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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
6th
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 May 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon Redshift is 7.0%, down from 7.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 2.4%, up from 1.2% 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 Warehouse2.4%
Other90.6%
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 solution is easy to set up and use."
"For the on-premises version of Amazon Redshift, we need to start from scratch. However, 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."
"Since we have lots of data sources and high volumes, we needed a unified and organized DB that can handle these amounts and will be our single source of truth for the organization."
"All this at an extremely low price makes it possible for small to medium sized organizations to use Redshift’s power to get business insights."
"Amazon Redshift is very fast. It has really good response times. It's very user-friendly."
"I like it because the usage is very similar to Microsoft SQL server. The structure of the query and the temporary tables are very similar."
"The main benefit is that our portal for end users is running in AWS, so we can easily connect it to other AWS services."
"The solution has very competitive pricing."
"In terms of stability, comparatively, the solution is quite stable."
"The most useful feature has been he ability to feed data into multiple systems in various formats."
"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."
"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."
"Technical support is good, and they were able to assist us in some specific issues we were experiencing."
"The customer support is wonderful. If your technical team is stuck somewhere, they are there to help."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"When working with third-party services requires additional integrations and configurations, which can sometimes add more cost."
"Amazon should provide more cloud-native tools that can integrate with Redshift like Microsoft's development tools for Azure."
"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."
"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."
"There might be some limitations from a business intelligence perspective, but nothing we can't find a workaround for."
"One of my previous customers told me they were migrating off Redshift because they hit the ceiling and had scalability issues."
"Amazon Redshift does not work alone and requires integration with other AWS tools like S3 and Glue for a complete ecosystem."
"It would be good to see Redshift as a serverless offering."
"It's a product that is at the end of life so they will not improve it anymore."
"The advanced structuring can be complicated and the interface is not very intuitive."
"The big minuses are its not being user friendly."
"The way the data is stored is kind of rigid in SAP BW as a product."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My customers have implementations that cost about $500 a month for a very small one. I also have a customer with a monthly invoice of about $25,000 USD."
"The product is cheap considering what it provides; I rate it five out of five for affordability."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The solution is available at a mid-range price compared to other vendors."
"For Amazon Redshift, we pay around INR 60,000 annually. The cost factor also depends on the number of existing customers."
"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."
"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."
"It's pay per use. You can have multiple models."
"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."
"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
Construction Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
 

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: May 2026.
895,891 professionals have used our research since 2012.