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Databricks 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

Databricks
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
91
Ranking in other categories
Data Science Platforms (1st), Streaming Analytics (1st)
SAP Business Warehouse
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
14th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Databricks is 8.3%, up from 5.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 1.9%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Databricks8.3%
SAP Business Warehouse1.9%
Other89.8%
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

ShubhamSharma7 - PeerSpot reviewer
Capability to integrate diverse coding languages in a single notebook greatly enhances workflow
Databricks offers various courses that I can use, whether it's PySpark, Scala, or R. I can leverage all these courses in a single notebook, which is beneficial for clients as they can access various tools in one place whenever needed. This is quite significant. I usually work with PySpark based on client requirements. After coding, I feed the Databricks notebooks into the ADF pipeline for updates. Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed. Furthermore, I can connect our Databricks notebook directly with Power BI and other visualization tools like Qlik. Once we develop code, it allows us to transform raw data into visualizations for clients using analysis diagrams, which is very helpful.
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

"The most valuable features of the solution are the hardware and the resources it quickly provides without much hassle."
"I would rate them ten out of ten."
"The most valuable feature is the Spark cluster which is very fast for heavy loads, big data processing and Pi Spark."
"The initial setup is pretty easy."
"Databricks has improved my organization by allowing us to transform data from sources to a different format and feed that to the analytics, business intelligence, and reporting teams. This tool makes it easy to do those kinds of things."
"Databricks helps crunch petabytes of data in a very short period of time."
"It's easy to increase performance as required."
"It can send out large data amounts."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the integration with SAP ERP."
"The most useful feature has been he ability to feed data into multiple systems in various formats."
"The warehouse is the solution's most valuable feature."
"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 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."
"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."
"With the technical support, the response has been pretty good from the SAP side."
"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."
 

Cons

"The product could be improved regarding the delay when switching to higher-performing virtual machines compared to other platforms."
"I think setting up the whole account for one person and giving access are areas that can be difficult to manage and should be made a little easier."
"The product needs samples and templates to help invite users to see results and understand what the product can do."
"Cluster failure is one of the biggest weaknesses I notice in our Databricks."
"Pricing is one of the things that could be improved."
"Databricks' performance when serving the data to an analytics tool isn't as good as Snowflake's."
"A lot of people are required to manage this solution."
"The solution could be improved by adding a feature that would make it more user-friendly for our team. The feature is simple, but it would be useful. Currently, our team is more familiar with the language R, but Databricks requires the use of Jupyter Notebooks which primarily supports Python. We have tried using RStudio, but it is not a fully integrated solution. To fully utilize Databricks, we have to use the Jupyter interface. One feature that would make it easier for our team to adopt the Jupyter interface would be the ability to select a specific variable or line of code and execute it within a cell. This feature is available in other Jupyter Notebooks outside of Databricks and in our own IDE, but it is not currently available within Databricks. If this feature were added, it would make the transition to using Databricks much smoother for our team."
"SAP Business Warehouse could improve by having more out-of-the-box use cases to cover more business types or operations."
"There is room for improvement from a technical perspective."
"One of our requirements is the ability to easily get answers regarding trends and exceptions. In BW, it is not that easy to get such information. I expect better trend and exception detection, better pattern detection."
"In the next release, my suggestion would be to have user-friendly interfaces and performance issues be addressed."
"The problem with BW, and the factor that differentiated it from the original BW, is that you only get limited functionality with your runtime license. So, you have to pay extra for extracting data."
"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."
"SAP Business Warehouse could integrate better with other ETL tools."
"I get all the information quickly, but it is one day old."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is based on a licensing model."
"The cost is around $600,000 for 50 users."
"I would rate Databricks' pricing seven out of ten."
"Databricks are not costly when compared with other solutions' prices."
"There are different versions."
"Databricks is a very expensive solution. Pricing is an area that could definitely be improved. They could provide a lower end compute and probably reduce the price."
"Databricks' cost could be improved."
"The licensing costs of Databricks is a tiered licensing regime, so it is flexible."
"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."
"The license for SAP Business Warehouse is paid yearly, and there's no extra cost in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"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 solution is quite expensive."
"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."
"SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."
"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 moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Retailer
10%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise56
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

Which do you prefer - Databricks or Azure Machine Learning Studio?
Databricks gives you the option of working with several different languages, such as SQL, R, Scala, Apache Spark, or Python. It offers many different cluster choices and excellent integration with ...
How would you compare Databricks vs Amazon SageMaker?
We researched AWS SageMaker, but in the end, we chose Databricks. Databricks is a Unified Analytics Platform designed to accelerate innovation projects. It is based on Spark so it is very fast. It...
Which would you choose - Databricks or Azure Stream Analytics?
Databricks is an easy-to-set-up and versatile tool for data management, analysis, and business analytics. For analytics teams that have to interpret data to further the business goals of their orga...
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...
 

Also Known As

Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
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 Databricks vs. SAP Business Warehouse and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
867,370 professionals have used our research since 2012.