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Heavy.AI vs SAP IQ 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

Heavy.AI
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
24th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.1
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SAP IQ
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
23rd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of Heavy.AI is 0.7%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP IQ is 2.2%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Relational Databases Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SAP IQ2.2%
Heavy.AI0.7%
Other97.1%
Relational Databases Tools
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2886843 - PeerSpot reviewer
Service Cloud Gb Strat High Technology Enterprise Account Executive at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Interactive analytics has revealed territory gaps and now needs simpler, more conversational guidance
I think whenever you're using these tools, you want it to be as conversational as possible, and I think more of that would be helpful for Heavy.AI. Allowing you to ask questions on how to do things inside of Heavy.AI and have it actually show you how to do it as you're doing it would be beneficial. That way you don't have to spend a lot of time trying things out through trial and error. Trial and error can be helpful because you're learning it that way, but at the same time, when you're just trying to do things quickly and you're not a professional or a user that uses it all the time, you might not have that. So you want to be able to get that information quickly and easily. Some aspects I didn't like, but some of it's just like, "of course not." I wish I could snap my fingers and have everything be perfect, but that's not realistic. The infrastructure is probably fairly expensive. I can't afford to do that. I would need my business, the company that I work for to do it for us. Otherwise I can't really do it. It's just expensive. I did feel that it was pretty easy to use, but I'm a little bit more experienced than the average person, so maybe someone less technical like my colleagues would struggle initially to figure it out. I think maybe enhancing the user-friendliness for people that are not coders, just kind of setting up the workflows and things so it's just easier would help. It seems to be more purpose-built for spatial stuff, for location plus time and things, but general purpose BI is kind of an important thing. I don't think people were actually taking advantage of that, and when they're not doing that, it creates a little bit of trouble.
KK
Tech Director at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Works well with existing platform integration but could improve error messaging and technical support
I do not use SAP IQ's machine learning capabilities. I cannot assess the benefit of SAP IQ's distributed query processing for complex queries, as I am a non-technical operator. I am not sure if we use SAP IQ's data compression features. I think the compression we are doing is on the data storage level and not on the database level. I believe we do not use it, but I'm not certain. We do not utilize SAP IQ's support for unstructured data, as we do not have unstructured data. I do not have any strong opinions on SAP IQ's security features such as data encryption. It's not been something that has been much in focus, neither in our choice of the platform, nor in our daily operations. I guess they're satisfactory as they have not been a problem. I am not aware of the pricing and licensing of SAP IQ, as it's part of a bigger agreement, and I'm not the owner of that agreement. My impression is that SAP IQ is a rather expensive tool in terms of value for money. On a scale of 1-10, I rate SAP IQ a 7.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We did see a saving of time and cost because we had a one-stop shop where we could access GPU utilization along with plotting of geographical data."
"Heavy.AI being able to do these things without having that background was powerful for me."
"The feature I appreciate the most about SAP IQ is the compression, which is very good; we cannot compare with any other type of EDW."
"IQ is a very high-performance and high-transaction database."
"It’s the central component of our enterprise data warehouse."
"The initial setup is easy."
"All data is compressed and indexed, allowing for fast execution of transactions."
"While queries with previous products could run for hours, with SAP IQ, they run in a matter of minutes or seconds."
"We can now have over one billion rows in a table for semi-real trans-national querying."
"The performance is amazing, but the stability issues, and the expense of the product, coupled with less than top-tier technical support, should be considered when evaluating the product for your specific environment."
 

Cons

"Heavy.AI can be improved since it is a very large and comprehensive tool. For someone who does not have expertise in the tool, they will struggle somewhat, so I think it could be made easier for people."
"My experience with that was expensive to do for myself, so I had to get the company to sort of allow me to do it for Heavy.AI."
"Aborts happen, and we don't know why."
"With various patches of v15.4 and v16.0, we had instances where the IQ server crashed under certain circumstances."
"A production database server should never crash in response to user input, but Sybase IQ has repeatedly done that for us, over multiple revisions of the product."
"The room for improvement would be the marketing of the product, because this product is much better than advertised."
"Customer Service: It has been good, but more can be done in this area."
"There could be more documentation and training."
"The organization who owns the product does not support it well and appears not to be doing significant development for the future."
"The tool gets stuck sometimes."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Evaluate all options; check to see if you need expensive add-ons."
"It's not that costly. So, the pricing is cheap."
"Negotiate based on the features required."
"Negotiation is very important."
"The cost of implementation is about $3,000."
"The only costs after standard licensing fees are for add-ons and upgrades."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
35%
Insurance Company
19%
Healthcare Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
5%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise16
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Heavy.AI?
Heavy.AI can be improved since it is a very large and comprehensive tool. For someone who does not have expertise in the tool, they will struggle somewhat, so I think it could be made easier for pe...
What is your primary use case for Heavy.AI?
Heavy.AI is my main tool for large-scale data plotting and analysis. We have a lot of geographical data which we process for IoT vehicle fleets and cell tower pings. For this, we analyze and plot t...
What advice do you have for others considering Heavy.AI?
My advice to others looking into using Heavy.AI is to understand data and concepts in depth before using the tool rather than using it blindly. I give Heavy.AI a rating of 9.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP IQ?
IQ implementation costs about three thousand dollars. It's less expensive compared to alternatives like Teradata Base in terms of transactional efficiency.
What needs improvement with SAP IQ?
When it comes to SAP IQ, the areas that could be improved or enhanced include the error messaging and the locking capabilities, as that's where we often encounter problems. When there is an issue, ...
What is your primary use case for SAP IQ?
Our usual use cases for SAP IQ is that we have a Software-as-a-Service architecture where this database is the foundation for our SAP BusinessObjects platform. This is where it's getting its data f...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

OmniSci
Sybase IQ
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pactriglo, TUTELA, Skyhook, npm, Inc., Simulmedia
ASR Group, Citrix, State of Indiana, PocketCard Co. Ltd.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and others in Relational Databases Tools. Updated: August 2026.
909,153 professionals have used our research since 2012.