SAP Business Warehouse vs Snowflake comparison

SAP and Snowflake Computing are both solutions in the Cloud Data Warehouse category. SAP is ranked #14 with an average rating of 7.7, while Snowflake Computing is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.1. SAP holds a 1.9% mindshare in CDW, compared to Snowflake Computing’s 17.7% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of SAP users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Snowflake Computing users who would recommend it.

SAP Business Warehouse

Read 25 SAP Business Warehouse reviews

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535 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Snowflake

Read 101 Snowflake reviews

9,962 Views
7,173 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

SAP Business Warehouse

Snowflake

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2025

Snowflake and SAP Business Warehouse are significant contenders in the data warehousing category. Snowflake appears to have the upper hand due to its scalability, performance, and flexible pricing, which is recognized for delivering promising ROI and operational cost reductions.

Features: Snowflake stands out with its scalability, performance, and flexibility, offering diverse data processing capabilities. It is known for efficiently handling massive datasets, powered by its ability to load petabytes of data and perform quick transformations. SAP Business Warehouse is notable for its deep integration with other SAP systems and its strength in structurally managing complex datasets, which is a significant advantage for businesses using a complete SAP suite.

Room for Improvement: Snowflake can enhance its spatial support, streamline Snowpipe auto-ingest features, and improve pricing transparency. Users point out challenges with integration and desire more user-friendly interfaces. SAP Business Warehouse is considered expensive, with suggestions for improving its intuitive design, flexibility, and integration with newer SAP solutions, as well as reducing complexity in setup configurations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Snowflake utilizes the public cloud, ensuring speedy deployment and solid customer support, although some users mention occasional delays. SAP Business Warehouse operates on private and hybrid clouds, benefiting from robust integration with on-premise systems. Its customer service is praised, but there are concerns about its cost and response speed.

Pricing and ROI: Snowflake has a cost-effective model based on capacity and usage, though some users find it complex and expensive. Its transparency allows scaling according to business needs. In contrast, SAP Business Warehouse is seen as more costly, especially for smaller businesses, with licensing costs tied to company revenue, making it somewhat opaque. Users report a significant ROI from Snowflake related to operational cost reductions, whereas SAP Business Warehouse incurs high consultancy and maintenance costs.

To learn more, read our detailed SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake Report (Updated: August 2025).

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake

August 2025

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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

Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse

14th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Snowflake

Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

101

Ranking in other categories

Data Warehouse (1st), AI Synthetic Data (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 1.9%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 17.7%, down from 23.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Data Warehouse Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Snowflake	17.7%
SAP Business Warehouse	1.9%
Other	80.4%

Cloud Data Warehouse

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.

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Snehasish Das

Technology Leader at eTCaaS

Transformation in data querying speed with good migration capabilities

Snowflake is a data lake on the cloud where all processing happens in memory, resulting in very fast query responses. One key feature is the separation of compute and storage, which eliminates storage limitations. It also has tools for migrating data from legacy databases like Oracle. Its stability and efficiency enhance performance greatly. Tools in the AI/ML marketplace are readily available without needing development.

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

"Having the back-end data set with the right information is the best qualification for this solution."

"The most useful feature is definitely the speed."

"I like that it integrates to open-source."

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

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

"The features that I have found most valuable are its capabilities to connect to Excel and to slice and dice."

"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."

"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."

More SAP Business Warehouse pros

"A user-friendly and reliable solution."

"It helped us to build MVP (minimum viable product) for our idea of building a data warehouse model for small businesses."

"Snowflake's most valuable features are data enrichment and flattening."

"It is very fast and the performance is great."

"The ability to share the data and the ability to scale up and down easily are the most valuable features. The concept of data sharing and data plumbing made it very easy to provide and share data. The ability to refresh your Dev or QA just by doing a clone is also valuable. It has the dynamic scale up and scale down feature. Development and deployment are much easier as compared to other platforms where you have to go through a lot of stuff. With a tool like DBT, you can do modeling and transformation within a single tool and deploy to Snowflake. It provides continuous deployment and continuous integration abilities. There is a separation of storage and compute, so you only get charged for your usage. You only pay for what you use. When we share the data downstream with business partners, we can specifically create compute for them, and we can charge back the business."

"I don't think it is difficult to maintain."

"The snapshot feature is good, the rollback feature is good and the interface is user-friendly."

"This solution has helped our organization by being easy to maintain and having good technical support."

More Snowflake pros

Cons

"SAP Business Warehouse could improve by having more out-of-the-box use cases to cover more business types or operations."

"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."

"They should reduce the product’s installation package size for easier downloading."

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

"In the next release, my suggestion would be to have user-friendly interfaces and performance issues be addressed."

"I'm not sure if our issue is related to BW or the Analysis Office. However, we're having performance issues in terms of time. It takes a long time to generate the report."

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

"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."

More SAP Business Warehouse cons

"Portability is a big hurdle right now for our clients. Porting all of your existing SQL ecosystem, such as stored procedures, to Snowflake is a major pain point. Currently, Snowflake stored procedures use JavaScript, but they should support SQL-based stored procedures. It would be a huge advantage if you can write your stored procedures using SQL. It seems that they are working on this feature, and they are yet to release it. I remember seeing some notes saying that they were going to do that in the future, but the sooner this feature comes out, it would be better for Snowflake because there are a lot of clients with whom I'm interacting, and their main hurdle is to take their existing Oracle or SQL Server stored procedures and move them into Snowflake. For this, you need to learn JavaScript and how it works, which is not easy and becomes a little tricky. If it supports SQL-based procedures, then you can just cut-paste the SQL code, run it, and easily fix small issues."

"The complexity of the initial setup of Snowflake depends on the use case. However, Snowflake itself, we don't set it up. The difficulty comes from the ingestion patterns, depending on what data I'm putting in, what kind of enrichment, and what additional value we have to add. However, it does tend to get complex because we have a lot of semi-structured data which we need to handle in Snowflake. There have been some challenges."

"Room for improvement would be writebacks. It doesn't support extensively writing back to the database, and it doesn't support web applications effectively. Ultimately, it's a database call, so if we are building web applications using Snowflake, it isn't that effective because there is some turnaround time from the database."

"They need to incorporate some basic OLAP capabilities in the backend or at the database level. Currently, it is purely a database. They call it purely a data warehouse for the cloud. Currently, just like any database, we have to calculate all the KPIs in the front-end tools. The same KPIs again need to be calculated in Snowflake. It would be very helpful if they can include some OLAP features. This will bring efficiency because we will be able to create the KPIs within Snowflake itself and then publish them to multiple front-end tools. We won't have to recreate the same in each project. There should be the ability to automate raised queries, which is currently not possible. There should also be something for Exception Aggregation and things like that."

"We would like to be able to do modeling with Snowflake. It should support statistical modeling."

"From an improvement perspective, Snowflake can evolve in terms of writing costly, expensive queries with less cost and try to see if pipeline development can be made a little easier."

"Snowflake has to build more capabilities because they have only built very few adapters, but they're growing and they're building. They should provide provisions to collect ETL pipeline capabilities, reduce developer work, and make more rapid application development, rather than some customizations. There are very few options, but they are building. I hope they will build ETL rapid application development provisions with more variety."

"Their strategy is just to leverage what you've got and put Snowflake in the middle. It does work well with other tools. You have to buy a separate reporting tool and a separate data loading tool, whereas, in some platforms, these tools are baked in. In the long-term, they'll need to add more direct partnerships to the ecosystem so that it's not like adding on tools around Snowflake to make it work. They can also consider including Snowflake native reporting tools versus partnering with other reporting tools. It would kind of change where they sit in the market."

More Snowflake cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."

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

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

"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."

"The solution is quite expensive."

"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."

"The price for the solution's license depends on the use cases."

"I have not been billed yet, but it should be less. I'm still running the trial version, but it seems to be less than Databricks."

"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."

"It is pay-as-you-go. Its cost is in the medium range."

"It is not cheap."

"The pricing for Snowflake is competitive."

"The solution is costly, making it unsuitable for midsize organizations due to its price."

More Snowflake pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

14%

Retailer

Government

Energy/Utilities Company

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	15

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	28
Midsize Enterprise	20
Large Enterprise	56

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...

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What do you like most about Snowflake?

The best thing about Snowflake is its flexibility in changing warehouse sizes or computational power.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake?

It is complicated to understand how requests impact warehouse size. Unlike competitors such as Microsoft and Databricks ( /products/databricks-reviews ), Snowflake lacks transparency in estimating ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Snowflake?

Pricing is quite high for Snowflake Data Cloud, which is an area that could be improved. Snowflake Data Cloud is still beneficial to use, but only if you can afford it. It can be cost-effective if ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Databricks vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 29% of the time

BigQuery vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 25% of the time

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 20% of the time

Amazon Redshift vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 14% of the time

More SAP Business Warehouse Competitors

Azure Data Factory vs Snowflake

Compared 12% of the time

Dremio vs Snowflake

Compared 7% of the time

Teradata vs Snowflake

Compared 7% of the time

Amazon EMR vs Snowflake

Compared 7% of the time

SAP BW4HANA vs Snowflake

Compared 7% of the time

More Snowflake Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse

August 2025

Download SAP Business Warehouse product report

Buyer's Guide

Snowflake

August 2025

Download Snowflake product report

Also Known As

No data available

Snowflake Computing, Snowflake Data Cloud

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

Snowflake provides a modern data warehousing solution with features designed for seamless integration, scalability, and consumption-based pricing. It handles large datasets efficiently, making it a market leader for businesses migrating to the cloud.

Snowflake offers a flexible architecture that separates storage and compute resources, supporting efficient ETL jobs. Known for scalability and ease of use, it features built-in time zone conversion and robust data sharing capabilities. Its enhanced security, performance, and ability to handle semi-structured data are notable. Users suggest improvements in UI, pricing, on-premises integration, and data science functions, while calling for better transaction performance and machine learning capabilities. Users benefit from effective SQL querying, real-time analytics, and sharing options, supporting comprehensive data analysis with tools like Tableau and Power BI.

What are Snowflake's Key Features?

Scalability: Easily adjusts to handle growing data volumes.
Seamless Integration: Works with a wide range of platforms.
Consumption-Based Costs: Pay only for what you use.
Time Travel: Access historical data effortlessly.
Data Sharing: Secure and efficient sharing of datasets.
Time Zone Conversion: Built-in feature for global operations.
Security: Robust measures to protect sensitive information.
Compute and Storage Separation: Independent scaling for optimal performance.

What Benefits Should You Look for?

Cost Efficiency: Optimized pricing models for minimal waste.
Enhanced Performance: Fast queries and processing times.
Flexibility: Handles both structured and semi-structured data.
Analytics Capabilities: Supports advanced data analysis and reporting.

In industries like finance, healthcare, and retail, Snowflake's flexible data warehousing and analytics capabilities facilitate cloud migration, streamline data storage, and allow organizations to consolidate data from multiple sources for advanced insights and AI-driven strategies. Its integration with analytics tools supports comprehensive data analysis and reporting tasks.

Snowflake Computing

Sample Customers

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

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake

August 2025

Free Report: SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake

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