SAP Business Warehouse vs Snowflake Analytics 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 #9 with an average rating of 8.5. SAP holds a 1.7% mindshare in CDW, compared to Snowflake Computing’s 0.9% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of SAP users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Snowflake Computing users who would recommend it.

SAP Business Warehouse

Read 25 SAP Business Warehouse reviews

721 Views
548 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Snowflake Analytics

Read 40 Snowflake Analytics reviews

793 Views
270 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

SAP Business Warehouse

Snowflake Analytics

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

SAP Business Warehouse and Snowflake Analytics are prominent competitors in data management and analytics. Snowflake Analytics is favored for its cloud-native approach, providing superior flexibility and scalability.

Features: SAP Business Warehouse provides robust data modeling tools, strong analytics within an enterprise ecosystem, and seamless SAP integration. Snowflake Analytics excels with elastic scalability, supports various data workloads, and offers advanced data warehousing features.

Room for Improvement: SAP Business Warehouse could enhance ease of use and reduce complexity in integration processes. Real-time data processing and improved user interface are also areas for growth. Snowflake Analytics can enhance cost control features, expand integration capabilities, and improve non-technical user accessibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SAP Business Warehouse requires significant setup and integration, while Snowflake Analytics facilitates quick cloud-based deployment. Snowflake's customer service is praised for swift responses, whereas SAP Business Warehouse has an extensive support network but slower response times.

Pricing and ROI: SAP Business Warehouse has a higher setup cost and takes longer to achieve ROI, whereas Snowflake Analytics offers a cost-effective pay-as-you-go pricing model that ensures quicker ROI and reduces initial investment.

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

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake Analytics

July 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 Analytics

Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse

9th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Web Analytics (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 1.7%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake Analytics is 0.9%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

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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Paresh_Nayak

Solutions Architect at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Enables data-driven decision-making with robust features and effective scalability

The internal design engine and the columnar database are particularly valuable. These features reduce input and output memory, which is crucial in handling large data sets. The solution fulfills the business requirement for scaling and analytics. Snowflake Analytics supports data security with a single sign-on feature and complies with framework regulations, which is highly beneficial.

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

"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the integration with SAP ERP."

"SAP Business Warehouse is a scalable solution."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"The real-time information is great."

"What I like most about SAP Business Warehouse is its ability to feed data into new, multiple systems in various formats. It can open its data to any system over gateway services or a portal or application that needs to consume and analyze data."

More SAP Business Warehouse pros

"The most valuable feature of Snowflake Analytics is the ability to control and manage the cost."

"One advantage is that installation is unnecessary since it's cloud-based. You subscribe to a Snowflake instance, configure it, and start using it. It's very user-friendly and allows you to scale up or down based on usage."

"One of the key advancements in Snowflake Analytics is data sharing."

"It is quite a convenient tool."

"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."

"It helps with business intelligence by providing analytics that can be reported."

"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."

"Scaling is very high – there's no problem for scaling purposes. The learning curve is very small. And there are a lot of advanced features like handling duplicates, security, data governance, data sharing, and data cloning."

More Snowflake Analytics pros

Cons

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

More SAP Business Warehouse cons

"The scheduling of jobs requires improvement, particularly in terms of the user interface which currently lacks certain features found in comparable platforms."

"The solution’s interface is good but it could be improved."

"The pricing visibility is complex. If you understand pricing, you can estimate costs, but if not, it can be challenging."

"The solution's high price can be an area of concern that needs improvement."

"Snowflake could improve in the areas of advanced machine learning AML and generative AI."

"There are issues while loading data from Snowflake Analytics to the Power BI reporting."

"When we insert data into a large table, it takes a lot of time."

"The platform could work easier for AI implementation compared to one of its competitors."

More Snowflake Analytics cons

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."

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

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

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

"The solution is quite expensive."

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

"It's not costly if you configure it properly to ensure optimal performance. People don't configure it properly, which is why costs go up."

"It is not overly expensive. I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, with ten being expensive."

"The cost of Snowflake Analytics is low, any small organization can use it."

"The product's pricing is subjective."

"The solution's price is high and I would rate it an eight out of ten."

"The tool is quite expensive."

"Snowflake charges per query, which amounts to a very minor cost, such as $0.015 per query."

"I have been using free trial version."

More Snowflake Analytics pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

15%

Retailer

Government

Energy/Utilities Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Retailer

10%

Insurance Company

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 do you like most about Snowflake Analytics?

Its performance speed is very good.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake Analytics?

Snowflake Analytics is quite economical. It does not appear to incur significant extra expenses beyond the solution's initial cost. However, a complete pricing analysis is still in progress.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Snowflake Analytics?

The advantages of Snowflake Analytics outweigh the disadvantages. However, if it offered flexibility similar to Oracle and supported more heterogeneous data sources and database connectivity, it wo...

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

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Adobe Analytics vs Snowflake Analytics

Compared 21% of the time

Amplitude vs Snowflake Analytics

Compared 20% of the time

Teradata vs Snowflake Analytics

Compared 16% of the time

Mixpanel vs Snowflake Analytics

Compared 15% of the time

SAP IQ vs Snowflake Analytics

Compared 14% of the time

More Snowflake Analytics Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse

July 2025

Download SAP Business Warehouse product report

Buyer's Guide

Snowflake Analytics

July 2025

Download Snowflake Analytics product report

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

Conventional data platforms and big data solutions struggle to deliver on their fundamental purpose: to enable any user to work with any data, without limits on scale, performance or flexibility. Whether you’re a data analyst, data scientist, data engineer, or any other business or technology professional, you’ll get more from your data with Snowflake.

To achieve this, we built a new data platform from the ground up for the cloud. It’s designed with a patented new architecture to be the centerpiece for data pipelines, data warehousing, data lakes, data application development, and for building data exchanges to easily and securely share governed data. The result, A platform delivered as a service that’s powerful but simple to use.

Snowflake’s cloud data platform supports a multi-cloud strategy, including a cross-cloud approach to mix and match clouds as you see fit. Snowflake delivers advantages such as global data replication, which means you can move your data to any cloud in any region, without having to re-code your applications or learn new skills.

Snowflake Computing

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

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake Analytics

July 2025

Free Report: SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake Analytics

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