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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 (15th)
SAP BW4HANA
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (7th)
 

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

"The key element in this solution is its rapid response, because if you have a question about prices, buyers, customers, providers, or services, you need the answer in a minute or two, and that is the key benefit for us that a solution like BW gives us."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the integration with SAP ERP."
"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 fact that it can integrate with Microsoft Excel is the solution's most valuable feature."
"The real-time information is great."
"Having the integration with the reporting tool which is provided by SAP is great."
"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."
"The customer support is wonderful. If your technical team is stuck somewhere, they are there to help."
"SAP BW4HANA definitely helps to reduce data footprint on data management efficiency as it works on a HANA Cloud, which is an optimized database, and offers the capability to optimize the loads."
"It is a very stable solution."
"The product is stable."
"The processes are the most valuable aspect of this solution."
"Out of the box, this solution has a lot of standard features."
"The solution is based on SAP ERP, so there's some business content already included. For customers who use SAP ERP, SAP BW4HANA is a good choice for their DW implementation."
"For a big customer, who is SAP-centric, with lots of SAP data or SAP business processes, this is one of the best data warehousing solutions."
"We can get good visualization and less redundant data."
 

Cons

"You can start quickly but, when you have to get a little more detailed, when you have to change something, when you have to solve problems, it's not that easy."
"We are running an older version; it is doing what we need it to do but there is some limitation due to its version."
"The visualization should be improved, as well as the dashboards and advanced analytics."
"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."
"What I'd like improved in SAP Business Warehouse is its setup. It could be more flexible, and it could be a configuration-based setup."
"A few things which are missing include the visualization of reports. That's where your costs and licensing become heavy."
"I would for sure like to see a different end solution in order to read the data and attract internal users."
"SAP Business Warehouse could integrate better with other ETL tools."
"The tool is not cloud-compatible."
"The product needs to improve with more performance and fewer data layers."
"I would like to be able to design new reports in a future release."
"The HCM needs improvement, but as a company, they have stopped any development on this."
"Not a ten because it's expensive and its ecosystem is not very open."
"SAP BW/4HANA can generally be less flexible than other tools, depending on how it is set up."
"This solution is very costly compared to competitors on the market, which stops some people from implementing it."
"Pricing would be a good improvement. A lot of customers think that it's very expensive and support is especially very expensive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."
"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 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."
"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."
"The license for SAP Business Warehouse is paid yearly, and there's no extra cost in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."
"The solution is expensive."
"Price wise, this solution is on the higher side."
"It's a little expensive compared to Microsoft Azure."
"The tool is affordable."
"SAP BW/4HANA is expensive."
"We started as early birds from the SAP side. We got this entire suite for free. I cannot really talk about the price because we didn't have to pay anything."
"In general, it's quite expensive."
"For the on-premises version of the product, the solution offers a perpetual-based licensing model to its users. In general, SAP offers a monthly subscription-based licensing model to its users."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
10%
Retailer
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Retailer
11%
Energy/Utilities Company
5%
 

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
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about SAP BW4HANA vs. SAP Business Warehouse and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
886,468 professionals have used our research since 2012.