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 84% of SAP IQ users who would recommend it.

SAP Business Warehouse

Read 25 SAP Business Warehouse reviews

721 Views
548 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

SAP IQ

Read 21 SAP IQ reviews

955 Views
487 Comparison Views

84% willing to recommend

SAP Business Warehouse

SAP IQ

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

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: August 2025).

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse vs. SAP IQ

August 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 865,384 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

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Data Warehouse (14th)

SAP IQ

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Relational Databases Tools (27th), Data Warehouse (15th)

Featured Reviews

Srini-Dhanaraj

Founder & CEO at imfine.club

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.

Read full review

Tejas Raj

Manager at Capgemini

Columnar database, so pulling records is easy but there isn't enough documentation for installation

I've seen very few SAP IQ systems in recent years. So people are moving away from SAP IQ In the last three years, I've rarely encountered customers using it. Fewer systems with SAP IQ usage among our customers. Most of them have moved on to HANA. There are parallel products, and there are also viable alternatives from AWS, so many have migrated to those.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

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

"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 product is very stable."

"The real-time information is great."

"The warehouse is the solution's most valuable feature."

"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."

"We are currently in a basic stage of analytics and the first goal we have is to make sure the numbers are correct. BW has some features that help you to build factors and ETL in such a way that it's easy to get to correct responses. That's the number one condition that you have to have in an analytic solution."

More SAP Business Warehouse pros

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

"The column-based technologies (basically all the database for ITP) are used for SAP IQ. It is used as a column-based solution."

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

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

"Columnar storage allows high compression, high load rates and high query performance."

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

"The product is easy to learn."

"The initial setup is easy."

More SAP IQ pros

Cons

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

"More integration with Microsoft Office products (not just Excel) would be helpful."

"There is room for improvement from a technical perspective."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More SAP Business Warehouse cons

"The primary negative aspect is the cost, which can be a challenge due to the economic conditions in Peru."

"I think the universe should be part of the Sybase IQ tool set."

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

"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."

"The only negative aspect of IQ is the cost, which can be challenging for companies in Peru."

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

"The tool gets stuck sometimes."

"Concurrency and functional error messaging."

More SAP IQ cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is quite 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 moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."

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

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

"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."

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

"Negotiate based on the features required."

"Negotiation is very important."

"Evaluate all options; check to see if you need expensive add-ons."

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

"It's not that costly. So, the pricing is cheap."

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

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Warehouse solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

15%

Retailer

Government

Energy/Utilities Company

Financial Services Firm

42%

Healthcare Company

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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 solution is quite expensive. We paid a yearly subscription fee.

See all answers

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...

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?

The primary negative aspect is the cost, which can be a challenge due to the economic conditions in Peru.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for SAP IQ?

I worked on implementing new databases, migration data in production, and developer environments with SAP IQ.

See all answers

Comparisons

Databricks vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 24% of the time

BigQuery vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 23% of the time

Amazon Redshift vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 21% of the time

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 21% of the time

Snowflake vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 12% of the time

More SAP Business Warehouse Competitors

Snowflake vs SAP IQ

Compared 21% of the time

SAP HANA vs SAP IQ

Compared 16% of the time

SQL Server vs SAP IQ

Compared 13% of the time

OpenText Analytics Database (Vertica) vs SAP IQ

Compared 8% of the time

Apache Hadoop vs SAP IQ

Compared 8% of the time

More SAP IQ Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse

July 2025

Download SAP Business Warehouse product report

Buyer's Guide

SAP IQ

July 2025

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

August 2025

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: August 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our SAP Business Warehouse vs. SAP IQ report.

See our list of best Data Warehouse vendors and best Cloud Data Warehouse vendors.

We monitor all Data Warehouse reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.