SAP Business Warehouse vs Snowflake comparison

Why PeerSpot?

SAP and Snowflake Computing are both solutions in the Cloud Data Warehouse category. SAP is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.0, while Snowflake Computing is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.1. SAP holds a 2.6% mindshare in CDW, compared to Snowflake Computing’s 15.4% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of SAP users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Snowflake Computing users who would recommend it.

SAP Business Warehouse

Read 26 SAP Business Warehouse reviews

3,035 Views
1,791 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Snowflake

Read 108 Snowflake reviews

19,422 Views
8,740 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

SAP Business Warehouse

Snowflake

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 1, 2026

Snowflake and SAP Business Warehouse are significant players in the data warehousing market. Among the two, Snowflake appears to have a competitive edge due to its scalability and ease of use, although SAP Business Warehouse offers strong integration capabilities with SAP ERP.

Features: Snowflake provides robust scalability, allowing efficient handling of petabytes of data. Its distributed architecture enhances performance by processing large datasets quickly, and it offers flexibility through dynamic node adjustments, supporting multiple file formats for accessibility. SAP Business Warehouse is known for advanced data structuring and seamless integration with SAP ERP, excelling in environments where SAP systems are prevalent.

Room for Improvement: Snowflake could benefit from stronger geo-spatial capabilities and a simpler Snowpipe auto-ingest feature. Users desire a more intuitive command-line tool and greater cost transparency, along with integrated basic analytics for better data visualization. SAP Business Warehouse could enhance its user interfaces, provide more advanced analytics options, and improve integration with additional ETL tools.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Snowflake predominantly serves public and hybrid cloud environments, offering easy deployment and responsive customer support, despite the potential for better SLAs. SAP Business Warehouse is typically used in on-premises and private cloud setups, providing robust support but sometimes lacking in responsiveness and transparency compared to Snowflake.

Pricing and ROI: Snowflake's pricing model is flexible and perceived as cost-effective through pay-as-you-go, though costs can be unpredictable, especially with enterprise features. SAP Business Warehouse generally involves higher initial costs tied to company revenue, making it less attractive to smaller businesses. Snowflake users find potential ROI with efficient usage, while SAP offers value by integrating with existing SAP infrastructures.

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

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake

October 2026

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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

15th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.1

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

6.9

Number of Reviews

108

Ranking in other categories

Data Warehouse (1st), AI Synthetic Data (1st), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (6th), AI Software Development (8th)

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 2.6%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 15.4%, down from 16.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Snowflake	15.4%
SAP Business Warehouse	2.6%
Other	82.0%

Cloud Data Warehouse

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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SunilPatil1

Asset Builder at Genpact - Headstrong

Have prioritized security while managing multi-agent data migration and cloud adoption

We utilize Time Travel with Snowflake because this is a very useful feature. Everyone finds it crucial because in conventional data platforms, it's very difficult to handle these kinds of things. This feature is essential, though I don't have the use cases currently; it is just there for implementation. Regarding Snowflake's automated scaling and suspension features, this auto-scaling is very significant. We had a comparison with Databricks and Snowflake a few months back, and this auto-scaling takes an edge within Snowflake; that's what our observation reflects.

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

"All our processes such as funds management, grant, payroll transactions are processed automatically through this system and BW helps to collect the data for analytic needs of the department users and board members."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the advanced structuring of data capabilities, as you can get different structures of data to suit your needs."

"What I like most about SAP Business Warehouse is that it's a seamless integration platform. A valuable feature in the tool is the monitoring alert that makes you aware of what process chain has failed. There's no manual monitoring required if you have configured an alert system, so the process chain can run in the background, and you can get alerts about it. The functionalities I find good in SAP Business Warehouse are alerting and monitoring. If you have configured the tool and have integrated it with SAP Solution Manager, then it's a good product to use."

"We switched to SAP because the solution is more comfortable to work with."

"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 product is very stable."

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

"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."

More SAP Business Warehouse pros

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

"Great scalability and near zero maintenance."

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

"It is a cloud solution with many useful features. It has the data science capability. It can transform data and prepare data for a data science project with scalability."

"The syntax is advanced which reduces the time to write code."

"Potential new users should just definitely give it a shot."

"We mainly used SQL scripts and provided a solution for different owners who want to query a database but have several tables."

"It was relatively easy to use, and it was easy for people to convert to it."

More Snowflake pros

Cons

"I get all the information quickly, but it is one day old."

"When some things go wrong, it becomes extremely unreliable."

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

"It's a product that is at the end of life so they will not improve it anymore."

"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."

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

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

"We are running an older version; it is doing what we need it to do but there is some limitation due to its version."

More SAP Business Warehouse cons

"Cost reduction is one area I would like Snowflake to improve. The product is not very cheap, and a reduction in costs would be appreciated."

"They have a new console, but I couldn't figure out anything in the new console."

"Snowflake needs transparency over costs and pricing."

"The aspect of it that was more complicated was stored procedures. It does not support SQL language-based stored procedures. You have to write in JavaScript. If they supported SQL language and stored procedures, it would make migration from on-prem much simpler. In most cases, if an on-prem solution has stored procedures, they're usually written in SQL. They're not written as what most on-prem DBMS would refer to as an external stored procedure, which is what these feel like to most people because they're written in a language outside of SQL."

"Availability is a problem."

"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."

"They do have a native connector to connect with integration tools for loading data, but it would be much better to have the functionality built-in."

"The stability has been phenomenal up until lately. We haven't had any issues until the last month."

More Snowflake cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"The license for SAP Business Warehouse is paid yearly, and there's no extra cost in addition to the standard licensing fees."

"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 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 solution is quite 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."

"Snowflake licensing is more flexible and it is cheaper than other solutions. I can use it for only 10 days for MVP, or three years, and for flexible models. I can scale up, or down, and the pricing is based on the volume and duration. There are many licensing permutation combinations available."

"It is on a monthly basis. It is based on your usage. There are no additional costs from the point of the licensing fee. We do give some kind of evaluation to the customers about how much it is going to be. You can decide in Snowflake the virtual machine that you are using for customers. There are several kinds of virtual machines that you can use. It is similar to the clothing sizes: small to extra large. If you need more power in the coming month, you can decide in advance and take a more powerful machine. You can just select it from the platform. You can also decide which machine you want to take for extracting data."

"Comparing Snowflake to on-prem options such as Oracle or SAP, it seemed more cost-effective."

"Part of the problem with the pricing is that it is very difficult for businesses to get an idea of how expensive it might be until they actually start using Snowflake."

"Snowflake is cost-effective."

"The product's price range falls between average to a bit expensive range. I think the tool is worth the money if you use it properly."

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

"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

12%

Construction Company

10%

Outsourcing Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

17%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Outsourcing Company

Comms Service Provider

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	31
Midsize Enterprise	20
Large Enterprise	61

Questions from the Community

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with SAP Business Warehouse?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for SAP Business Warehouse?

I am using SAP Business Warehouse in my organization for data warehousing as well as an ETL tool. Integration with SAP Business Warehouse's ETL tools is not straightforward. Integration with SAP ER...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake?

We find the metering and billing experience for Snowflake to be expensive because there are many limitations to what it can do. When we compared performance-wise and cost-wise to Bedrock for some o...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Snowflake?

Lessons learned about our main use case or how Snowflake performed in those areas include that the sales representatives do not really understand the product, and that the solutions consultants bas...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Snowflake?

Our main use case for Snowflake was to ingest data, use it for search, analytics, and data sharing with our customers; however, in reality, those use cases did not work. When it came to our challen...

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 11% of the time

BigQuery vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 7% of the time

SAP BW4HANA vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 5% of the time

SAP Business Data Cloud vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 5% of the time

Databricks vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 5% of the time

More SAP Business Warehouse Competitors

Teradata vs Snowflake

Compared 6% of the time

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs Snowflake

Compared 6% of the time

Databricks vs Snowflake

Compared 5% of the time

Amazon Redshift vs Snowflake

Compared 4% of the time

Amazon EMR vs Snowflake

Compared 2% of the time

More Snowflake Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse

October 2026

Download SAP Business Warehouse product report

Buyer's Guide

Snowflake

October 2026

Download Snowflake product report

Also Known As

No data available

Snowflake Computing, Snowflake Data Cloud

Overview

SAP Business Warehouse integrates real-time data access via HANA, with Microsoft Excel and SAP ERP for enhanced data transformation and reporting. Known for its speed and hybrid features, it meets diverse data governance needs.

SAP Business Warehouse is designed to streamline data access and transformation with its integration capabilities. Its speed and efficiency are complemented by advanced reporting features and a robust authorization model. Users benefit from drag-and-drop reporting and alert systems that enhance operational efficiency. Despite its strengths, improvements are necessary in user friendliness, data integration, and reporting speed. Users require better trend analysis tools, increased visualization capabilities, and a more flexible configuration to optimize use. Real-time data access remains an area for development.

What features define SAP Business Warehouse?

HANA Integration: Enables real-time data access
Excel and ERP Integration: Seamless interaction with popular tools
Advanced Reporting: Delivers high-quality reporting capabilities
Hybrid Functionality: Offers versatile use cases
Drag-and-Drop: Simplifies reporting and analysis tasks
Authorization Model: Ensures secure data handling

What benefits and ROI can users expect?

Operational Efficiency: Enhanced by alert and monitoring tools
Data Governance: Robust models meet diverse needs
Centralized Data: Comprehensive data storage and access
Decision-Making Support: BI tools inform strategic planning

SAP Business Warehouse plays a crucial role in industries like finance and supply chain, leveraging data warehousing, ETL processes, and powerful BI applications to enhance decision-making with tools like Business Objects, Tableau, and Power BI. It serves as a central data repository, facilitating extensive reporting and analysis capabilities.

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

October 2026

Free Report: SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake

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