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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 (7th)
SAP Business Warehouse
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (14th)
 

Featured Reviews

NR
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.
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

"Most valuable features are HDFS and Kafka: Ingestion of huge volumes and variety of unstructured/semi-structured data is feasible, and it helps us to quickly onboard a new Big Data analytics prospect."
"Hadoop can store any kind of data—structured, unstructured, and semi-structured—and presents it using the relational model through Hive."
"Hadoop is a distributed file system, and it scales reasonably well provided you give it sufficient resources."
"The most valuable feature is the database."
"Hadoop is designed to be scalable, so I don't think that it has limitations in regards to scalability."
"​​Data ingestion: It has rapid speed, if Apache Accumulo is used."
"The platform's quick data processing capabilities have been instrumental in supporting our AI-driven projects."
"It's good for storing historical data and handling analytics on a huge amount of data."
"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 features that I have found most valuable are its capabilities to connect to Excel and to slice and dice."
"The product is very stable."
"With the technical support, the response has been pretty good from the SAP side."
"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 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."
"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."
"What I like most about SAP Business Warehouse is its ability to feed data into new, multiple systems in various formats. It can open its data to any system over gateway services or a portal or application that needs to consume and analyze data."
 

Cons

"The main thing is the lack of community support. If you want to implement a new API or create a new file system, you won't find easy support."
"Hadoop's security could be better."
"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."
"I think more of the solution needs to be focused around the panel processing and retrieval of data."
"The stability of the solution needs improvement."
"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."
"I would like to see more direct integration of visualization applications."
"There are certain shortcomings when it comes to the product's technical support part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"SAP Business Warehouse could improve by having more out-of-the-box use cases to cover more business types or operations."
"The solution should be more open to the cloud."
"Integration with SAP Business Warehouse's ETL tools is not straightforward."
"A few things which are missing include the visualization of reports. That's where your costs and licensing become heavy. When it comes to this database compared Microsoft Warehouse, it's an expensive solution."
"SAP Business Warehouse could integrate better with other ETL tools."
"Areas for improvement in SAP Business Warehouse include enhancing scheduling and monitoring tools, as well as improving communication about hidden features to make them more accessible to users."
"I would like to see a different end solution in order to read the data and attract internal users."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price could be better. Hortonworks no longer exists, and Cloudera killed the free version of Hadoop."
"The price of Apache Hadoop could be less expensive."
"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 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."
"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."
"The product is open-source, but some associated licensing fees depend on the subscription level."
"We just use the free version."
"It's reasonable, but there's room for improvement in cost-effectiveness."
"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 license for SAP Business Warehouse is paid yearly, and there's no extra cost in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."
"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."
"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."
"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
34%
Computer Software Company
7%
University
5%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Retailer
10%
Energy/Utilities Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

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 Business8
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 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

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: January 2026.
881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.