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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
7th
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 June 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon Redshift is 7.0%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 2.4%, up from 1.4% 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

"A feature I find most valuable in Amazon Redshift is that it's fast."
"Amazon Redshift is reliable and has high availability."
"Amazon Redshift's performance optimization and scalability are quite helpful, providing functionalities such as scaling up and down."
"The valuable features are performance, data compression, and scalability."
"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."
"I would rate Amazon Redshift a ten on a scale of one to ten."
"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."
"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."
"We switched to SAP because the solution is more comfortable to work with."
"What I like most about SAP Business Warehouse is that it's a seamless integration platform. A valuable feature in the tool is the monitoring alert that makes you aware of what process chain has failed. There's no manual monitoring required if you have configured an alert system, so the process chain can run in the background, and you can get alerts about it. The functionalities I find good in SAP Business Warehouse are alerting and monitoring. If you have configured the tool and have integrated it with SAP Solution Manager, then it's a good product to use."
"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."
"Getting high volume data is most valuable for us; it is really fast and it has great integration with SAP ERP or a non-SAP system."
"I like that it integrates to open-source."
"What I like most about SAP Business Warehouse is that it's a seamless integration platform."
"We are currently in a basic stage of analytics and the first goal we have is to make sure the numbers are correct. BW has some features that help you to build factors and ETL in such a way that it's easy to get to correct responses. That's the number one condition that you have to have in an analytic solution."
 

Cons

"The product must provide new indexes that support special data structures or data types like TEXT."
"Should be made available across zones, like other Multi-AZ solutions."
"The solution is unable to work fast."
"It would be nice if it was a bit cheaper to retain data long-term."
"In our experiments, the handling of unstructured data was not very smooth."
"Pricing is one of the things that it could improve. It should be more competitive."
"The only minor issue I faced was that it took a bit longer than expected to change the cluster to have more space or storage."
"Migrating data from other data sources can be challenging when you are working with multibyte character sets."
"From a support perspective, SAP Business Warehouse is quite a complex module."
"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."
"SAP Business Warehouse could improve by having more out-of-the-box use cases to cover more business types or operations."
"They should reduce the product’s installation package size for easier downloading."
"I would for sure like to see a different end solution in order to read the data and attract internal users."
"The visualization should be improved, as well as the dashboards and advanced analytics."
"What I'd like to improve in SAP Business Warehouse is its data structure, that's a little bit rigid. It could be a bit more flexible, so you can design your data structure and improve performance when creating a solution. Currently, the way data is stored in SAP Business Warehouse is rigid."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This solution implements the pay-as-you-use model, so no license. Pricing could be cheaper."
"The part that I like best is that you only pay for what you are using."
"The product is quite expensive."
"The price of Amazon Redshift is reasonable because it depends on the usage that you use and for DWH for the long term."
"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."
"It's around $200 US dollars. There are some data transfer costs but it's minimal, around $20."
"It's pay per use. You can have multiple models."
"Amazon Redshift is an expensive solution. Larger organizations can afford this solution, but smaller businesses would struggle to afford 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."
"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."
"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."
"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Construction Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Manufacturing Company
12%
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: June 2026.
899,283 professionals have used our research since 2012.