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Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs SAP Business Warehouse vs Snowflake 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:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is 6.0%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 2.2%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 15.6%, down from 21.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Snowflake15.6%
Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics6.0%
SAP Business Warehouse2.2%
Other76.2%
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

AnandTiwari - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at New Turn Technologies
Has consistently supported integration across diverse environments and streamlined deployment processes
Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics could improve their pricing structure. They currently have two separate pricing tiers: full log and partial log. I suggest they implement a single price and reduce charges on logs. They could implement a cap with some free tier or price tier based on the GBs of log collected. This would help customers use Azure more effectively. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is an excellent product because it includes both SIEM and orchestration capabilities with playbooks, but the log management part is very costly. Regarding future improvements, I would appreciate more application connectors for integration, particularly for on-premise based solutions. Many customers still maintain on-premise infrastructure, so having more integration possibilities for these environments would be beneficial.
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.
SunilPatil1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Asset Builder at Genpact - Headstrong
Have prioritized security while managing multi-agent data migration and cloud adoption
We utilize Time Travel with Snowflake because this is a very useful feature. Everyone finds it crucial because in conventional data platforms, it's very difficult to handle these kinds of things. This feature is essential, though I don't have the use cases currently; it is just there for implementation. Regarding Snowflake's automated scaling and suspension features, this auto-scaling is very significant. We had a comparison with Databricks and Snowflake a few months back, and this auto-scaling takes an edge within Snowflake; that's what our observation reflects.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution's scalability is very, very good. It's one of the most important aspects for us."
"For Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, the integration is the most valuable feature, meaning that whatever you need is fast and easy to use."
"We find the serverless tool to be the most valuable feature ."
"Compared to hosting a Microsoft setup on premise, if you use Azure Synapse, the return on investment is very high because you get rid of your hardware and licensing, move to a subscription-based pay-as-you-use model, reduce operational costs, optimize more, diminish capital expenditure by moving to an OpEx model, and simplify overall management."
"The setup is pretty simple."
"I love the way all the application resources from Microsoft can synchronize, help me with a lot of stuff, and reduce the time or hour of having maybe a resource for an hour a day while also being able to use artificial intelligence."
"Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics will scale automatically behind the scenes, which is one of its main powerful features."
"Very interactive and provides flexibility."
"The most useful feature is definitely the speed."
"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 customer support is wonderful. If your technical team is stuck somewhere, they are there to help."
"We switched to SAP because the solution is more comfortable to work with."
"I like that it integrates to open-source."
"Out-of-the-box reports are very useful."
"The most valuable feature is the new version of Business Explorer Analyzer, which is a very good version because there are a lot of analytical features of Excel also."
"Having the integration with the reporting tool which is provided by SAP is great."
"It has great flexibility whenever we are loading data and performs ELT (extract, load, transform) techniques instead of ETL."
"Its performance is a big advantage, and when you run a query, its performance is very good."
"Excellent performance Very easy to use Amazing UI"
"We decided to go with Snowflake because it seemed mature and had what we wanted."
"It is a cloud solution with many useful features, has data science capability, and can transform and prepare data for a data science project with scalability."
"Can be leveraged with respect to better performance, auto tuning and competition."
"Once you have finished your designs they can be easily imported to Snowflake and the information can be readily accessed without an IT expert."
"The most valuable feature has been the Snowflake data sharing and dynamic data masking."
 

Cons

"Synapse Analytics' performance slows down if you don't get your distribution right because it gets queued and goes into a single node."
"Synapse Analytics needs to develop an automation framework because now you have to build a cache yourself. You have to build a pipeline in WhereScape, which does end-to-end pipeline automation well. Microsoft should come up with a framework to save people time. If they developed a tool like WhereScape, it would dramatically reduce development time."
"Right now, we are really struggling with the performance. it's not as good as we had hoped."
"Integration with other products is an area that can be improved."
"Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics could improve the section in the solution where you can implement the Python Spark pipelines, it's not the same as in Databricks which would be better."
"Real-time integration is hard to do in Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics."
"One potential area for improvement could be the availability of an on-premises data lake implementation, as the product is currently only implemented in a cloud environment."
"Adding more transformations and plugins to the solution is very important."
"I get all the information quickly, but it is one day old."
"There are a lot of things that could be improved especially in terms of data cleansing, data management, data lineage, etc. The solution needs to offer more flexibility in terms of formulas and the query designer."
"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 big minuses are its not being user friendly."
"SAP Business Warehouse could improve by having more out-of-the-box use cases to cover more business types or operations."
"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."
"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."
"They should reduce the product’s installation package size for easier downloading."
"In a future release we would like to have a link which would allow us to connect to an external database and create certain views in your own database. This is because it is becoming hard for us to compare the data between multiple sources."
"To ensure the proper functioning of Snowflake as an MDS, it relies heavily on other partner tools."
"In a future release we would like to have a link which would allow us to connect to an external database and create certain views in your own database. This is because it is becoming hard for us to compare the data between multiple sources."
"There is a need for improvements in the documentation, this would allow more people to switch over to this solution."
"The solution should offer an on-premises version also."
"They should improve the reporting tools."
"The solution should offer an on-premises version also. We have some requirements where we would prefer to use it as a template."
"Currently there isn't end-to-end or B2B sharing of data."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the package not expensive and depends on how much it is used."
"The pricing is quite reasonable in comparison to other products."
"We only have to pay for what we use in the solution. It's easy for the customers. It's not more than some companies, not more than 300 to 400 users. They do not need to buy other license products, such as SAP B1, or analytics tools in the market, such as Tableau."
"Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is a moderately priced solution."
"The cost of the licensing depends on the size of the warehouse, where the cost of storage is approximately $130 USD per terabyte."
"When we are not using this solution we can simply shut it down saving us costs, which is a nice advantage."
"We have a licensing cost to pay."
"The product 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."
"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 solution is quite expensive."
"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."
"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."
"Snowflake is cost-effective. However, the cost can depend on how it's being used and how efficiently the code is written. If engineers don't write efficient code and usage is billed based on processing, it can become costly. If they write optimal code and choose the best solution, it can reduce costs in comparison to other options, such as Oracle."
"Snowflake licensing is more flexible and it is cheaper than other solutions. I can use it for only 10 days for MVP, or three years, and for flexible models. I can scale up, or down, and the pricing is based on the volume and duration. There are many licensing permutation combinations available."
"It is not cheap."
"They give a different price for every single company. I don't know if I negotiated that well, but we got the enterprise tier for $3 a credit, and the other two were a dollar-ninety a credit. I suspect we don't have almost zero compute usage, but I know that our annual contract packages are below all of their minimums."
"It is pay-as-you-go. Its cost is in the medium range."
"Snowflake goes by credits. For a financial institution where you have 5,000 employees, monthly costs may run up to maybe $5,000 to $6,000. This is actually based on the usage. It is mostly the compute cost. Your computing cost is the variable that is actually based on your usage. It is pay-per-use. In a pay-per-use case, you won't be spending more than $6,000 to $7,000 a month. It is not more than that for a small or medium enterprise, and it may come down to $100K per year. Storage is very standard, which is $23 a terabyte. It is not much for any enterprise. If you have even 20 terabytes, you are not spending more than $400 per month, which may turn out to be $2,000 to $3,000 per annum."
"The pricing for Snowflake is competitive."
"Its price should be improved. It should be cheaper than Microsoft."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
5%
Government
5%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Healthcare Company
8%
Retailer
8%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business29
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise56
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise58
 

Questions from the Community

How does Amazon Redshift compare with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?
Amazon Redshift is very fast, has a very good response time, and is very user-friendly. The initial setup is very str...
What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?
The product is easy to use, and anybody can easily migrate to advanced DB.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?
I think the licensing cost for Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is very high, but I have a local system to support t...
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 suc...
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...
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 SA...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake?
For pricing, setup cost, and licensing, everything is managed smoothly. Regarding licensing, it is inexpensive. The s...
What needs improvement with Snowflake?
Snowflake is already quite improved, but they have recently introduced AI features. AI integration would be beneficia...
What is your primary use case for Snowflake?
Snowflake is primarily used to handle the data warehousing part, for creating data modeling, and also keeping the raw...
 

Also Known As

Azure Synapse Analytics, Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Microsoft Azure SQL DW, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, MS Azure Synapse Analytics
No data available
Snowflake Computing, Snowflake Data Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Toshiba, Carnival, LG Electronics, Jet.com, Adobe, 
Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone
Accordant Media, Adobe, Kixeye Inc., Revana, SOASTA, White Ops
Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Microsoft, Teradata and others in Cloud Data Warehouse. Updated: March 2026.
885,444 professionals have used our research since 2012.