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SAP BW4HANA vs SAP Business Warehouse comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (14th)
SAP BW4HANA
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (8th)
 

Featured Reviews

VishnuReddy2 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
HP
SAP Analytics Lead at Miracle Software Systems, Inc
Support and pricing challenges overshadow user expertise
In SAP BW4HANA, I have worked in modeling, extraction, and reporting. I have experience with different tools including Power BI, BEx tools, Web Intelligence reports, and SSC. The best features include the ability to create data sources directly on tables, and perform mapping without creating info objects. It directly maps to target fields and source fields. There is no info cube concept, only ODS concept. We can create BEx queries in HANA itself, not as a separate tool. The modeling and reporting processes are easier to accomplish.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Out-of-the-box reports are very useful."
"The warehouse is the solution's most valuable feature."
"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."
"SAP Business Warehouse is a scalable solution."
"I like that it integrates to open-source."
"Having the integration with the reporting tool which is provided by SAP is great."
"The product is very stable."
"The best features of SAP Business Warehouse that I am fond of are how this technology handles navigational attributes and the hierarchy; these are two interesting features."
"I rate this solution a 10."
"I like how it blends no-code and ABAP code for complex transformations during data loading."
"Its direct approach is the most valuable. You get more real time and capabilities than BW."
"The solution's most valuable feature is that it is a very powerful tool. The solution also has the best stability, robustness, and customizability features."
"The most valuable features are the speed of reporting and the HANA database."
"It is a stable solution."
"The most valuable feature is that we can transform a huge amount of data and apply business logic as per the requirements."
"It can calculate data in detail. Before we could not calculate financial documents and accountant documents in detail, we could not do it at a document level but now we can. This is the most important feature. It also has predictive analysis memory."
 

Cons

"SAP Business Warehouse could integrate better with other ETL tools."
"I get all the information quickly, but it is one day old."
"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."
"SAP Business Warehouse could improve by having more out-of-the-box use cases to cover more business types or operations."
"In the next release, my suggestion would be to have user-friendly interfaces and performance issues be addressed."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see a different end solution in order to read the data and attract internal users."
"The solution is not easy to implement. It requires a lot of learning at the beginning."
"If I want to have good reporting, then I have to buy a separate license."
"One thing that could be enhanced in SAP BW4HANA is the user interface for process chains."
"The product's initial setup phase is a bit complex."
"Regarding SAP support, I have raised many support tickets but did not receive adequate support. It took more than months to get responses."
"Price wise, this solution is on the higher side."
"The integration with AI/ML in SAP BW4HANA is currently very limited, which is definitely an area that needs improvement."
"The problem is the expensive pricing of technical support, making it an area where improvements are required."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."
"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."
"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."
"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."
"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."
"The SAP HANA application still hasn't been leveraged to the fullest extent, but it's a five-year enterprise license."
"The cost and licensing depends on how the customer is going to use the solution."
"We have a broad licensing arrangement, which is expensive but worth it for sizeable businesses."
"It is an expensive product."
"SAP BW/4HANA is expensive."
"Price wise, this solution is on the higher side."
"The product is free if we have the ECC license."
"The cost of ownership is higher. It's resource-intensive, and naturally, that increases costs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
11%
Retailer
9%
Energy/Utilities Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Retailer
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise29
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What needs improvement with SAP Business Warehouse?
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 Warehou...
What is your primary use case for SAP Business Warehouse?
I am using SAP Business Warehouse in my organization for data warehousing as well as an ETL tool. Integration with SAP Business Warehouse's ETL tools is not straightforward. Integration with SAP ER...
What do you like most about SAP BW4HANA?
One significant advantage of SAP BW/4HANA is the direct integration with the SAP HANA database, providing seamless access to real-time analytics. Additionally, it enables real-time data integrati...
What needs improvement with SAP BW4HANA?
The integration with AI/ML in SAP BW4HANA is currently very limited, which is definitely an area that needs improvement. The second area for improvement is integration with third-party systems, whi...
 

Also Known As

No data available
SAP BW/4HANA
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone
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Find out what your peers are saying about SAP BW4HANA vs. SAP Business Warehouse and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
883,896 professionals have used our research since 2012.