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SAP BW4HANA 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

SAP Business Warehouse
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (14th)
SAP BW4HANA
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (8th)
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Csaba Grünblatt - PeerSpot reviewer
Performs all necessary data warehouse tasks and offers additional functionalities
SAP BW4HANA improved data reporting processes significantly. Performance on HANA database is good. Well-built data models ensure consistent and fast reporting. Reusable models enhance efficiency, even for SaaS services. In-memory computing, especially since HANA, has greatly improved performance in data analysis tasks. It eliminates the need for complex optimizations like creating indexes or aggregates. Queries that once took minutes now run in seconds, enabling real-time reporting, especially for SAP ECC on HANA. SAP BW4HANA's integration capabilities are streamlined with a simplified architecture and more virtual layers. You can directly load data into optimized layers, reducing the need for extra storage. The introduction of Open ODS Views allows for additional logic and master data inclusion, making integration faster and simpler. The learning curve for SAP BW4HANA is much faster now compared to ten years ago, thanks to abundant free resources like documentation, videos, blogs, and learning journeys provided by SAP. It is simpler to learn with these resources available compared to the past when you had to attend courses and rely on books. I would recommend SAP BW4HANA to users looking to implement it, especially if they want to keep their systems on-premise and already have SAP systems. Those with BW on HANA have two choices: BW4HANA or DataSphere, depending on their cloud strategy. If they are advanced in their cloud strategy and want to migrate off-premise, DataSphere is a good choice. However, for a robust solution on-premise or in a private cloud, BW4HANA is an excellent option. Overall, I would rate BW4HANA as a nine out of ten. It performs all necessary data warehouse tasks and offers additional functionalities. We use it traditionally, with complex transformations and models but with less emphasis on real-time processing and third-party sources.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"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."
"I like that it integrates to open-source."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the integration with SAP ERP."
"Having the back-end data set with the right information is the best qualification for this solution."
"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."
"With the technical support, the response has been pretty good from the SAP side."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the advanced structuring of data capabilities. You can get different structures of data to suit your needs."
"The solution's most valuable feature is that it is a very powerful tool. The solution also has the best stability, robustness, and customizability features."
"It can calculate data in detail. Before we could not calculate financial documents and accountant documents in detail, we could not do it at a document level but now we can. This is the most important feature. It also has predictive analysis memory."
"We benefited from BW/4HANA's ability to utilize predefined content inside. We didn't need to start from scratch."
"The product has efficient performance."
"The solution is useful for connecting with external systems."
"The solution seamlessly integrates with SAP products."
"We can get good visualization and less redundant data."
"The most valuable feature is that we can transform a huge amount of data and apply business logic as per the requirements."
 

Cons

"The solution could offer better connectivity with other databases."
"What I'd like improved in SAP Business Warehouse is its setup. It could be more flexible, and it could be a configuration-based setup."
"SAP Business Warehouse could integrate better with other ETL tools."
"In the next release, my suggestion would be to have user-friendly interfaces and performance issues be addressed."
"We are very unhappy with technical support. First of all, they send their sales agents or pre-sales agents and most of them who don't know the solution as a properly trained tech would. We have an on-site SAP representative who is supposed to help us with our high priority and production issues, and they're not satisfactory to say the least."
"The advanced structuring can be complicated and the interface is not very intuitive."
"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. It's easy to start but evolving is not that easy."
"It's a product that is at the end of life so they will not improve it anymore."
"The licensing cost could be made better."
"Pricing would be a good improvement. A lot of customers think that it's very expensive and especially support is very expensive."
"Not a ten because it's expensive and its ecosystem is not very open."
"BW/4HANA could improve query optimization. For example, there could be an error message that pops up when you hover over it if any query fails. That would make it easier to find out what went gone wrong. Guided SAP help tools would make it easier for us to go forward."
"Support could be more reliable."
"The solution is not scalable. It does not have a data streaming feature as well."
"The solution does occasionally get a few bugs, but this is typical for any product."
"If I want to have good reporting, then I have to buy a separate license."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."
"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."
"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."
"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."
"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and 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."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"Price wise, this solution is on the higher side."
"We started as early birds from the SAP side. We got this entire suite for free. I cannot really talk about the price because we didn't have to pay anything."
"For the on-premises version of the product, the solution offers a perpetual-based licensing model to its users. In general, SAP offers a monthly subscription-based licensing model to its users."
"The SAP HANA application still hasn't been leveraged to the fullest extent, but it's a five-year enterprise license."
"This is an expensive solution and there are costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"The price is high and currently only affordable for large organizations."
"For some, the rates offered by SAP can be costly while for others it may seem cheap. The price ultimately depends on how you have negotiated your contract with SAP."
"The tool is affordable."
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Top Industries

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

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise27
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What do you like most about SAP BW4HANA?
One significant advantage of SAP BW/4HANA is the direct integration with the SAP HANA database, providing seamless access to real-time analytics. Additionally, it enables real-time data integrati...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP BW4HANA?
The certification cost is extremely high. I completed certification for $40,000. The certification cost for SAP BW4HANA in 2025 is expected to be one lakh forty thousand.
What needs improvement with SAP BW4HANA?
Integration needs improvement. In reporting, I am not comfortable with the creation of variables, and some calculations need improvement in BW queries.
 

Also Known As

No data available
SAP BW/4HANA
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about SAP BW4HANA vs. SAP Business Warehouse and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.