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SAP HANA vs SAP IQ comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.6
Companies have mixed experiences with SAP HANA, benefiting from efficiency but facing potential unforeseen costs and integration challenges.
Sentiment score
7.0
SAP IQ offers a high ROI with low implementation costs and significant hardware savings, despite some users not tracking exact returns.
We do not feel we're getting value for the investment due to the additional resources needed for integration and maintenance.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.1
SAP HANA support is generally positive but needs improvements in response times and issue prioritization, varying by user experience.
Sentiment score
5.6
SAP IQ's service is mixed, with good global support but issues with expertise, staff shortages, and inefficient initial responses.
The community support is better than the official SAP support.
While issues are resolved eventually, the first level of support is not as good as we would like.
We often do not know when our ticket will be handled or who is handling it, and we can wait from one to four days for a reply, which is unexpected.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
SAP HANA is praised for its scalable, adaptable infrastructure, efficiently managing large-scale deployments despite potential speed impacts.
Sentiment score
7.4
SAP IQ excels in scalability, with easy expansion, though some multiplex architecture limitations are noted by users.
Our operations have grown from a hundred data operations a day to as many in a couple of seconds.
The scalability rating is based on the ability to expand.
There is enough scalability offered by SAP to meet our deployment needs.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
SAP HANA is highly stable and reliable, with ongoing updates improving performance and most users rating its stability highly.
Sentiment score
6.1
SAP IQ's stability has improved, handling high data volumes well, despite occasional issues in earlier versions under high load.
We recently faced customer data loss during the cluster handover or failover fallback.
We have not had any problems in the last seven to eight years.
Regarding stability, they are using legacy systems and have implemented SAP HANA.
 

Room For Improvement

SAP HANA is criticized for high cost, integration challenges, cumbersome interface, complex setup, and need for better customization.
SAP IQ needs better integration, stability, training, and affordability to overcome awareness and concurrency issues, enhancing user appeal.
Many customers still prefer Oracle, possibly due to cost or familiarity, despite SAP mandating that they have to go to SAP HANA.
The main issue is the ecosystem, which lacks the widespread support that SQL enjoys.
The setup process and deployment process for SAP HANA is complex.
 

Setup Cost

SAP HANA is costly, especially on-premise, but cloud deployment offers a more affordable option for smaller businesses.
SAP IQ offers cost-effective licensing options and economical implementation, ideal for large databases needing partitioning and performance evaluation.
It's a recurring subscription model, which is expensive compared to legacy systems with just a maintenance fee.
SAP is not a cheap company, and its licenses are expensive.
I would rate the price for SAP HANA as high.
 

Valuable Features

SAP HANA's in-memory computing offers fast data processing, seamless integration, robust security, and efficient analytics for enhanced database management.
SAP IQ provides fast query processing, data compression, and scalability, ideal for BI with high data demands and user concurrency.
It allows some tables to be stored in a column base, others in a row base, and the In-Memory functionalities are mostly the highlight of SAP HANA, especially compared to disk-based memory users.
One of our dashboards using Excelsius was previously developed on normal BW on Oracle data, which took 10 minutes to open. After developing the same calculation views using those tables and replacing them with calculation views in Excelsius, the dashboard opened in seconds.
The concept enhances speed, allowing the database to serve and move data quickly.
 

Categories and Ranking

SAP HANA
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
88
Ranking in other categories
Data Virtualization (2nd), Embedded Database (4th)
SAP IQ
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
27th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (16th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of SAP HANA is 10.5%, down from 11.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP IQ is 0.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Relational Databases Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Dhiraj Jankar - PeerSpot reviewer
Users appreciate the mix of in-memory architecture and ease of backend management
The most valuable SAP HANA features are that, compared to Oracle, there is less administrative work and less complex work to handle, making it very straightforward. The tool itself takes care of the backend work. The main benefits SAP HANA provides to users include its architecture, which combines both column store and row store capabilities. Some places find the row feature important, whereas others find column store important. It allows some tables to be stored in a column base, others in a row base, and the In-Memory functionalities are mostly the highlight of SAP HANA, especially compared to disk-based memory users. This was the main reason SAP HANA was introduced initially.
Tejas Raj - PeerSpot reviewer
Columnar database, so pulling records is easy but there isn't enough documentation for installation
I've seen very few SAP IQ systems in recent years. So people are moving away from SAP IQ In the last three years, I've rarely encountered customers using it. Fewer systems with SAP IQ usage among our customers. Most of them have moved on to HANA. There are parallel products, and there are also viable alternatives from AWS, so many have migrated to those.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
14%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
41%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What are the biggest benefits of using SAP HANA?
Based on my work with SAP HANA, the biggest benefit that it can bring to your business is total data management. This product is by SAP - a company that serves almost all needs a client may have co...
Is SAP HANA’s customer and technical support reliable?
We have been using SAP HANA for a fairly short period of time and have only taken advantage of their customer support. So far, we have not had issues that required specialized help from technical s...
Is SAP HANA difficult to set up and start using?
SAP HANA is fairly easy to set up, however, I do not think a complete beginner can do it. You certainly need some preparation - either you need to have experience with similar solutions, or with ot...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP IQ?
IQ implementation costs about three thousand dollars. It's less expensive compared to alternatives like Teradata Base in terms of transactional efficiency.
What needs improvement with SAP IQ?
The primary negative aspect is the cost, which can be a challenge due to the economic conditions in Peru.
What is your primary use case for SAP IQ?
I worked on implementing new databases, migration data in production, and developer environments with SAP IQ.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance, HANA
Sybase IQ
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Unilever, NHS 24, adidas Group, CHIO Aachen, Hamburg Port Authority (HPA), Bangkok Airways Public Company Limited
ASR Group, Citrix, State of Indiana, PocketCard Co. Ltd.
Find out what your peers are saying about SAP HANA vs. SAP IQ and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,579 professionals have used our research since 2012.