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 7.3, while Snowflake Computing is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.3. SAP holds a 2.3% mindshare in CDW, compared to Snowflake Computing’s 1.5% 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 26 SAP Business Warehouse reviews

912 Views
547 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Snowflake Analytics

Read 43 Snowflake Analytics reviews

959 Views
345 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: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake Analytics

December 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

6.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Snowflake Analytics

Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse

10th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Web Analytics (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 2.3%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake Analytics is 1.5%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Data Warehouse Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Snowflake Analytics	1.5%
SAP Business Warehouse	2.3%
Other	96.2%

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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Garima Goel

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.

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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 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."

"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."

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

"The most valuable feature of SAP Business Warehouse is transformation, where I extract data from different sources, particularly the raw data. Then I do some transformations and store that in a format that allows me to do reporting easily."

"Now, because of the HANA integration, the hard disk and RAM are together, and because of that, the output is very quick and very fast actually."

"The product is very stable."

"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."

More SAP Business Warehouse pros

"The performance has been good."

"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 has a streaming capability to work with real-time streaming data and delta tables."

"The most important feature is the warehouse functionality."

"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

"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."

"The advanced features like time travel, zero copy cloning and scalability have been most useful. Snowflake requires zero maintenance for Data Warehousing on the cloud system."

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

More Snowflake Analytics pros

Cons

"Integration with SAP Business Warehouse's ETL tools is not straightforward."

"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."

"There is room for improvement from a technical perspective."

"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."

"The solution could offer better connectivity with other databases."

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

"Integration with SAP Business Warehouse's ETL tools is not straightforward."

More SAP Business Warehouse cons

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

"The UI could be more user-friendly."

"We were experiencing errors while running reports and making connections."

"The UI must be improved."

"One notable absence in Snowflake's offerings is an on-premises solution."

"The technical support is not very good."

"Navigating the user console can be challenging, particularly when looking for details like the account ID."

"The tool should support EIM use cases. I guess the product is already working on it. I look forward to seeing inbuilt AI generative tools in the solution's future releases. The tool's price can be a little lower. The solution's on-premises support is also very limited. We have to rely on other support services to deploy it on-premises."

More Snowflake Analytics cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"The tool is quite expensive."

"The product's pricing is subjective."

"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."

"The pricing is on the higher side."

"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."

"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 an expensive solution, but the kind of usability and flexibility it proactively provides for the organizations justify the price."

More Snowflake Analytics pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

13%

Retailer

10%

Energy/Utilities Company

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

Healthcare Company

Retailer

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	11
Midsize Enterprise	12
Large Enterprise	21

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 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 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?

In my opinion, Snowflake Analytics can be improved by introducing more features, such as additional integration options. I remember using Snowflake Pro, which allows exporting direct data into the ...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 18% of the time

BigQuery vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 18% of the time

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 11% of the time

SAP BW4HANA vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 10% of the time

Snowflake vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 9% of the time

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Amplitude vs Snowflake Analytics

Compared 17% of the time

SAP Business Data Cloud vs Snowflake Analytics

Compared 13% of the time

Teradata vs Snowflake Analytics

Compared 11% of the time

Adobe Analytics vs Snowflake Analytics

Compared 10% of the time

SAP IQ vs Snowflake Analytics

Compared 9% of the time

More Snowflake Analytics Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse

January 2026

Download SAP Business Warehouse product report

Buyer's Guide

Snowflake Analytics

January 2026

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

December 2025

Free Report: SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake Analytics

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