster, which is a different node type and we are finding some issues with the RA3 cluster regarding connection and processing. There is room for improvement in this area. We are in talks with AWS regarding the connection issues."

More Amazon Redshift cons

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

"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."

"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."

"The advanced structuring can be complicated and the interface is not very intuitive."

"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."

"A few things which are missing include the visualization of reports. That's where your costs and licensing become heavy."

"SAP Business Warehouse could integrate better with other ETL tools."

"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."

More SAP Business Warehouse cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is quite expensive."

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

"Amazon Redshift is an expensive solution. Larger organizations can afford this solution, but smaller businesses would struggle to afford it."

"The pricing is reasonable."

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

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

"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."

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

More Amazon Redshift pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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."

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

"The solution is quite expensive."

"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."

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

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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

Energy/Utilities Company

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 15% 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 vs Amazon Redshift

Compared 5% of the time

More Amazon Redshift Competitors

BigQuery vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 13% of the time

Databricks vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 13% of the time

Snowflake vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 12% of the time

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 11% 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

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