SAP BW4HANA vs SAP Business Warehouse comparison

SAP Business Warehouse and SAP BW4HANA are both solutions in the Data Warehouse category. Additionally, 89% of SAP Business Warehouse users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 86% of SAP BW4HANA users who would recommend it.

SAP Business Warehouse

Read 25 SAP Business Warehouse reviews

766 Views
459 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

SAP BW4HANA

Read 42 SAP BW4HANA reviews

1,483 Views
1,011 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

SAP Business Warehouse

SAP BW4HANA

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between SAP Business Warehouse and SAP BW4HANA based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Data Warehouse solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed SAP BW4HANA vs. SAP Business Warehouse Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

SAP BW4HANA vs. SAP Business Warehouse

January 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

SAP Business Warehouse

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Data Warehouse (14th)

SAP BW4HANA

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Warehouse (9th)

Featured Reviews

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.

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Csaba Grünblatt

Senior Data, Data warehouse and BI/Analytics Architect at Techwave.

Performs all necessary data warehouse tasks and offers additional functionalities

SAP BW4HANA improved data reporting processes significantly. Performance on HANA database is good. Well-built data models ensure consistent and fast reporting. Reusable models enhance efficiency, even for SaaS services. In-memory computing, especially since HANA, has greatly improved performance in data analysis tasks. It eliminates the need for complex optimizations like creating indexes or aggregates. Queries that once took minutes now run in seconds, enabling real-time reporting, especially for SAP ECC on HANA. SAP BW4HANA's integration capabilities are streamlined with a simplified architecture and more virtual layers. You can directly load data into optimized layers, reducing the need for extra storage. The introduction of Open ODS Views allows for additional logic and master data inclusion, making integration faster and simpler. The learning curve for SAP BW4HANA is much faster now compared to ten years ago, thanks to abundant free resources like documentation, videos, blogs, and learning journeys provided by SAP. It is simpler to learn with these resources available compared to the past when you had to attend courses and rely on books. I would recommend SAP BW4HANA to users looking to implement it, especially if they want to keep their systems on-premise and already have SAP systems. Those with BW on HANA have two choices: BW4HANA or DataSphere, depending on their cloud strategy. If they are advanced in their cloud strategy and want to migrate off-premise, DataSphere is a good choice. However, for a robust solution on-premise or in a private cloud, BW4HANA is an excellent option. Overall, I would rate BW4HANA as a nine out of ten. It performs all necessary data warehouse tasks and offers additional functionalities. We use it traditionally, with complex transformations and models but with less emphasis on real-time processing and third-party sources.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Having the integration with the reporting tool which is provided by SAP is great."

"The solution has functionality that makes it easy for end-users to readily extract data directly from Business Warehouse into Excel and carry on their analysis on their own."

"The features that I have found most valuable are its capabilities to connect to Excel and to slice and dice."

"I like that it integrates to open-source."

"The most valuable feature of SAP Business Warehouse is transformation, where I extract data from different sources, particularly the raw data. Then I do some transformations and store that in a format that allows me to do reporting easily."

"The real-time information is great."

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

"The warehouse is the solution's most valuable feature."

More SAP Business Warehouse pros

"The product is stable."

"I like the reporting features of the solution."

"Out of the box, this solution has a lot of standard features."

"Technology-wise, it is a very robust tool."

"The most valuable features are the speed of reporting and the HANA database."

"It is a stable solution."

"SAP BW4HANA aids in managing data from ER to front-end analysis, contributes to ROI, and fosters business growth understanding. I like that the solution breaks down components to a very granular level, allowing for customization and implementation based on specific requirements. The solution is stable. The solution is scalable."

"We like that it is an SAP product, so we can easily connect with the SAP ERP system."

More SAP BW4HANA pros

Cons

"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."

"The solution could offer better connectivity with other databases."

"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."

"So far, the initial setup process in our company has not been easy enough for us to understand."

"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. It's easy to start but evolving is not that easy."

"In the next release, my suggestion would be to have user-friendly interfaces and performance issues be addressed."

"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

"One thing that could be enhanced in SAP BW4HANA is the user interface for process chains."

"SAP BW/4HANA can generally be less flexible than other tools, depending on how it is set up."

"The licensing cost could be made better."

"There's one area where the other vendors have an upper edge, which is the data lake. I think SAP is trying to figure out whether to stick with IQ, their own data lake solution, or push customers toward customer-preferred vendors, like Azure Data Lake, AWS, or any other provider."

"The UI is not user-friendly."

"The solution is not easy to implement. It requires a lot of learning at the beginning."

"The tool is not cloud-compatible."

"The problem is the expensive pricing of technical support, making it an area where improvements are required."

More SAP BW4HANA cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

"The solution is quite expensive."

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

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

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

"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 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."

"For some, the rates offered by SAP can be costly while for others it may seem cheap. The price ultimately depends on how you have negotiated your contract with SAP."

"As an investment, the solution is very expensive."

"It is an expensive product."

"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."

"The SAP HANA application still hasn't been leveraged to the fullest extent, but it's a five-year enterprise license."

"The product is free if we have the ECC license."

More SAP BW4HANA pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Energy/Utilities Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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

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...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP BW4HANA?

We have a broad licensing arrangement, which is expensive but worth it for sizeable businesses.

See all answers

What needs improvement with SAP BW4HANA?

The interface could be more user-friendly, as we often need to do low-level coding to get things done.

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 24% of the time

Snowflake vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 20% of the time

Amazon Redshift vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 20% 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

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs SAP BW4HANA

Compared 31% of the time

Snowflake vs SAP BW4HANA

Compared 29% of the time

SAP HANA vs SAP BW4HANA

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon Redshift vs SAP BW4HANA

Compared 9% of the time

Oracle Exadata vs SAP BW4HANA

Compared 3% of the time

More SAP BW4HANA Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse

January 2025

Download SAP Business Warehouse product report

Buyer's Guide

SAP BW4HANA

January 2025

Download SAP BW4HANA product report

Also Known As

No data available

SAP BW/4HANA

Overview

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

SAP BW4HANA is a data warehouse solution developed by SAP for businesses looking to analyze big data in real time. It is designed to run on the SAP HANA database, offering improved performance and optimized processing of large data sets. SAP BW/4HANA provides an array of advanced analytics capabilities, including predictive analytics, text analytics, and spatial data processing. It also offers a modern, intuitive user interface and streamlined data modeling and administration tools, making it easier for businesses to access, manage, and utilize their data.

SAP BW4HANA Features

SAP BW4HANA has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

In-memory data processing: The solution runs on the SAP HANA database, providing fast and efficient data processing.

Advanced analytics: SAP BW4HANA includes capabilities for predictive analytics, text analytics, and spatial data processing.

Data modeling and administration: The solution provides streamlined data modeling and administration tools for efficient data management.

Modern user interface: SAP BW4HAN is designed with a modern, intuitive user interface for easier data access and analysis.

Data warehousing optimization: The solution is optimized for big data warehousing, offering improved performance and scalability.

Integration with SAP ecosystem: SAP BW4HAN integrates with the SAP ecosystem, including SAP S/4HANA and SAP Cloud Platform, for seamless data exchange.

Real-time data processing: It supports real-time data processing and analysis, enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions.

Data governance and security: With its robust data governance and security features, SAP BW4HAN can be used for secure data management and compliance.

Automated data loading: SAP BW4HAN supports automated data loading from various sources, including SAP and non-SAP systems.

Advanced data visualization: With its advanced data visualization capabilities, users can generate better data insights and make more informed business decisions.

SAP BW4HANA Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing SAP BW4HANA. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Improved data processing speed: Running on the SAP HANA database, SAP BW/4HANA provides fast and efficient data processing, resulting in improved performance and reduced downtime.

Streamlined data management: The solution's streamlined data modeling and administration tools make it easier for organizations to manage their data, improving overall efficiency and reducing the risk of errors.

Improved data governance: SAP BW/4HANA includes robust data governance and security features, helping organizations meet regulatory requirements and protect sensitive data.

Cost savings: By optimizing data warehousing processes, SAP BW/4HANA helps organizations reduce costs and improve their bottom line.

Reviews from Real Users

SAP BW4HANA is a solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. Some of its major advantages are its hierarchical alert slicing, real-time insights, and its ability to transform large amounts of data.

PeerSpot reviewer, Srivatsav A., SAP BW/4HANA Specialist at a government, is very happy with the solution. He explains, "You can do hierarchical alert slicing and dicing out-of-box, which is not available in other solutions. I haven't come across that in Oracle or any other software provider."

“It has got wonderful features in terms of analyzing your production data, and it gives you real-time insight into productive maintenance. You can plan your budget, and you can map them against actuals. It gives you good insights on overall performance and processes,” says Amrit J., ERP Application Manager at an energy/utilities company.

In addition, a Technology Analyst at a tech services company mentions, "The most valuable feature is that we can transform a huge amount of data and apply business logic as per the requirements."

SAP

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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Buyer's Guide

SAP BW4HANA vs. SAP Business Warehouse

January 2025

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