Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs SAP Business Warehouse comparison

Microsoft and SAP are both solutions in the Cloud Data Warehouse category. Microsoft is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.2, while SAP is ranked #14 with an average rating of 7.4. Microsoft holds a 6.9% mindshare in CDW, compared to SAP’s 1.0% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of SAP users who would recommend it.

Microsoft Azure Synapse Ana...

Read 91 Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics reviews

8,714 Views
3,808 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

SAP Business Warehouse

Read 25 SAP Business Warehouse reviews

766 Views
459 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Microsoft Azure Synapse Ana...

SAP Business Warehouse

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics and SAP Business Warehouse compete in the data management category. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is favored due to cost-effective pricing and broader deployment options, though SAP Business Warehouse excels in integration within the SAP ecosystem.

Features: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is known for its integration capabilities, scalability, and robust analytics functions, including pipeline creation and monitoring. SAP Business Warehouse stands out for its integration with SAP ERP, supporting structured data reporting and facilitating Excel use for end users.

Room for Improvement: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics requires enhanced user-friendliness, AI, and machine learning advancements, alongside better governance and non-Azure integration features. SAP Business Warehouse could benefit from a simplified user interface, setup, and improved connectivity with non-SAP systems to lessen visualization tool dependencies.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics offers flexible deployment across public and hybrid cloud models with generally responsive customer service. SAP Business Warehouse is primarily on-premises, benefiting those in SAP environments, though user feedback indicates a need for more intuitive support and faster response times.

Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics provides competitive, consumption-based pricing models, beneficial for companies moving from traditional infrastructure to reduce capital expenses. SAP Business Warehouse's revenue-based pricing is complex and costly, potentially limiting for smaller enterprises despite recognized ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. SAP Business Warehouse Report (Updated: February 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. SAP Business Warehouse

February 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

Microsoft Azure Synapse Ana...

Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse

2nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

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

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is 6.9%, down from 11.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 1.0%, down from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Data Warehouse

Featured Reviews

Matthew Spieth

Senior Database Administrator at Summa Health System

Beneficial real-time analytics, simple setup, and useful tutorials

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics could improve its compatibility with Visual Studio. One of the challenges for people moving from an on-premise to a cloud solution, such as Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, is that you're constantly working in a browser. There are people that have been working for decades on desktop applications. For them to start working in a browser, it's quite a change. Allowing people to work and do their work inside Visual Studio than in the browser, would be a large advantage.

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JavedKhan1

SAP Security/GRC Manager at Tata Consultancy

Offers powerful analytics and integration capabilities but requires improved upgrade processes

SAP Business Warehouse could have been better. There is room for improvement from a technical perspective. So, from a technical perspective, when we are upgrading a Business Warehouse server or we are migrating from one place to another, the capability required for this upgradation has many manual activities. It took us around a month to streamline our server. Let’s say there are some transaction codes. Transaction code is a set of programs, and when you want to run a program from the backend, you need to hit the transaction code. It is called a T-code. So during the upgrade, many transaction codes get affected, and as a security consultant, it is my responsibility to recheck those transaction codes which are affected. Sometimes more than 100 codes may get affected, sometimes 500, and sometimes more as well. So, it takes a hell lot of time to integrate them again. That is a limitation or defect within the SAP Business Warehouse. SAP Business Warehouse should come up with proper solutions. Upgradation is an automatic activity. It should happen by itself. We just need to initiate it, and the backend SAP server is automatically upgraded. But it should handle the transactional code as well. They should not get absolutely, and any authorization object should not get deleted from the transaction codes. So, that functionality SAP Business Warehouse should come up with.

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

"I like the keynotes and their simplicity. Like other Microsoft products, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is simple to understand and use."

"What I found most valuable in Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is that it's native only for Azure, so you get better performance and there's no issue. To explain further, many different types of data come, in particular, structured and unstructured data. For audit purposes, there's also unstructured data, so the most important aspect is that with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, you have the capability of using both technologies, meaning that you can use or mix structured and unstructured data which is important. This can also be done in Hadoop, and on other platforms, so you have everything in one place. You don't have to worry about how to manage both structured and unstructured data and where to store information. With Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, you can take care of everything, particularly in Azure. The solution also provides you with many features apart from analytics, for example, storage which makes it better."

"I have been working with Microsoft, and they have been very helpful."

"The ability to scale out services on-demand and scale them down when they are not required is most valuable. You are in control of your expenditures, and you are also in control of the horsepower that you need. That's a major advantage."

"Synapse Analytics gives you information and reports in real-time."

"The fact that we can ingest from different types of sources, whether they are internal systems or external sources."

"The most valuable feature is the scalability."

"The most valuable features of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics are its serverless flexibility and complete power have allowed me to explore various different use cases. While I am not an expert in the product, my experience in programming in Databricks has shown me that Microsoft's investments in Synapse could potentially lead to it becoming a complete replacement for Databricks in the future."

More Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics pros

"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."

"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 key element in this solution is its rapid response. If you have a question about prices, buyers, customers, providers, or services, you need the answer in a minute or two. That's the key benefit for us that a solution like BW gives us."

"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."

"The real-time information is great."

"With the technical support, the response has been pretty good from the SAP side."

"Out-of-the-box reports are very useful."

More SAP Business Warehouse pros

Cons

"The initial setup has a bit of a learning curve."

"The initial setup process needs improvement. When you're moving to the cloud it takes a bit of time. It would be great if they could implement something that would make it faster."

"Adding more transformations and plugins to the solution is very important."

"It would be beneficial to take the top vendors and identify some kind of straightforward action to work with them. Instead of having to employ a separate vendor tool to be able to move this, it would be nice to be able to go through Microsoft."

"Synapse Analytics' performance slows down if you don't get your distribution right because it gets queued and goes into a single node."

"The platform is not flexible, and the graphical user interface needs to be improved because the interface makes it hard for the end user to use it."

"The configuration for things like high-availability could be more user-friendly for non-technical users."

"There may be some challenges in terms of connecting with Virtual Networks (VNETs) to Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics."

More Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics cons

"Areas for improvement in SAP Business Warehouse include enhancing scheduling and monitoring tools, as well as improving communication about hidden features to make them more accessible to users."

"SAP Business Warehouse could integrate better with other ETL tools."

"The problem with BW, and the factor that differentiated it from the original BW, is that you only get limited functionality with your runtime license. So, you have to pay extra for extracting data."

"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."

"It's a product that is at the end of life so they will not improve it anymore."

"The advanced structuring can be complicated and the interface is not very intuitive."

"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."

"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

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a cost calculator available online that allows you to input your entire scenario, and it will get back to you with information on what the costs are going to be."

"You have to be very careful with one specific service inside Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics which is called the Sequel Data Warehouse Dedicated. It is very reliable and performs well, but it's expensive. You need to define the tier well because you can choose between several tiers and you have to define which suits your needs and not overperform the tier because it's quite expensive."

"I'm not sure of the exact cost, however, it is around $100,000 a year."

"The price of this solution could be improved."

"Our license is very expensive"

"We chose the serverless option for the database which has saved us a lot of money. Our costs are approximately £600 per month."

"I understand that Synapse Analytics' pricing is lower than Informatica's."

"It requires a less expensive version because currently, not every customer is able to buy it. If it could have a smaller setup that doesn't require so many resources, it would be helpful, and we would be able to use it in more cases. We are a small country, and most of our customers are quite small businesses."

More Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics pricing and cost advice

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

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

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

"The solution is quite expensive."

"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."

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

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

51%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

How does Amazon Redshift compare with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?

Amazon Redshift is very fast, has a very good response time, and is very user-friendly. The initial setup is very straightforward. This solution can merge and integrate well with many different dat...

See all answers

What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?

The product is easy to use, and anybody can easily migrate to advanced DB.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?

The financial aspect, including pricing and cost reduction, is not something I focus on.

See all answers

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

Comparisons

SAP BW4HANA vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

Compared 18% of the time

Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

Compared 14% of the time

Teradata vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

Compared 11% of the time

Snowflake vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

Compared 11% of the time

Vertica vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

Compared 2% of the time

More Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Competitors

Snowflake vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 20% of the time

Amazon Redshift vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 20% of the time

SAP BW4HANA vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 14% of the time

Teradata vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 13% of the time

BigQuery vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 11% of the time

More SAP Business Warehouse Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

February 2025

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics report

Download Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics product report

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse

January 2025

Download SAP Business Warehouse product report

Also Known As

Azure Synapse Analytics, Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Microsoft Azure SQL DW, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, MS Azure Synapse Analytics

No data available

Overview

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is an end-to-end analytics solution that successfully combines analytical services to merge big data analytics and enterprise data warehouses into a single unified platform. The solution can run intelligent distributed queries among nodes, and provides the ability to query both relational and non-relational data.

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is built with these 4 components:

Synapse SQL
Spark
Synapse Pipeline
Studio

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Features

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics has many valuable key features, including:

Cloud Data Service: WIth Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics you can operate services (data analytics, machine learning, data warehousing, dashboarding, etc.) in a single workspace via the cloud.
Structured and unstructured data: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics supports both structured and unstructured data and allows you to manage relational and non-relational data - unlike data warehouses and lakes that tend to store them respectively.
Effective data storage: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics offers next-level data storage with high availability and different tiers.
Responsive data engine: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics uses Massive Parallel Processing (MPP) and is designed to handle large volumes of data and analytical workloads efficiently without any problems.
Several scripting languages: The solution provides language compatibility and supports different programming languages, such as Python, Java, Spark SQL, and Scala.
Query optimization: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics works well to facilitate limitless concurrency and performance optimization. It also simplifies workload management.

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Benefits

Some of the benefits of using Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics include:

Database templates: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics offers industry-specific database templates that make it easy to combine and shape data.
Better business insights: With Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics you can expand discovery of insights from all your data and apply machine learning models to all your intelligent apps.
Reduce project development time: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics makes it possible to have a unified experience for developing end-to-end analytics, which reduces project development time significantly.
Eliminate data barriers: By using Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, you can perform analytics on operational and business apps data without data movement.
Advanced security: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics provides both advanced security and privacy features to ensure data protection.
Machine Learning: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics integrates Azure Machine Learning, Azure Cognitive Services, and Power BI.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics users who are currently using the solution.

PeerSpot user Jael S., who is an Information Architect at Systems Analysis & Design Engineering, comments on her experience using the product, saying that it is “Scalable, intuitive, facilitates compliance and keeps your data secure”. She also says "We also like governance. It looks at what the requirements are for the company to identify the best way to ensure compliance is met when you move to the cloud."

Michel T., CHTO at Timp-iT, mentions that "the features most valuable are the simplicity, how easy it is to create a dashboard from different information systems."

A Senior Teradata Consultant at a tech services company says, "Microsoft provides both the platform and the data center, so you don't have to look for a cloud vendor. It saves you from having to deal with two vendors for the same task."

Microsoft

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

Sample Customers

Toshiba, Carnival, LG Electronics, Jet.com, Adobe,

Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. SAP Business Warehouse

February 2025

Free Report: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. SAP Business Warehouse

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