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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

"Having the back-end data set with the right information is the best qualification for this solution."
"With the technical support, the response has been pretty good from the SAP side."
"The features that I have found most valuable are its capabilities to connect to Excel and to slice and dice."
"The customer support is wonderful. If your technical team is stuck somewhere, they are there to help."
"Technical support is good, and they were able to assist us in some specific issues we were experiencing."
"Having the integration with the reporting tool which is provided by SAP is great."
"My advice would be if you have a data block and if you really want a big solution on the reporting side of it with slicing and dicing, definitely go ahead with BW when it comes to SAP related data."
"We switched to SAP because the solution is more comfortable to work with."
"The most valuable features are the speed of reporting and the HANA database."
"Its direct approach is the most valuable. You get more real time and capabilities than BW."
"The most valuable features are the speed of reporting and the HANA database."
"It is a stable solution."
"The solution saves time and cost."
"Technology-wise, it is a very robust tool."
"It provides the functions in a way that even a less technical person can do the modeling."
"I like the reporting features of the solution."
 

Cons

"A few things which are missing include the visualization of reports. That's where your costs and licensing become heavy."
"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."
"One of our requirements is the ability to easily get answers regarding trends and exceptions. In BW, it is not that easy to get such information. I expect better trend and exception detection, better pattern detection."
"I would like to see a different end solution in order to read the data and attract internal users."
"From a support perspective, SAP Business Warehouse is quite a complex module."
"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."
"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's a product that is at the end of life so they will not improve it anymore."
"From a technical perspective, it could be even more related to legacy systems. The connectivity requirement is quite high and requires systems that are up-to-date."
"The speed of operations could be a little faster."
"The cost of the product might be an area that might introduce some restrictions or limitations to customers, making it one of the aspects where improvements are required."
"Other competitors provide better solutions that are more up to date with current technology."
"Other competitors provide better solutions that are more up to date with current technology. For example, machine learning and artificial intelligence."
"The licensing cost could be made better."
"If I want to have good reporting, then I have to buy a separate license. I have to pay for separate things; that's quite irritating."
"One thing is that it costs more because you have to acquire that license for the product, which itself is a waste."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"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."
"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."
"This is an expensive solution and there are costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"The cost of ownership is higher. It's resource-intensive, and naturally, that increases costs."
"The tool is affordable."
"The product is free if we have the ECC license."
"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."
"We have a broad licensing arrangement, which is expensive but worth it for sizeable businesses."
"The solution is expensive."
"It is an expensive product."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
10%
Retailer
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Retailer
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
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.
886,976 professionals have used our research since 2012.