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SAP Business Warehouse vs SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud 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 HANA Enterprise Cloud
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

SAP Business Warehouse and SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. SAP Business Warehouse is designed for Cloud Data Warehouse and holds a mindshare of 1.5%, up 1.1% compared to last year.
SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, on the other hand, focuses on Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS), holds 1.7% mindshare, down 1.9% since last year.
Cloud Data Warehouse
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

JavedKhan1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers powerful analytics and integration capabilities but requires improved upgrade processes
SAP Business Warehouse could have been better. There is room for improvement from a technical perspective. So, from a technical perspective, when we are upgrading a Business Warehouse server or we are migrating from one place to another, the capability required for this upgradation has many manual activities. It took us around a month to streamline our server. Let’s say there are some transaction codes. Transaction code is a set of programs, and when you want to run a program from the backend, you need to hit the transaction code. It is called a T-code. So during the upgrade, many transaction codes get affected, and as a security consultant, it is my responsibility to recheck those transaction codes which are affected. Sometimes more than 100 codes may get affected, sometimes 500, and sometimes more as well. So, it takes a hell lot of time to integrate them again. That is a limitation or defect within the SAP Business Warehouse. SAP Business Warehouse should come up with proper solutions. Upgradation is an automatic activity. It should happen by itself. We just need to initiate it, and the backend SAP server is automatically upgraded. But it should handle the transactional code as well. They should not get absolutely, and any authorization object should not get deleted from the transaction codes. So, that functionality SAP Business Warehouse should come up with.
Rajnikant Verma - PeerSpot reviewer
Real-time data processing and good support with room for market-driven improvements
SAP RFX and overall SAP solutions provide a very intuitive and integrated solution within finance, leading procurement, and other business scenarios. The real-time data processing and the ability to track all leasing processes and contracts are particularly valuable. SAP's capability to integrate with other systems like GIS and non-SAP applications also stands out.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"The most useful feature has been he ability to feed data into multiple systems in various formats."
"The most valuable feature of SAP Business Warehouse is its hybrid functionality, allowing users to leverage both SQL-based data warehouse capabilities from HANA and feature-based data warehousing from BW."
"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 most valuable aspect of the solution is the integration with SAP ERP."
"The real-time information is great."
"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."
"I like that it integrates to open-source."
"The interface is easy to manage."
"The processes and the way we take advantage and use assistance are good."
"The solution's initial setup process is straightforward."
"It is a stable and scalable product."
"The scalability is good because we have some cloud resources to support the ERP."
"My company has not had any problems with the product's initial setup phase."
"Traditionally, SAP worked with Oracle databases, but SAP is getting rid of the other databases and promoting its own. SAP will stop support for other databases around 2026, so everyone is moving to SAP S/4HANA for the performance and because it's the preferred database for SAP. S/4HANA has new features from the front-end or application feature perspective. The idea is to move toward future-ready technology."
"Ensuring data integrity across finance, supply chain, and other critical areas is paramount for real-time decision-making. Access to accurate and up-to-date information is essential for data protection. While the digital solution primarily serves basic maintenance, the ability to handle these core aspects efficiently is invaluable for your needs."
 

Cons

"It's a product that is at the end of life so they will not improve it anymore."
"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."
"They should reduce the product’s installation package size for easier downloading."
"SAP Business Warehouse could improve by having more out-of-the-box use cases to cover more business types or operations."
"The solution could offer better connectivity with other databases."
"What I'd like to improve in SAP Business Warehouse is its data structure, that's a little bit rigid. It could be a bit more flexible, so you can design your data structure and improve performance when creating a solution. Currently, the way data is stored in SAP Business Warehouse is rigid."
"In the next release, my suggestion would be to have user-friendly interfaces and performance issues be addressed."
"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."
"The stability needs to be improved to be able to handle large amounts of data."
"It’s a common challenge with applications like Microsoft and SAP that they tend to rely on engineers rather than human resources personnel for knowledge and implementation."
"SAP support isn't on par with products like Microsoft Azure or AWS. It's nowhere close to the competitors."
"It needs improvement in terms of stability and performance."
"I would rate the stability a four out of ten. It's an area that could use improvement"
"Enterprise Cloud's reporting could be more automated to improve content accountability, especially regarding BI reports."
"The SAP products are complicated to deploy anywhere."
"They should probably offer more cloud services. Most of the cloud infrastructure providers we have make everything pretty transparent, you know what you're getting, you have all these metrics and measurements and everything in the dashboard. Here you have to go through the contracting negotiations and all those things."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."
"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 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."
"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."
"SAP may not be the most cost-effective option, but it does offer a comprehensive set of tools and features. When you have the right information, structure, and dashboard in place, it can provide excellent value. Additionally, competition with Oracle might be a factor to consider."
"The price is on little bit higher. For SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, we see roughly five crores per annum."
"The product itself is relatively expensive."
"The price is expensive compared to the competition."
"I rate the product's price a five out of ten."
"Our pricing is based on a yearly contract."
"The pricing is reasonable when compared to other vendors like Oracle who offer technology enterprise resource software."
"The solution could be less expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
20%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 HANA Enterprise Cloud?
It has significantly streamlined our operations.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud?
SAP HANA Cloud can be quite costly compared to other solutions. The high licensing costs make it an expensive option, particularly for smaller customers. However, they offer solutions for mid-sized...
What needs improvement with SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud?
SAP should adopt more rapid changes in market processes and customer needs to deliver solutions that meet new industry requirements swiftly. SAP finance needs to be more advanced to keep up with cu...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone
FC Bayern Munich, Reuters News Agency, MEMEBOX
Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Microsoft, Google and others in Cloud Data Warehouse. Updated: May 2025.
857,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.