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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
8th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
72
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
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon Redshift is 7.2%, up from 6.9% 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 Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon Redshift7.2%
SAP Business Warehouse2.3%
Other90.5%
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

PJ
Data Analytics, Ai & Automation Lead at a venture capital & private equity firm with 10,001+ employees
Performance optimization and scaling adaptations enable efficient data management
Amazon Redshift does not work alone and requires integration with other AWS tools like S3 and Glue for a complete ecosystem. They should bring the entire ETL data management process into Amazon Redshift. Either they should move Amazon Redshift under Glue, or Glue should be brought under Amazon Redshift. The initial setup could also be improved, particularly in terms of sizing, as it requires trial and error to get right.
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 of Amazon Redshift is its ability to handle really large sets of data."
"The feature that we find most useful is the ability to do analytics on the fly."
"Changing from local servers to the cloud is very easy. It's so nice not to have to worry about physical servers."
"The main benefit is that our portal for end users is running in AWS, so we can easily connect it to other AWS services."
"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."
"In terms of valuable features, I like the columnar storage that Redshift provides. The storage is one of the key features that we're looking for. Also, the data updates and the latency between the data-refreshes."
"The seamless connection and good scalability on the cloud are valuable features of Amazon Redshift."
"It allows for the storage of huge amounts of data."
"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."
"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."
"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 most valuable aspect of the solution is the integration with SAP ERP."
"The most useful feature has been he ability to feed data into multiple systems in various formats."
"The real-time information is great."
"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 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."
 

Cons

"It would be useful to have an option where all of the data can be queried at once and then have the result shown."
"When working with third-party services requires additional integrations and configurations, which can sometimes add more cost."
"It is difficult to work with unstructured data and JSON documents."
"Pricing needs improvement as the solution is expensive."
"One area where Amazon Redshift could improve is in adopting the compute-separate, data-separate architecture, which Delta, Snowflake are adopting, and a few others in the cloud data warehouse spectrum."
"Improvement could be made in the area of streaming data."
"Migrating data from other data sources can be challenging when you are working with multibyte character sets."
"The solution is unable to work fast."
"It's a product that is at the end of life so they will not improve it anymore."
"SAP Business Warehouse could integrate better with other ETL tools."
"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."
"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."
"The solution should be more open to the cloud."
"They should reduce the product’s installation package size for easier downloading."
"SAP Business Warehouse could improve by having more out-of-the-box use cases to cover more business types or operations."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For Amazon Redshift, we pay around INR 60,000 annually. The cost factor also depends on the number of existing customers."
"The part that I like best is that you only pay for what you are using."
"It's around $200 US dollars. There are some data transfer costs but it's minimal, around $20."
"The solution is available at a mid-range price compared to other vendors."
"Amazon Redshift is an expensive solution. Larger organizations can afford this solution, but smaller businesses would struggle to afford it."
"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."
"If you want a fixed price, an to not worry about every query, but you need to manage your nodes personally, use Redshift."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."
"The license for SAP Business Warehouse is paid yearly, and there's no extra cost in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."
"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 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 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
19%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Media Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Retailer
9%
Energy/Utilities Company
9%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise28
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 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.
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...
 

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: January 2026.
882,886 professionals have used our research since 2012.