Apache Hadoop vs SAP Business Warehouse comparison

Apache and SAP are both solutions in the Data Warehouse category. Additionally, 89% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of SAP users who would recommend it.

Apache Hadoop

Read 40 Apache Hadoop reviews

3,677 Views
2,647 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

SAP Business Warehouse

Read 26 SAP Business Warehouse reviews

2,199 Views
1,297 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Apache Hadoop

SAP Business Warehouse

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Apache Hadoop and SAP Business Warehouse based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Teradata, Oracle and others in Data Warehouse.

To learn more, read our detailed Data Warehouse Report (Updated: August 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Data Warehouse

August 2026

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Helped 909,725 peers since 2012

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

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Warehouse (10th)

SAP Business Warehouse

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Data Warehouse (15th)

Featured Reviews

Nick Rapoport

Financial Advisor at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Reliable performance maintained but requires ongoing management and support

Hadoop was used for years, but there were problems since the people who originally set it up left the firm. The group that owned it later didn't have the technical resources to properly maintain it. Although there was nothing wrong with Hadoop itself, issues arose without proper management and upgrades.

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VishnuReddy2

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Hadoop is a distributed file system, and it scales reasonably well provided you give it sufficient resources."

"Hadoop File System is compatible with almost all the query engines."

"The most valuable features are the ability to process the machine data at a high speed, and to add structure to our data so that we can generate relevant analytics."

"The most valuable features are powerful tools for ingestion, as data is in multiple systems."

"Hadoop is good for analytics and some reporting requirements."

"What I like about Apache Hadoop is that it's for big data, in particular big data analysis, and it's the easier solution. I like the data processing feature for AI/ML use cases the most because some solutions allow me to collect data from relational databases, while Hadoop provides me with more options for newer technologies."

"It is a file system for data collection. There are nodes in this cluster that contain all the information, directories, and other files. The nodes are based on the MySQL database."

"Since both Apache Hadoop and Amazon EC2 are elastic in nature, we can scale and expand on demand for a specific PoC, and scale down when it's done."

More Apache Hadoop pros

"SAP Business Warehouse is a scalable solution."

"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 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."

"Technical support is good, and they were able to assist us in some specific issues we were experiencing."

"The product is very stable."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the advanced structuring of data capabilities, as you can get different structures of data to suit your needs."

"The fact that it can integrate with Microsoft Excel is the solution's most valuable feature."

"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."

More SAP Business Warehouse pros

Cons

"The solution is very expensive."

"General installation/dependency issues were there, but were not a major, complex issue. While migrating data from MySQL to Hive, things are a little challenging, but we were able to get through that with support from forums and a little trial and error."

"Hadoop's security could be better."

"There are certain shortcomings when it comes to the product's technical support part, making it an area where improvements are required."

"From the Apache perspective or the open-source community, they need to add more capabilities to make life easier from a configuration and deployment perspective."

"What could be improved in Apache Hadoop is its user-friendliness. It's not that user-friendly, but maybe it's because I'm new to it. Sometimes it feels so tough to use, but it could be because of two aspects: one is my incompetency, for example, I don't know about all the features of Apache Hadoop, or maybe it's because of the limitations of the platform. For example, my team is maintaining the business glossary in Apache Atlas, but if you want to change any settings at the GUI level, an advanced level of coding or programming needs to be done in the back end, so it's not user-friendly."

"We are using HDTM circuit boards, and I worry about the future of this product and compatibility with future releases."

"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."

More Apache Hadoop cons

"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."

"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."

"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."

"From a support perspective, SAP Business Warehouse is quite a complex module."

"SAP Business Warehouse could improve by having more out-of-the-box use cases to cover more business types or operations."

"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."

"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."

More SAP Business Warehouse cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For any big enterprise the costs can be handled, and it is suitable for big enterprises because the scale of data is large. For medium and small enterprises, the tool is on the high-price side."

"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."

"We just use the free version."

"This is a low cost and powerful solution."

"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."

"The price could be better. Hortonworks no longer exists, and Cloudera killed the free version of Hadoop."

"The product is open-source, but some associated licensing fees depend on the subscription level."

"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."

More Apache Hadoop pricing and cost advice

"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."

"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."

"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."

"SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."

"The solution is quite expensive."

"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is 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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

24%

Outsourcing Company

Construction Company

Manufacturing Company

13%

Construction Company

11%

Healthcare Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	14
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	22

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	15

Questions from the Community

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...

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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...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Apache Hadoop?

My use cases for Apache Hadoop include the setups I completed, connecting to the database, and analyzing the incidences, making it a good tool for Hadoop. Apache Hadoop helps us analyze all of the ...

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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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with SAP Business Warehouse?

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Apache Hadoop

August 2026

Download Apache Hadoop product report

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse

July 2026

Download SAP Business Warehouse product report

Overview

Apache Hadoop provides a scalable, cost-effective open-source platform capable of handling vast data volumes with features like HDFS, distributed processing, and high integration capabilities.

Apache Hadoop is known for its distributed file system HDFS, which supports large data volumes efficiently. Its open-source nature allows cost-effective scalability and compatibility with tools like Spark for enhanced analytics. While it offers significant processing power, areas for improvement include user-friendliness, interface design, security measures, and real-time data handling. Users benefit from data storage for structured and unstructured data, facilitated by its distributed processing architecture. Data replication ensures fault tolerance, while its capability to integrate with tools like Apache Atlas and Talend highlights its versatility.

What are the key features of Apache Hadoop?

HDFS: Distributed file system managing vast data scales.
Scalability: Seamlessly add nodes to increase capacity.
Integration: Works with tools such as Spark to enhance analytics.
Data Replication: Ensures fault tolerance and reliability.
Low Latency: Offers high throughput for efficient processing.

Why choose Apache Hadoop based on user reviews?

Cost-Effectiveness: Open-source framework reduces expenses.
Data Versatility: Supports multiple data types and sources.
Processing Power: Efficiently handles distributed data processing.
High Storage Capacity: Manages large data volumes efficiently.
Expandability: Easily integrates with numerous data processing tools.

Industries leverage Apache Hadoop for Big Data analytics, data lakes, ETL tasks, and enterprise data hubs, handling unstructured and structured data from IoT, RDBMS, and real-time streams. Its applications extend to data warehousing, AI/ML projects, and data migration, employing tools like Apache Ranger, Hive, and Talend for effective data management and analysis.

Apache

SAP Business Warehouse integrates real-time data access via HANA, with Microsoft Excel and SAP ERP for enhanced data transformation and reporting. Known for its speed and hybrid features, it meets diverse data governance needs.

SAP Business Warehouse is designed to streamline data access and transformation with its integration capabilities. Its speed and efficiency are complemented by advanced reporting features and a robust authorization model. Users benefit from drag-and-drop reporting and alert systems that enhance operational efficiency. Despite its strengths, improvements are necessary in user friendliness, data integration, and reporting speed. Users require better trend analysis tools, increased visualization capabilities, and a more flexible configuration to optimize use. Real-time data access remains an area for development.

What features define SAP Business Warehouse?

HANA Integration: Enables real-time data access
Excel and ERP Integration: Seamless interaction with popular tools
Advanced Reporting: Delivers high-quality reporting capabilities
Hybrid Functionality: Offers versatile use cases
Drag-and-Drop: Simplifies reporting and analysis tasks
Authorization Model: Ensures secure data handling

What benefits and ROI can users expect?

Operational Efficiency: Enhanced by alert and monitoring tools
Data Governance: Robust models meet diverse needs
Centralized Data: Comprehensive data storage and access
Decision-Making Support: BI tools inform strategic planning

SAP Business Warehouse plays a crucial role in industries like finance and supply chain, leveraging data warehousing, ETL processes, and powerful BI applications to enhance decision-making with tools like Business Objects, Tableau, and Power BI. It serves as a central data repository, facilitating extensive reporting and analysis capabilities.

SAP

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 Snowflake Computing, Teradata, Oracle and others in Data Warehouse. Updated: August 2026.

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