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SAP Business Warehouse vs Snowflake Analytics comparison

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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 (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 2.4%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake Analytics is 3.5%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Snowflake Analytics3.5%
SAP Business Warehouse2.4%
Other94.1%
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.
Hemanthreddy Vakiti - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Daily restaurant dashboards have become faster and now support simultaneous team analytics
Some of the best features of Snowflake Analytics is how it is separated for compute and storage, which allows multiple teams to run queries without performance impact. Our project has more than nine or ten teams, so if a team is working on a particular dashboard and another team wants to work on Snowflake Analytics, they can easily work on it without disturbing the work of one team, ensuring that the work can be consistent and multiple users can use the tool simultaneously. This is one of the main features I appreciate about Snowflake Analytics.The other aspect is how the query performance is high due to its columnar storage and also automatic optimization, allowing for scaling down during weekdays when there is less data and scaling up during weekends or festivals when the data can be huge. Because of this automatic scaling, if there is less data, we are using only 5 GB instead of 10 GB, which reduces the storage level, and consequently, the cost can be reduced. This automatic scaling and optimization saves us a huge amount of money for our project. Snowflake Analytics has impacted our organization positively by providing faster query performance and better scalability. Previously, we faced issues with slow queries due to traditional systems, but within Snowflake, we can assign separate virtual warehouses for reporting as well as data processing, ensuring that it does not impact tool performance and does not delay reporting to business users. Analysts can run complex queries without affecting ETL workloads due to this separation, which has improved our speed of reporting, and our business users have expressed happiness due to how fast we are generating reports during peak hours.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"My advice would be if you have a data block and if you really want a big solution on the reporting side of it with slicing and dicing, definitely go ahead with BW when it comes to SAP related data."
"What I like most about SAP Business Warehouse is that it's a seamless integration platform."
"The Real-time InfoCube is quite useful in terms of getting information fast when we need it."
"The customer support is wonderful. If your technical team is stuck somewhere, they are there to help."
"I think BW is one of the best products at the moment."
"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."
"In terms of stability, comparatively, the solution is quite stable."
"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."
"What we found most valuable in Snowflake Analytics are its attributes that are very convenient for business use such as data sharing, cloning, time travel, and fail-safe. It's a good product all in all."
"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."
"It ensures the optimization of the application development while maintaining the user-friendly nature of its UI."
"It's not necessary to use a physical server."
"I am impressed with the product's data-sharing feature."
"It's a scalable solution because you can analyze a huge amount of data in the solution."
"The performance has been good."
 

Cons

"When some things go wrong, it becomes extremely unreliable."
"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."
"From a support perspective, SAP Business Warehouse is quite a complex module."
"The solution should be more open to the cloud."
"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."
"What I'd like to improve in SAP Business Warehouse is its data structure, that's a little bit rigid. It could be a bit more flexible, so you can design your data structure and improve performance when creating a solution. Currently, the way data is stored in SAP Business Warehouse is rigid."
"The advanced structuring can be complicated and the interface is not very intuitive."
"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."
"One notable absence in Snowflake's offerings is an on-premises solution."
"The solution needs to consider including some updates in the future."
"I would prefer Snowflake Analytics to improve their support response times, as sometimes the responses we receive are not very prompt and ticket assignments may not be timely."
"Moving data from legacy systems to Snowflake is not that easy. There are some cases where processors are not actually compatible with Snowflake."
"The scheduling of jobs requires improvement, particularly in terms of the user interface which currently lacks certain features found in comparable platforms."
"However, if it offered flexibility similar to Oracle and supported more heterogeneous data sources and database connectivity, it would be even better."
"The solution's high price can be an area of concern that needs improvement."
"The product's cost is an area of concern where improvements are required."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."
"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"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 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."
"When using Snowflake, you pay based on your usage. They calculate how much CPU has been used. If you use excess warehouse storage, you are charged one credit per hour. If you are in Asia, you are charged $3 per credit. If you have 10 users running parallel with the same excess, you will be charged $30."
"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."
"The product's pricing is subjective."
"The tool is quite expensive."
"Snowflake Analytics is not an expensive solution, and its pricing is average."
"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."
"It is not overly expensive. I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, with ten being expensive."
"The pricing is on the higher side."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Construction Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Construction Company
17%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

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: September 2026.
915,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.