We performed a comparison between SAP BW4HANA and Snowflake based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Data Warehouse solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The solution is useful for connecting with external systems."
"The most valuable aspect of this solution is that the infrastructure is easy to understand."
"The solution's performance is really good. Also, it's easy to operate, easy to administer, and relatively simple to install."
"It is a stable solution."
"From an ERP point of view and a functionality point of view, it works very well. The benefits are in that of financial costing and material management."
"The processes are the most valuable aspect of this solution."
"The solution is easier to maintain than traditional SAP products."
"I like that it's quite quick."
"It is very fast and the performance is great."
"The solution is easy to use."
"I like the ability to work with a managed service on the cloud and that is easy to start with."
"Snowflake is faster than on-premise systems and allows for variable compute power based on need."
"Scaling is a big plus point of Snowflake."
"The features I found most valuable with this solution are sharing options and built-in time zone conversion."
"It is a highly scalable solution. There is no limit on storage or computing."
"It is a very easy-to-use solution. It is user-friendly, and its setup time is very less."
"Support could be more reliable."
"We cannot integrate with third-party tools like Python or advanced integration options. You can't fine-tune tables within BW or generate specific views or reports."
"They have taken out a few BW functionalities when they redesigned this. The way of multi-dimensional thinking and star schema got a little bit lost. It may be because of the cost, but certain functionalities that were previously implemented from the BW side should come back again in the whole product. It is a young product. It is version 2.0. In time, I'm pretty sure they will come back again because otherwise, it limits the potential of the product, and I have to do a lot of modeling towards that direction. For me, the analytics focus is too much. It is not cube-oriented in that way, so its functionality is limited. It is not really technically limited in the back end; it is more limited in the front end. It has a data-mining mindset for SQL developers. The navigational attributes should be easy. It needs to be built in models. I see the data mark cube or understanding that the composite provider needs to be models in a cube coming back. The multi-dimensional star schema approach and the reporting need to be done as well as possible to leverage the star scheme below. This is definitely not understood by many consultants and even composite providers for star schema. They always think in terms of flat tables, which is limiting. You need to build the right dimensions, objects, and so on. If you can build this in BW4HANA, then you have this understanding that BW4HANA is not forcing you in this direction, but it should force you a bit better in this direction. Maybe a few elements which were in use in BW should come back again. It would help the community to determine the direction to build on the cube. You can have maybe 50 elements, and then you can expand it to what you need by leveraging navigation. So far, this functionality is a little bit limited in the tool, and it is not thought through, but I think it will come. They should also be adding more capabilities for the transformation between different objects. In BW, this is currently limited, especially towards composite providers. It is a bit complex basically in the building. You have to have a lot of knowledge as well as know how to do it better because it is a bit different from BW. There is not too much expertise currently in the consulting markets. Many are trying to build something, but it may be based on their knowledge of what they have from the BW and HANA side. You have to find the right mix from both of them at this time. We also have HANA Native. These are our two different sync sources basically, and we have approaches to connect nicely, but it is hard to manage your team because a lot of coaching is required."
"Pricing would be a good improvement. A lot of customers think that it's very expensive and especially support is very expensive."
"Price wise, this solution is on the higher side."
"I don't see SAP actively supporting the solution now...a better support from SAP would be appreciated."
"The solution is not easy to implement. It requires a lot of learning at the beginning."
"It's complicated to use. You need to spend a lot of time learning about it. The interface could be improved. It's not intuitive to build a data model and use their ETL tools."
"The solution should offer an on-premises version also. We have some requirements where we would prefer to use it as a template."
"More data governance and access control features would be a welcome addition."
"Its transaction application needs improvement."
"If we can have a feature where the results can be moved to different tabs, so that I can compare the results with earlier queries before applying the changes, it would be great."
"It's difficult to know how to size everything correctly."
"The complexity of the initial setup of Snowflake depends on the use case. However, Snowflake itself, we don't set it up. The difficulty comes from the ingestion patterns, depending on what data I'm putting in, what kind of enrichment, and what additional value we have to add. However, it does tend to get complex because we have a lot of semi-structured data which we need to handle in Snowflake. There have been some challenges."
"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."
"Room for improvement would be writebacks. It doesn't support extensively writing back to the database, and it doesn't support web applications effectively. Ultimately, it's a database call, so if we are building web applications using Snowflake, it isn't that effective because there is some turnaround time from the database."
SAP BW4HANA is ranked 7th in Data Warehouse with 34 reviews while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Data Warehouse with 92 reviews. SAP BW4HANA is rated 7.4, while Snowflake is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of SAP BW4HANA writes "An easy-to-operate and administer tool that needs to consider revising its existing licensing cost". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Snowflake writes "Good usability, good data sharing and elastic compute features, and requires less DBA involvement". SAP BW4HANA is most compared with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, Amazon Redshift, SAP HANA, SQL Server and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, whereas Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse. See our SAP BW4HANA vs. Snowflake report.
See our list of best Data Warehouse vendors.
We monitor all Data Warehouse reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.