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SAP Business Warehouse vs Snowflake Analytics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

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
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Snowflake Analytics
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
12th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Web Analytics (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 2.3%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake Analytics is 3.4%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Snowflake Analytics3.4%
SAP Business Warehouse2.3%
Other94.3%
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

VishnuReddy2 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Garima Goel - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Principal Engineer at Nagarro
Have created secure cloud-based data lakes and improved real-time data processing using integrated AI features
There are many capabilities which Snowflake Analytics offers that I find valuable, such as the storage and compute engine that allows working with any cloud system such as AWS or Azure, alongside its efficiencies in storage computation and cost-effectiveness, which saves money compared to on-premise systems. We also have features such as pre-cached results, Time Travel, and fail-safe, which are very useful for restoring data if deleted accidentally, and the streams and data pipes that facilitate real-time ingestion are great features as well. Snowflake Analytics offers multiple new connectors, allowing me to connect it with Kafka, and with Snowpark, I can work with any programming language such as Python, Java, or Scala for data processing and analysis. The data sharing feature offered by Snowflake Analytics is good because it allows sharing specific sets of data to end customers or users from different Snowflake Analytics accounts without exposing the entire dataset for data security reasons. Snowflake Analytics' support for machine learning models and real-time insights has enhanced significantly. Originally, it wasn't strong in AI/ML, but now it has multiple models and forecasting capabilities, providing good competition to tools such as Databricks and Spark. In BI, I have worked majorly with Microsoft Power BI, and the integration with Snowflake Analytics is very easy. The way we integrate Snowflake Analytics with other on-premise systems just requires the warehouse details, username, passwords, and the account name, along with multiple options such as client ID and credentials for logging in and creating a session. The end-to-end encryption provided by Snowflake Analytics is very important because, in my previous firm, working in finance and investment management, data encryption is necessary due to the sensitive nature of customer data and the involvement of people's money. It's crucial to have encryption in transit and at rest, along with data masking features which Snowflake Analytics offers.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the new version of Business Explorer Analyzer, which is a very good version because there are a lot of analytical features of Excel also."
"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 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 features that I have found most valuable are its capabilities to connect to Excel and to slice and dice."
"The most useful feature is definitely the speed."
"Having the back-end data set with the right information is the best qualification for this solution."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the integration with SAP ERP."
"What I like most about SAP Business Warehouse is that it's a seamless integration platform."
"Deployment is straightforward as it's a SaaS product. No maintenance required."
"The Snowflake features I find most beneficial for data analysis are primarily related to analytics, particularly their features like materialized views and queues, which are especially useful for dashboarding purposes."
"Snowflake Analytics is pretty easy to use with the connectors for integration with the tools and systems in my company."
"The most valuable features of Snowflake for our data analytics are its time travel capability, allowing easy data recovery, and its automatic optimization of partitioning and clustering."
"One of the valuable features is the solution’s time travel capability. The solution is highly stable. The solution is highly scalable. The initial setup is straightforward, and the deployment process is quick and efficient. I recommend the solution. Overall, I rate it a perfect ten."
"We have experienced a 40 to 50% improvement in ROI compared to legacy systems."
"Snowflake Analytics has played a major role in improving our data model transformations, increasing our productivity by allowing us to do things very quickly and receive results rapidly, and reducing the time and effort required for coding compared to traditional methods and Python."
"In most cases, Snowflake improves our operational efficiency if we optimize the warehouse."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"SAP Business Warehouse could improve by having more out-of-the-box use cases to cover more business types or operations."
"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."
"From a support perspective, SAP Business Warehouse is quite a complex module."
"In the next release, my suggestion would be to have user-friendly interfaces and performance issues be addressed."
"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."
"So far, the initial setup process in our company has not been easy enough for us to understand."
"Machine learning in Snowflake isn't as advanced as in other products. I haven't heard of any successful industry-wide use cases of machine learning implemented in Snowflake. It might take a couple of years to reach the same level as Databricks."
"If you have a lot of computations, Snowflake becomes costlier."
"I cannot comment on the product's stability because we are still struggling with its performance."
"Improvements are needed in importing and exporting large datasets to and from reporting tools."
"AIML-based SQL prompt and query generation could be an area for enhancement."
"We haven't witnessed any ROI, however, it's not really a goal of the solution."
"The solution's high price can be an area of concern that needs improvement."
"Implementing everything on-premise is challenging because it require proper support from advisors, DBAs, and others."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."
"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 solution is quite expensive."
"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."
"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 product's pricing is subjective."
"It is not overly expensive. I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, with ten being expensive."
"The tool is quite expensive."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing a seven. The solution's pricing is high."
"The solution's price is high and I would rate it an eight out of ten."
"I rate the product's licensing cost a five or six on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price, and ten is high price."
"Snowflake charges per query, which amounts to a very minor cost, such as $0.015 per query."
"I rate the product price a seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price, and ten is high price."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Construction Company
9%
Healthcare Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Construction Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise23
 

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...
What needs improvement with SAP Business Warehouse?
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 Warehou...
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake Analytics?
The pricing for Snowflake Analytics is reasonable, but as I am not part of the management team, I am not certain about our organization's exact costs. Overall, the return on investment for this too...
What needs improvement with Snowflake Analytics?
One improvement Snowflake Analytics could benefit from is in cost, particularly during peak hours. Sometimes, due to its automatic scalability, we think it has scaled up, but it does not always hap...
What is your primary use case for Snowflake Analytics?
I am using Snowflake Analytics because we are already using Snowflake for data engineering and data warehousing tasks, and we are using it for analytics as well as business intelligence reporting. ...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone
Lionsgate, Adobe, Sony, Capital One, Akamai, Deliveroo, Snagajob, Logitech, University of Notre Dame, Runkeeper
Find out what your peers are saying about SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake Analytics and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,988 professionals have used our research since 2012.