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Apache Hadoop vs SAP Business Warehouse 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

Apache Hadoop
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
41
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (6th)
SAP Business Warehouse
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (14th)
 

Featured Reviews

Sushil Arya - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides ease of integration with the IT workflow of a business
When working with Kafka, I saw that the data came in an incremental order. The incremental data processing part is still not very effective in Apache Hadoop. If the data is already there, it can be processed very effectively, especially if the data is coming in every second. If you want to know the location of some data every second, then such data is not processed effectively in Apache Hadoop. I can say that one of the features where improvements are required revolves around the licensing cost of the tool. If the tool can build some licensing structures in a pay-per-use manner, organizations can get the look and feel of Apache Hadoop. Apache Hadoop can offer a licensing structure of the product that can be seen as similar to how AWS operates. Apache Hadoop can look into the capability of processing incremental data. The tool's setup process can be a scope of improvement. Also, it is not very simple because while doing the setup, we need to do all the server settings, including port listing and firewall configurations. If we look at other products on the market, then they can be made simpler. There are certain shortcomings when it comes to the product's technical support part, making it an area where improvements are required. The time frame for the resolution is an area that needs to be improved. The overall communication part of the technical support team also needs improvement.
Srini-Dhanaraj - PeerSpot reviewer
The solution enables seamless connection, but it is expensive, and the information is one day old
Out-of-the-box reports are very useful. The product provides a seamless connection between the SAP operation system and the data warehouse. It also moves the data from the operating system to the data warehouse in a 3D format. The report generation is easy. It’s a drag-and-drop process. People who want to do a project need not reinvent the wheel. Everything is designed, built, and delivered out of the box. All we have to do is interact with the customers to understand the kind of reports they need and check whether they are already available in the out-of-the-box report. If they are available, we just have to enable them and give the URLs to the customers. The Integration between the SAP operating system and data warehouse is excellent. The UI is good.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Hadoop is extensible — it's elastic."
"What comes with the standard setup is what we mostly use, but Ambari is the most important."
"The most valuable feature is scalability and the possibility to work with major information and open source capability."
"As compared to Hive on MapReduce, Impala on MPP returns results of SQL queries in a fairly short amount of time, and is relatively fast when reading data into other platforms like R."
"Hadoop can store any kind of data—structured, unstructured, and semi-structured—and presents it using the relational model through Hive."
"Its integration is Hadoop's best feature because that allows us to support different tools in a big data platform."
"​​Data ingestion: It has rapid speed, if Apache Accumulo is used."
"We selected Apache Hadoop because it is not dependent on third-party vendors."
"I like that it integrates to open-source."
"The features that I have found most valuable are its capabilities to connect to Excel and to slice and dice."
"Predominantly, our company uses SAP Business Warehouse for reporting purposes across various departments, especially for managers to gain a quick understanding of their current standing and make informed decisions."
"With the technical support, the response has been pretty good from the SAP side."
"Out-of-the-box reports are very useful."
"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 aspect of the solution is the integration with SAP ERP."
"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."
 

Cons

"The solution is very expensive."
"It would be helpful to have more information on how to best apply this solution to smaller organizations, with less data, and grow the data lake."
"The stability of the solution needs improvement."
"The solution needs a better tutorial. There are only documents available currently. There's a lot of YouTube videos available. However, in terms of learning, we didn't have great success trying to learn that way. There needs to be better self-paced learning."
"In certain cases, the configurations for dealing with data skewness do not make any sense."
"Based on our needs, we would like to see a tool for data visualization and enhanced Ambari for management, plus a pre-built IoT hub/model. These would reduce our efforts and the time needed to prove to a customer that this will help them."
"It would be good to have more advanced analytics tools."
"It could be more user-friendly."
"SAP Business Warehouse could improve by having more out-of-the-box use cases to cover more business types or operations."
"In the next release, my suggestion would be to have user-friendly interfaces and performance issues be addressed."
"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."
"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."
"The solution could offer better connectivity with other databases."
"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 advanced structuring can be complicated and the interface is not very intuitive."
"So far, the initial setup process in our company has not been easy enough for us to understand."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We just use the free version."
"The product is open-source, but some associated licensing fees depend on the subscription level."
"The price could be better. Hortonworks no longer exists, and Cloudera killed the free version of Hadoop."
"This is a low cost and powerful solution."
"It's reasonable, but there's room for improvement in cost-effectiveness."
"Do take into consider that data storage and compute capacity scale differently and hence purchasing a "boxed" / 'all-in-one" solution (software and hardware) might not be the best idea."
"We don't directly pay for it. Our clients pay for it, and they usually don't complain about the price. So, it is probably acceptable."
"If my company can use the cloud version of Apache Hadoop, particularly the cloud storage feature, it would be easier and would cost less because an on-premises deployment has a higher cost during storage, for example, though I don't know exactly how much Apache Hadoop costs."
"The license for SAP Business Warehouse is paid yearly, and there's no extra cost in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."
"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."
"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
36%
Computer Software Company
10%
University
5%
Government
4%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Retailer
10%
Energy/Utilities Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Apache Hadoop?
It's primarily open source. You can handle huge data volumes and create your own views, workflows, and tables. I can also use it for real-time data streaming.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Hadoop?
The product is open-source, but some associated licensing fees depend on the subscription level. While it might be free for students, organizations typically need to pay for their subscriptions. Th...
What needs improvement with Apache Hadoop?
The problem with Apache Hadoop arose when the guys that originally set it up left the firm, and the group that later owned it didn't have enough technical resources to properly maintain it. This wa...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP Business Warehouse?
The solution is quite expensive. We paid a yearly subscription fee.
What needs improvement with SAP Business Warehouse?
Over a period, we realized that the license and maintenance costs were quite expensive. Every day, we had to run the background job ODS. Eventually, we moved away from SAP Business Warehouse and bo...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Amazon, Adobe, eBay, Facebook, Google, Hulu, IBM, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Spotify, AOL, Twitter, University of Maryland, Yahoo!, Cornell University Web Lab
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 Apache Hadoop vs. SAP Business Warehouse and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.