CockroachDB vs SAP HANA comparison

Cockroach and SAP are both solutions in the Relational Databases Tools category. Cockroach is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.4, while SAP is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.2. Cockroach holds a 4.1% mindshare in SQL, compared to SAP’s 10.5% mindshare. Additionally, 83% of Cockroach users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of SAP users who would recommend it.

CockroachDB

Read 12 CockroachDB reviews

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1,138 Comparison Views

83% willing to recommend

SAP HANA

Read 88 SAP HANA reviews

6,723 Views
4,613 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

CockroachDB

SAP HANA

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

SAP HANA and CockroachDB compete in the database management category, where SAP HANA stands out for its performance in large enterprises and CockroachDB excels in distributed data management. Based on feature comparisons, SAP HANA has the upper hand in enterprise functionality and analytics, whereas CockroachDB leads in resilience and distributed architecture.

Features: SAP HANA provides real-time database capabilities, high data compression, and strong memory utilization, which makes it effective for large enterprises requiring robust functionality. It shines in supplier relationship management, data integration, and analytics. CockroachDB focuses on high fault-tolerance for clusters, easy node deployment, and PostgreSQL compatibility, which are beneficial for applications requiring resilience and geo-replication.

Room for Improvement: SAP HANA could improve by enhancing its customization, ease of integration, user interface, and cost-effectiveness, with more focus on localization and flexibility. CockroachDB could enhance its PostgreSQL compatibility, disaster recovery capabilities, and support for various protocols. While SAP HANA faces challenges with high costs and complexity, CockroachDB needs to bolster enterprise-level features and compatibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SAP HANA offers flexible deployment options including on-premises, hybrid, and private cloud environments, but customization can be complex. SAP's customer service tends to be varied with some reports of slow responses though they provide 24/7 support. CockroachDB is more straightforward with public cloud and on-premises deployment, however, it could benefit from improved support consistency and user resources.

Pricing and ROI: SAP HANA is typically high-cost, requiring significant investment yet providing good ROI for large enterprises due to its extensive functionalities. Its annual licensing can add substantial costs. CockroachDB, however, has a more cost-effective structure, offering adaptable options for different use cases, including free open-source versions and serverless cloud offers. SAP HANA suits organizations with large budgets, while CockroachDB is accessible for those focusing on distributed resilience and scalability.

To learn more, read our detailed CockroachDB vs. SAP HANA Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

CockroachDB vs. SAP HANA

June 2025

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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

CockroachDB

Ranking in Relational Databases Tools

11th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

SAP HANA

Ranking in Relational Databases Tools

3rd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Virtualization (2nd), Embedded Database (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of CockroachDB is 4.1%, up from 2.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP HANA is 10.5%, down from 11.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Relational Databases Tools

Featured Reviews

Dang Quy Tai

Student at Univerzita obrany

Geo-replication benefits with distributed setup and a helpful AI support chatbot

I am studying how to deploy CockroachDB and YugaByteDB, and learning some basic information about them. I am testing these databases as part of my school application to find a suitable database for our applications. Currently, I am using PostgreSQL, however, I want to try some distributed databases…

Read full review

Dhiraj Jankar

Senior SAP Basis Consultant at Capgemini

Users appreciate the mix of in-memory architecture and ease of backend management

The most valuable SAP HANA features are that, compared to Oracle, there is less administrative work and less complex work to handle, making it very straightforward. The tool itself takes care of the backend work. The main benefits SAP HANA provides to users include its architecture, which combines both column store and row store capabilities. Some places find the row feature important, whereas others find column store important. It allows some tables to be stored in a column base, others in a row base, and the In-Memory functionalities are mostly the highlight of SAP HANA, especially compared to disk-based memory users. This was the main reason SAP HANA was introduced initially.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is that CockroachDB is a distributed database, which can deploy nodes running in different regions."

"CockroachDB is highly reliable."

"I use CockroachDB to test big data samples and to create the best structure for databases. We have four users and required 10 people for deployment and maintenance."

"The most valuable features of the solution are its resiliency features and the geo-partitioning capabilities."

"The best feature of CockroachDB is the ability to keep the nodes in different locations."

"The subset of SQL that my client is using is completely supported."

"What I like best is its ability to solve data residency issues. The main advantage is auto geo partitioning, built into the product. This means we don't have to spin up separate servers in each region, which would be much more costly."

"The availability and the easy to use feature is the most valuable. The documentation is also good."

More CockroachDB pros

"The functionality is of the solution is very good."

"The most valuable feature of SAP HANA is the modeling of the databases."

"The speed at which it gets the data is great."

"Technically it resembles Oracle, but as a somewhat lighter version."

"This is a feature-rich product and I like all of them."

"The most value for us was in terms of using it to issue tenders online. We host our server, but it is open to the public, so clients who want to buy those tenders were able to go online, put their tender documents up, and we could evaluate them using SAP."

"The feature that I like the most is that we can transport the data to our web data application. SAP HANA's performance is really perfect. We're working on big data, and SAP HANA is really working on high performance. We are happy working with it."

"The product's initial setup phase was really easy."

More SAP HANA pros

Cons

"We are looking for more features to support distributed high availability and geo-partitioning."

"Cockroach does not support all types of protocols. I need to improve it myself to support a CouchDB on my network."

"I find the serverless offer a bit confusing."

"The platform could be more extensible."

"I think the engine itself could be improved. If you miss a partition key, it should be able to be modeled. This is where AI could be really helpful. For example, if a user is from Australia, the system should know to look for their data there first instead of searching in the US or another continent."

"The closer they can make CockroachDB to being completely compatible with Postgres, the better. It's almost compatible, but not completely. If it was, it would be nice to just be able to use Postgres libraries without any fiddling."

"The initial setup and pricing could be improved."

"I would like CockroachDB to have more compatibility with PostgreSQL, especially with the connection string and technical integrations."

More CockroachDB cons

"It would be nice to know when SAP plans to stop its maintenance of a previous version of SAP ECC ERP because, at this point, anyone utilizing SAP will have no choice but to go on S/4HANA Database."

"The worst thing about SAP HANA is the price; it's very expensive. The licensing cost, implementation cost, hosting cost, and appliance cost are all high."

"The installation process could be more straightforward."

"I give the scalability of SAP HANA a six out of ten."

"When we are using SAP HANA we have some difficulty with the customization. We would like to be able to add and make customized menus."

"The main issue is the ecosystem, which lacks the widespread support that SQL enjoys."

"If the developers were to enhance or improve the application logic while processing the transactions, that would be great."

"I would like more technical documentation. I would like it to be easier to find online help or have a better launch-based service. SAP has a lot of functions, so we need more best practices and more detailed documentation on industry solutions. For example, it would be good to have documentation on why a certain process needs to be set up and which kinds of configurations need to be set up."

More SAP HANA cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing is not cheap. However, the good thing is that customers are willing to pay for it if they want it."

"I've used CockroachDB at a small scale on the free accounts because we are only testing."

"The platform is affordable even for the enterprise version. It provides value for investment in terms of performance."

"The pricing is good but can be made cheaper. I would rate the pricing a five out of ten."

"The product's price depends on the user's company and the contract model they enter into with CockroachDB. Depending on the contract model one enters into with CockroachDB, the product may or may not be expensive."

"While the cost of the license may seem high, it is important to note that the benefits of the solution far outweighs the cost."

"We pay annually for the license of the solution."

"The price of SAP HANA is very expensive and it is paid annually."

"The price of licensing is dependent on the size of the project, however, we have found that there is scope to negotiate the cost. If the solution is implemented on-premises there may be some extra costs for hosting etc."

"SAP HANA is very expensive here in China. My company bought the SAP ERP suite, which includes SAP HANA. For others who use SAP HANA as an analytical database, CPU numbers will affect the pricing, so as a solution, it's costly."

"The price of this product is good."

"The pricing is a bit on the high side."

"The licensing could improve."

More SAP HANA pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

36%

Computer Software Company

13%

Educational Organization

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

14%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about CockroachDB?

The subset of SQL that my client is using is completely supported.

See all answers

What needs improvement with CockroachDB?

I would like CockroachDB to have more compatibility with PostgreSQL, especially with the connection string and technical integrations.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for CockroachDB?

See all answers

What are the biggest benefits of using SAP HANA?

Based on my work with SAP HANA, the biggest benefit that it can bring to your business is total data management. This product is by SAP - a company that serves almost all needs a client may have co...

See all answers

Is SAP HANA’s customer and technical support reliable?

We have been using SAP HANA for a fairly short period of time and have only taken advantage of their customer support. So far, we have not had issues that required specialized help from technical s...

See all answers

Is SAP HANA difficult to set up and start using?

SAP HANA is fairly easy to set up, however, I do not think a complete beginner can do it. You certainly need some preparation - either you need to have experience with similar solutions, or with ot...

See all answers

Comparisons

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YugabyteDB vs CockroachDB

Compared 10% of the time

Oracle Database vs CockroachDB

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon Aurora vs CockroachDB

Compared 3% of the time

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Oracle Database vs SAP HANA

Compared 23% of the time

SQL Server vs SAP HANA

Compared 21% of the time

MySQL vs SAP HANA

Compared 11% of the time

IBM Db2 Database vs SAP HANA

Compared 8% of the time

Apache Spark vs SAP HANA

Compared 5% of the time

More SAP HANA Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

CockroachDB

June 2025

Download CockroachDB product report

Buyer's Guide

SAP HANA

March 2025

Download SAP HANA product report

Also Known As

No data available

SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance, HANA

Overview

CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database built on a transactional and strongly-consistent key-value store. It scales horizontally; survives disk, machine, rack, and even datacenter failures with minimal latency disruption and no manual intervention; supports strongly-consistent ACID transactions; and provides a familiar SQL API for structuring, manipulating, and querying data.

CockroachDB is inspired by Google’s Spanner and F1 technologies, and it’s completely open source.

Cockroach

SAP HANA, also known as SAP High-performance Analytics Appliance, is a multi-model database that stores data in its memory, allowing users to avoid disk storage. The product combines its robust database with services for creating applications. SAP HANA is faster than other database management systems (DBMS) because it stores data in column-based tables in main memory and brings online analytical processing (OLAP) and online transaction processing (OLTP) together.

The column-oriented in-memory database design allows users to run high-speed transactions alongside advanced analytics, all in a single system. This provides companies with the ability to process very large amounts of data with low latency and query data in an instant. By combining multiple data management capabilities, the solution simplifies IT, helps businesses with innovations, and facilitates digital transformation.

The solution is structured into five groups of capabilities, categorized as:

Database design
Database management
Application development
Advanced analytics
Data virtualization

There are three more SAP products that work alongside SAP HANA and complete the experience for users together. SAP S/4HANA Cloud is a ready-to-run cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP). SAP BW/4HANA is a packaged data warehouse, based on SAP HANA, which allows users to consolidate data across the enterprise to get a consistent view of their data. Finally, SAP Cloud is a single database as a service (DBaaS) foundation for modern applications and analytics across all enterprise data. All three products can combine with SAP HANA to deliver to users an optimized experience regarding their data.

SAP HANA Features

Each architectural group of capabilities of SAP HANA has various features that users can benefit from. These include:

Parallel processing database: SAP HANA utilizes a single platform to run transactional and analytical workloads.
ACID compliance: This feature ensures compliance with requirements for Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID) standards.
Multi-tenancy: This feature allows multiple tenant databases to run in one system while sharing the same memory and processors.
Multi-tier storage and persistent memory support: SAP HANA's native storage extension is a built-in capability to manage between memory and persistent storage, including SAP HANA Cloud Data Lake.
Scaling: The scaling feature supports terabytes of data in a single server and distributes large tables across multiple servers in a cluster to scale further.
Data modeling: This feature consists of graphical modeling tools that enable collaboration between stakeholders and the creation of models to execute complex business logic and data transformation in real time.
Stored procedures: The product has a native language to build stored procedures and uses advanced capabilities to create complex logic.
Administration: This feature consists of administration tools for various platform lifecycle, performance, and management operations and automations.
Security: SAP HANA provides its users with real-time data anonymization features to extract value from data while protecting privacy.
Availability and recovery: The tool supports high availability and disaster recovery through an array of techniques, including backup, storage mirroring, synchronous, asynchronous, and multitarget system replication.
Extended application services: Through its built-in application server, users can develop services such as REST and ODATA, as well as web applications that can run on multiple locations.
Client access: The product offers clients the ability to access it via other application platforms and languages, including Java, JavaScript, R, and Go.
Application lifecycle management: This set of features facilitates the building and packaging of applications, transporting them for development to test to production, and then deploying them.
Application development: This feature consists of a set of tools that offer application development on premises and in the Cloud. The programming language ABAP includes additional optimized features to build extensions to SAP applications.
Search: The search feature uses SQL to locate text promptly across multiple columns and textual content.
Spatial processing: This product feature provides native support for spatial data types and spatial functions.
Graph: Through this feature, users of the product can store and process highly connected data using a property graph.
Streaming analytics: This feature combines various data sources that users can utilize to discover trends over a set period.
Data integration and replication: The solution offers comprehensive features to handle all data integration scenarios.
Data federation: This feature allows users to perform queries on remote data sources in real time with data federation.
Caching: The capacity to cache data provides users with the ability to optimize federated queries against remote sources of data.

SAP HANA Benefits

SAP HANA provides many benefits for its users. These include:

This solution offers a high level of data and application security, beginning from a secure setup and providing continuous support.
SAP HANA offers augmentation for applications and analytics with built-in machine learning (ML).
The solution works in a timely manner, as it provides a response to queries within seconds in large production applications.
SAP HANA simplifies work, as it provides a single gateway to all user data with advanced data virtualization.
The product is very flexible, as it allows users to deploy applications in a public or private cloud, in multiple clouds, on premises, or hybrid.
SAP HANA scales easily for data volume and concurrent users across a distributed environment.
This is a powerful solution in terms of querying large datasets with a massively parallel processing (MPP) database.
SAP HANA is a versatile product that supports hybrid transactional and analytical processing as well as many data types.
The product provides a smaller data footprint with no data duplication or advanced compression, and reduces data silos.

Reviews from Real Users

According to a database consultant at a pharma/biotech company, SAP HANA is a very robust solution with good data access.

Bruno V., owner at LAVORO AUTOM INF E COM LTDA, likes SAP HANA because the product offers advanced features, helps reduce hours, and makes it easy to find what you need.

SAP

Sample Customers

Baidu, Kindred, Tierion, Heroic Labs, Gorgias

Unilever, NHS 24, adidas Group, CHIO Aachen, Hamburg Port Authority (HPA), Bangkok Airways Public Company Limited

Buyer's Guide

CockroachDB vs. SAP HANA

June 2025

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