CockroachDB vs SAP HANA comparison

Cockroach and SAP are both solutions in the Relational Databases Tools category. Cockroach is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.4, while SAP is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.4. Cockroach holds a 3.7% mindshare in SQL, compared to SAP’s 11.4% mindshare. Additionally, 83% of Cockroach users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of SAP users who would recommend it.

CockroachDB

Read 12 CockroachDB reviews

2,677 Views
1,856 Comparison Views

83% willing to recommend

SAP HANA

Read 85 SAP HANA reviews

8,321 Views
7,228 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

CockroachDB

SAP HANA

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

SAP HANA and CockroachDB compete in the database management category, where SAP HANA stands out for its performance in large enterprises and CockroachDB excels in distributed data management. Based on feature comparisons, SAP HANA has the upper hand in enterprise functionality and analytics, whereas CockroachDB leads in resilience and distributed architecture.

Features: SAP HANA provides real-time database capabilities, high data compression, and strong memory utilization, which makes it effective for large enterprises requiring robust functionality. It shines in supplier relationship management, data integration, and analytics. CockroachDB focuses on high fault-tolerance for clusters, easy node deployment, and PostgreSQL compatibility, which are beneficial for applications requiring resilience and geo-replication.

Room for Improvement: SAP HANA could improve by enhancing its customization, ease of integration, user interface, and cost-effectiveness, with more focus on localization and flexibility. CockroachDB could enhance its PostgreSQL compatibility, disaster recovery capabilities, and support for various protocols. While SAP HANA faces challenges with high costs and complexity, CockroachDB needs to bolster enterprise-level features and compatibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SAP HANA offers flexible deployment options including on-premises, hybrid, and private cloud environments, but customization can be complex. SAP's customer service tends to be varied with some reports of slow responses though they provide 24/7 support. CockroachDB is more straightforward with public cloud and on-premises deployment, however, it could benefit from improved support consistency and user resources.

Pricing and ROI: SAP HANA is typically high-cost, requiring significant investment yet providing good ROI for large enterprises due to its extensive functionalities. Its annual licensing can add substantial costs. CockroachDB, however, has a more cost-effective structure, offering adaptable options for different use cases, including free open-source versions and serverless cloud offers. SAP HANA suits organizations with large budgets, while CockroachDB is accessible for those focusing on distributed resilience and scalability.

To learn more, read our detailed CockroachDB vs. SAP HANA Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

CockroachDB vs. SAP HANA

April 2025

Download the complete report

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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

CockroachDB

Ranking in Relational Databases Tools

12th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

SAP HANA

Ranking in Relational Databases Tools

4th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Virtualization (2nd), Embedded Database (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of CockroachDB is 3.7%, up from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP HANA is 11.4%, up from 11.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Relational Databases Tools

Featured Reviews

Antonio Tringali

Software Engineer at a consultancy with self employed

Open source with extensive documentation and a University for training

I am a freelancer. A client of mine wanted a solution that would allow them to scale yet not abandon the familiar PostgreSQL front-end (and rewrite a part of their source code). Scalability aside, CockroachDB is a fine way forward from PostgreSQL and is not changing the client source code part of the system. If you are lucky and you do not use newer features from recent versions of PostgreSQL or PostgreSQL extensions, it's fine. There are nice-to-have features for big organizations like regional tables. At the moment, my client simply does not use these. However, the serverless offer from CockroachDB is reacting well as data grows.

Read full review

Jayarami Reddy Pujeri

ERP Head at ID Fresh Food

Comprehensive system with real-time analytics for versatile industry applications

Our primary use case is working with various clients in industries such as pharmaceuticals and other services. We support clients as implementers of SAP HANA, providing expertise in functionality, finance, logistics, and processes The solution is very user-friendly and supports all kinds of…

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 best feature of CockroachDB is the ability to keep the nodes in different locations."

"The product has valuable security features."

"The tool's most valuable feature is node syncing, which takes only 0.54 milliseconds."

"What I like best is its ability to solve data residency issues. The main advantage is auto geo partitioning, built into the product. This means we don't have to spin up separate servers in each region, which would be much more costly."

"CockroachDB is highly reliable."

"The most valuable feature is that CockroachDB is a distributed database, which can deploy nodes running in different regions."

"The initial setup and deployment are simple."

"I use CockroachDB to test big data samples and to create the best structure for databases. We have four users and required 10 people for deployment and maintenance."

More CockroachDB pros

"The solution is very stable."

"We can save data very easily."

"Our operations have grown from a hundred data operations a day to as many in a couple of seconds."

"The memory is the solution's most valuable feature. It's the main feature of HANA. Others are still the regular IT databases that are on storage and are therefore much slower than HANA. The solution is quite fast."

"Eases management of databases."

"It's sufficed all of our requirements. We primarily needed it to run SAP applications, like NetWeaver or S/4HANA, and it has been really good at that."

"The initial setup is straightforward. It usually takes around eight months but it depends on a customer's requirements. We can spend a month or two customizing."

"The solution offers advanced features that the company was struggling to implement."

More SAP HANA pros

Cons

"Cockroach does not support all types of protocols. I need to improve it myself to support a CouchDB on my network."

"The product must improve its disaster recovery features."

"The platform could be more extensible."

"I find the serverless offer a bit confusing."

"The initial setup and pricing could be improved."

"We are looking for more features to support distributed high availability and geo-partitioning."

"I think the engine itself could be improved. If you miss a partition key, it should be able to be modeled. This is where AI could be really helpful. For example, if a user is from Australia, the system should know to look for their data there first instead of searching in the US or another continent."

"CockroachDB needs to improve store processes."

More CockroachDB cons

"A documents preview could be helpful."

"The initial setup was very, very complex, tedious, and costly and required someone with great expertise to complete it."

"The high price of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."

"The challenge right now is all databases are on S4 HANA architecture. You're running it for HANA, but not all the functionalities are available. If they can speed up getting all the databases on S4 HANA that would help."

"There could be better management for faster updates, last year there were some changes in India to the e-invoicing feature."

"SAP HANA is not strong like Oracle when it comes to finance. They are only strong with the logistic business project."

"The pricing could be better."

"They can improve their technology for the CRM subsystem. There are other products that are better and more effective for the CRM subsystem. Its price could be better. It is expensive."

More SAP HANA cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's price depends on the user's company and the contract model they enter into with CockroachDB. Depending on the contract model one enters into with CockroachDB, the product may or may not be expensive."

"I've used CockroachDB at a small scale on the free accounts because we are only testing."

"The pricing is good but can be made cheaper. I would rate the pricing a five out of ten."

"The solution's pricing is not cheap. However, the good thing is that customers are willing to pay for it if they want it."

"The platform is affordable even for the enterprise version. It provides value for investment in terms of performance."

"The price of SAP HANA is very expensive and it is paid annually."

"I would rate the pricing of the solution a ten on ten. The pricing for on-prem SAP HANA is on a yearly basis and expensive. I am not aware of the actual pricing but it is based on 64 Gigabytes. For instance, if you consider $10,000 for 64 Gigabytes, then you can calculate the cost for Terabytes in case you have one. You will have to buy expensive hardware as well which is quite a lot."

"SAP HANA is affordable. I rate it a seven out of ten."

"SAP HANA is very expensive here in China. My company bought the SAP ERP suite, which includes SAP HANA. For others who use SAP HANA as an analytical database, CPU numbers will affect the pricing, so as a solution, it's costly."

"SAP HANA is expensive, but unfortunately, we do not have any alternatives."

"The licensing cost for SAP HANA is approximately $200 per user per month."

"The pricing is relatively high for both customers and partners."

"The pricing for SAP HANA is high. You pay a lot for the license, and you also have to pay for some add-ons."

More SAP HANA pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

37%

Computer Software Company

13%

Educational Organization

Manufacturing Company

15%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about CockroachDB?

The subset of SQL that my client is using is completely supported.

See all answers

What needs improvement with CockroachDB?

I would like CockroachDB to have more compatibility with PostgreSQL, especially with the connection string and technical integrations.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for CockroachDB?

I am studying how to deploy CockroachDB and YugaByteDB, and learning some basic information about them. I am testing these databases as part of my school application to find a suitable database for...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 20% of the time

Citus Data vs CockroachDB

Compared 16% of the time

YugabyteDB vs CockroachDB

Compared 11% of the time

Oracle Database vs CockroachDB

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon Aurora vs CockroachDB

Compared 3% of the time

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Oracle Database vs SAP HANA

Compared 23% of the time

SQL Server vs SAP HANA

Compared 22% of the time

MySQL vs SAP HANA

Compared 11% of the time

IBM Db2 Database vs SAP HANA

Compared 9% of the time

Apache Spark vs SAP HANA

Compared 6% of the time

More SAP HANA Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

CockroachDB

April 2025

Download CockroachDB product report

Buyer's Guide

SAP HANA

March 2025

Download SAP HANA product report

Also Known As

No data available

SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance, HANA

Overview

CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database built on a transactional and strongly-consistent key-value store. It scales horizontally; survives disk, machine, rack, and even datacenter failures with minimal latency disruption and no manual intervention; supports strongly-consistent ACID transactions; and provides a familiar SQL API for structuring, manipulating, and querying data.

CockroachDB is inspired by Google’s Spanner and F1 technologies, and it’s completely open source.

Cockroach

SAP HANA, also known as SAP High-performance Analytics Appliance, is a multi-model database that stores data in its memory, allowing users to avoid disk storage. The product combines its robust database with services for creating applications. SAP HANA is faster than other database management systems (DBMS) because it stores data in column-based tables in main memory and brings online analytical processing (OLAP) and online transaction processing (OLTP) together.

The column-oriented in-memory database design allows users to run high-speed transactions alongside advanced analytics, all in a single system. This provides companies with the ability to process very large amounts of data with low latency and query data in an instant. By combining multiple data management capabilities, the solution simplifies IT, helps businesses with innovations, and facilitates digital transformation.

The solution is structured into five groups of capabilities, categorized as:

Database design
Database management
Application development
Advanced analytics
Data virtualization

There are three more SAP products that work alongside SAP HANA and complete the experience for users together. SAP S/4HANA Cloud is a ready-to-run cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP). SAP BW/4HANA is a packaged data warehouse, based on SAP HANA, which allows users to consolidate data across the enterprise to get a consistent view of their data. Finally, SAP Cloud is a single database as a service (DBaaS) foundation for modern applications and analytics across all enterprise data. All three products can combine with SAP HANA to deliver to users an optimized experience regarding their data.

SAP HANA Features

Each architectural group of capabilities of SAP HANA has various features that users can benefit from. These include:

Parallel processing database: SAP HANA utilizes a single platform to run transactional and analytical workloads.
ACID compliance: This feature ensures compliance with requirements for Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID) standards.
Multi-tenancy: This feature allows multiple tenant databases to run in one system while sharing the same memory and processors.
Multi-tier storage and persistent memory support: SAP HANA's native storage extension is a built-in capability to manage between memory and persistent storage, including SAP HANA Cloud Data Lake.
Scaling: The scaling feature supports terabytes of data in a single server and distributes large tables across multiple servers in a cluster to scale further.
Data modeling: This feature consists of graphical modeling tools that enable collaboration between stakeholders and the creation of models to execute complex business logic and data transformation in real time.
Stored procedures: The product has a native language to build stored procedures and uses advanced capabilities to create complex logic.
Administration: This feature consists of administration tools for various platform lifecycle, performance, and management operations and automations.
Security: SAP HANA provides its users with real-time data anonymization features to extract value from data while protecting privacy.
Availability and recovery: The tool supports high availability and disaster recovery through an array of techniques, including backup, storage mirroring, synchronous, asynchronous, and multitarget system replication.
Extended application services: Through its built-in application server, users can develop services such as REST and ODATA, as well as web applications that can run on multiple locations.
Client access: The product offers clients the ability to access it via other application platforms and languages, including Java, JavaScript, R, and Go.
Application lifecycle management: This set of features facilitates the building and packaging of applications, transporting them for development to test to production, and then deploying them.
Application development: This feature consists of a set of tools that offer application development on premises and in the Cloud. The programming language ABAP includes additional optimized features to build extensions to SAP applications.
Search: The search feature uses SQL to locate text promptly across multiple columns and textual content.
Spatial processing: This product feature provides native support for spatial data types and spatial functions.
Graph: Through this feature, users of the product can store and process highly connected data using a property graph.
Streaming analytics: This feature combines various data sources that users can utilize to discover trends over a set period.
Data integration and replication: The solution offers comprehensive features to handle all data integration scenarios.
Data federation: This feature allows users to perform queries on remote data sources in real time with data federation.
Caching: The capacity to cache data provides users with the ability to optimize federated queries against remote sources of data.

SAP HANA Benefits

SAP HANA provides many benefits for its users. These include:

This solution offers a high level of data and application security, beginning from a secure setup and providing continuous support.
SAP HANA offers augmentation for applications and analytics with built-in machine learning (ML).
The solution works in a timely manner, as it provides a response to queries within seconds in large production applications.
SAP HANA simplifies work, as it provides a single gateway to all user data with advanced data virtualization.
The product is very flexible, as it allows users to deploy applications in a public or private cloud, in multiple clouds, on premises, or hybrid.
SAP HANA scales easily for data volume and concurrent users across a distributed environment.
This is a powerful solution in terms of querying large datasets with a massively parallel processing (MPP) database.
SAP HANA is a versatile product that supports hybrid transactional and analytical processing as well as many data types.
The product provides a smaller data footprint with no data duplication or advanced compression, and reduces data silos.

Reviews from Real Users

According to a database consultant at a pharma/biotech company, SAP HANA is a very robust solution with good data access.

Bruno V., owner at LAVORO AUTOM INF E COM LTDA, likes SAP HANA because the product offers advanced features, helps reduce hours, and makes it easy to find what you need.

SAP

Sample Customers

Baidu, Kindred, Tierion, Heroic Labs, Gorgias

Unilever, NHS 24, adidas Group, CHIO Aachen, Hamburg Port Authority (HPA), Bangkok Airways Public Company Limited

Buyer's Guide

CockroachDB vs. SAP HANA

April 2025

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