SAP Business Warehouse vs SAP IQ comparison

SAP Business Warehouse and SAP IQ are both solutions in the Data Warehouse category. Additionally, 89% of SAP Business Warehouse users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 80% of SAP IQ users who would recommend it.

SAP Business Warehouse

Read 26 SAP Business Warehouse reviews

912 Views
547 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

SAP IQ

Read 23 SAP IQ reviews

1,362 Views
667 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

SAP Business Warehouse

SAP IQ

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between SAP Business Warehouse and SAP IQ based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Data Warehouse solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed SAP Business Warehouse vs. SAP IQ Report (Updated: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse vs. SAP IQ

January 2026

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Helped 881,082 peers since 2012

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

6.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Data Warehouse (14th)

SAP IQ

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Relational Databases Tools (24th), Data Warehouse (15th)

Featured Reviews

VishnuReddy2

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.

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Akhilesh Narayanan

Tech Lead, Database Section. at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Compression performance gets high marks but user-friendly interface needs improvement

The downside of SAP IQ, from what I understood from the management side, is that the front end for the DBA, for the admin, is not that user-friendly. If you compare it with SQL Server Management Studio, it is not that user-friendly GUI for the admin. But the engine is very strong and powerful. It is easy to deploy SAP IQ; the implementation and installation are easy. The downside I see is that it doesn't allow most integrated backups; many of the marketplace players such as NetBackup, those software integrated backups are not available. So, if you want to take a backup, you need to take it locally, and then only you can back it up to any storage or anything. Those features such as integrated backup, which would allow it to stripe into an appliance or something similar, are not present. One thing I notice as a downside is that if the CPU utilization is very high, there is no direct way we can find out which query is taking the most CPU. In any other RDBMS, there are DMVs available to find out which query is taking most of the CPU, but those features are not present in SAP IQ. If our CPU is hitting at 100%, it is not easy to identify which connection is taking the most CPU.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"In terms of stability, comparatively, the solution is quite stable."

"The real-time information is great."

"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."

"Predominantly, our company uses SAP Business Warehouse for reporting purposes across various departments, especially for managers to gain a quick understanding of their current standing and make informed decisions."

"The most useful feature is definitely the speed."

"Out-of-the-box reports are very useful."

"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 most useful feature has been he ability to feed data into multiple systems in various formats."

More SAP Business Warehouse pros

"All data is compressed and indexed, allowing for fast execution of transactions."

"The primary benefit of SAP IQ is its ability to limit the expansion of the costly SAP HANA database, which has limited storage capacity. This necessitates a form of data management that involves moving data from SAP HANA to SAP NLS, which is essentially archiving. This allows us to retain access to the data via a link whenever it is required."

"Valuable features for us include the compression, speed, fast response time, and easy object maintenance."

"SAP IQ is actually quite effective when it comes to scalability; we have a setup that's built with multiple servers involved and that seems to be working fairly efficiently, and if we wanted to add more servers into this entire setup, that would be fairly easy."

"IQ is a very high-performance and high-transaction database."

"The product is easy to learn."

"Unbeatable speed and compression with a colummn-structured relational database."

"It is very robust for ad hoc DW queries and its columnar compression is unique and valuable."

More SAP IQ pros

Cons

"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."

"A few things which are missing include the visualization of reports. That's where your costs and licensing become heavy. When it comes to this database compared Microsoft Warehouse, it's an expensive solution."

"The solution could offer better connectivity with other databases."

"Areas for improvement in SAP Business Warehouse include enhancing scheduling and monitoring tools, as well as improving communication about hidden features to make them more accessible to users."

"I would like to see a different end solution in order to read the data and attract internal users."

"SAP Business Warehouse could integrate better with other ETL tools."

"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."

More SAP Business Warehouse cons

"The room for improvement would be the marketing of the product, because this product is much better than advertised."

"The tool gets stuck sometimes."

"The organization who owns the product does not support it well and appears not to be doing significant development for the future."

"The solution works best when combined with other SAP solutions. If the environment has other systems other options might be better."

"In my interaction with SAP IQ's technical support, the people we are talking to don't know this application very thoroughly."

"Concurrency and functional error messaging."

"The downside I see is that it doesn't allow most integrated backups; many of the marketplace players such as NetBackup or Veritas, those software integrated backups are not available."

"Multiplex is very problematic. There are consistency problems in the metadata, meaning it is possible to lose metadata consistency. You should make sure you have healthy backups."

More SAP IQ cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."

"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."

"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."

"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."

"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."

"The solution is quite expensive."

"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."

"The cost of implementation is about $3,000."

"The only costs after standard licensing fees are for add-ons and upgrades."

"Negotiation is very important."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

13%

Retailer

10%

Energy/Utilities Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

36%

Comms Service Provider

Outsourcing Company

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	15

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	16

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about SAP Business Warehouse?

Out-of-the-box reports are very useful.

See all answers

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 such. In my experience on cloud, I did not use BW HANA Cloud. I used the cloud prod...

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What needs improvement with SAP Business Warehouse?

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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, ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 18% of the time

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Compared 18% of the time

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 11% of the time

SAP BW4HANA vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 10% of the time

Snowflake vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 9% of the time

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SQL Server vs SAP IQ

Compared 11% of the time

SAP HANA vs SAP IQ

Compared 9% of the time

Snowflake vs SAP IQ

Compared 9% of the time

Oracle Database vs SAP IQ

Compared 8% of the time

OpenText Analytics Database (Vertica) vs SAP IQ

Compared 6% of the time

More SAP IQ Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse

January 2026

Download SAP Business Warehouse product report

Buyer's Guide

SAP IQ

January 2026

Download SAP IQ product report

Also Known As

No data available

Sybase IQ

Overview

Reporting, analysis and interpretation of business data are crucial to preserve and enhance the competitive edge of companies by optimizing processes and enabling them to react quickly and in line with market needs. SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) provides tools and functions that enable companies to attain these goals. In SAP BW, you can integrate, transform, and consolidate relevant business information from productive SAP applications and external data sources. SAP BW provides you with a high-performance infrastructure that helps you evaluate and interpret data. Decision makers can make well-founded decisions and identify target-orientated activities on the basis of the analyzed data.

SAP

SAP® IQ software delivers speed and power for extreme-scale enterprise data warehousing and analytics. Its column-oriented, grid-based massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture and patented data compression and indexing technologies enable companies to exploit the value of huge amounts of data at the speed of business.

SAP

Sample Customers

Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone

ASR Group, Citrix, State of Indiana, PocketCard Co. Ltd.

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse vs. SAP IQ

January 2026

Free Report: SAP Business Warehouse vs. SAP IQ

Find out what your peers are saying about SAP Business Warehouse vs. SAP IQ and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.

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