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Amazon Redshift vs SAP BW4HANA comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
70
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (5th)
SAP BW4HANA
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (8th)
 

Featured Reviews

Ved Prakash Yadav - PeerSpot reviewer
Works as a data warehouse system and collects data from different sources
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. We often encounter issues like someone dropping a column or changing the order of columns, which can cause synchronization problems when pushing data through our pipeline. It's a minor issue, but it can be annoying.
Csaba Grünblatt - PeerSpot reviewer
Performs all necessary data warehouse tasks and offers additional functionalities
SAP BW4HANA improved data reporting processes significantly. Performance on HANA database is good. Well-built data models ensure consistent and fast reporting. Reusable models enhance efficiency, even for SaaS services. In-memory computing, especially since HANA, has greatly improved performance in data analysis tasks. It eliminates the need for complex optimizations like creating indexes or aggregates. Queries that once took minutes now run in seconds, enabling real-time reporting, especially for SAP ECC on HANA. SAP BW4HANA's integration capabilities are streamlined with a simplified architecture and more virtual layers. You can directly load data into optimized layers, reducing the need for extra storage. The introduction of Open ODS Views allows for additional logic and master data inclusion, making integration faster and simpler. The learning curve for SAP BW4HANA is much faster now compared to ten years ago, thanks to abundant free resources like documentation, videos, blogs, and learning journeys provided by SAP. It is simpler to learn with these resources available compared to the past when you had to attend courses and rely on books. I would recommend SAP BW4HANA to users looking to implement it, especially if they want to keep their systems on-premise and already have SAP systems. Those with BW on HANA have two choices: BW4HANA or DataSphere, depending on their cloud strategy. If they are advanced in their cloud strategy and want to migrate off-premise, DataSphere is a good choice. However, for a robust solution on-premise or in a private cloud, BW4HANA is an excellent option. Overall, I would rate BW4HANA as a nine out of ten. It performs all necessary data warehouse tasks and offers additional functionalities. We use it traditionally, with complex transformations and models but with less emphasis on real-time processing and third-party sources.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The solution's flexibility is its most valuable feature. It's also easy to scale and has relatively painless pricing."
"This service can merge and integrate well with all databases."
"The most valuable feature is its scalability."
"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 seamless connection and good scalability on the cloud are valuable features of Amazon Redshift."
"Setup is easy. It's a fast solution with machine learning features, good integration, and a good API."
"Redshift's Excel features are handy. Redshift spectrum allows you to directly query the data on an Excel sheet. Now, SQL Server also allows this, but Redshift has many more features."
"The most valuable features of Amazon Redshift are that its fast and efficient. We have lots of TBs of data and it's very fast."
"You can do hierarchical alert slicing and dicing out-of-box, which is not available in other solutions. I haven't come across that in Oracle or any other software provider."
"The most valuable aspect of this solution is that the infrastructure is easy to understand."
"The solution is based on SAP ERP, so there's some business content already included. For customers who use SAP ERP, SAP BW4HANA is a good choice for their DW implementation."
"It is a stable solution."
"The solution is easier to maintain than traditional SAP products."
"The solution saves time and cost."
"The UI is completely new, beautiful, and user-friendly. There are some other helpful features like global filters and advanced tools. We can perform custom calculations easily From a technical perspective, the performance has been enhanced and optimized for a limited number of flows. The content settings are more advanced, and there are so many other features that I can't name them all."
"It can calculate data in detail. Before we could not calculate financial documents and accountant documents in detail, we could not do it at a document level but now we can. This is the most important feature. It also has predictive analysis memory."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"They should provide a better way to work with interim data in a structured way than to store it in parquet files locally."
"The solution has four maintenance windows so, when it comes to stability, I think it would be better to decrease their number."
"Amazon Redshift does not have the capability to dynamically increase the VM file."
"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."
"The speed of the solution and its portability needs improvement."
"Query compilation time needs a lot of improvement for cases where you are generating queries dynamically."
"If I want to have good reporting, then I have to buy a separate license."
"The problem is the expensive pricing of technical support, making it an area where improvements are required."
"It's complicated to use. You need to spend a lot of time learning about it. The interface could be improved. It's not intuitive to build a data model and use their ETL tools."
"I don't see SAP actively supporting the solution now...a better support from SAP would be appreciated."
"The solution is not easy to implement. It requires a lot of learning at the beginning."
"The UI is not user-friendly."
"Connecting multiple sources is a challenge because you have to go through a lot of different setups."
"The cost of the product might be an area that might introduce some restrictions or limitations to customers, making it one of the aspects where improvements are required."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost will depend on how you set up your warehouse and what kind of data you store."
"Per hour pricing is helpful to keep the costs of a pilot down, but long-term retention is expensive."
"The cost must be improved."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"At the moment, pricing is a little bit on the higher side, although it depends on the size of the company."
"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."
"The price of Amazon Redshift is reasonable because it depends on the usage that you use and for DWH for the long term."
"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."
"The cost of ownership is higher. It's resource-intensive, and naturally, that increases costs."
"In general, it's quite expensive."
"The cost and licensing depends on how the customer is going to use the solution."
"This is an expensive solution and there are costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"The product is free if we have the ECC license."
"The SAP HANA application still hasn't been leveraged to the fullest extent, but it's a five-year enterprise license."
"It's a little expensive compared to Microsoft Azure."
"For the on-premises version of the product, the solution offers a perpetual-based licensing model to its users. In general, SAP offers a monthly subscription-based licensing model to its users."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
62%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
4%
Manufacturing Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Retailer
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 do you like most about SAP BW4HANA?
One significant advantage of SAP BW/4HANA is the direct integration with the SAP HANA database, providing seamless access to real-time analytics. Additionally, it enables real-time data integrati...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP BW4HANA?
We have a broad licensing arrangement, which is expensive but worth it for sizeable businesses.
What needs improvement with SAP BW4HANA?
The interface could be more user-friendly, as we often need to do low-level coding to get things done.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
SAP BW/4HANA
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Liberty Mutual Insurance, 4Cite Marketing, BrandVerity, DNA Plc, Sirocco Systems, Gainsight, Blue 449
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Redshift vs. SAP BW4HANA and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.