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SAP Business Warehouse vs SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud 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 HANA Enterprise Cloud
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

SAP Business Warehouse and SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. SAP Business Warehouse is designed for Cloud Data Warehouse and holds a mindshare of 2.4%, up 1.1% compared to last year.
SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, on the other hand, focuses on Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS), holds 1.4% mindshare, down 1.7% since last year.
Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SAP Business Warehouse2.4%
Snowflake15.2%
Databricks10.2%
Other72.2%
Cloud Data Warehouse
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud1.4%
Amazon AWS16.1%
Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode)9.2%
Other73.3%
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

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.
Salman Mukhtar Baig - PeerSpot reviewer
SAP Technical Manager at VS Furniture Middle East
Cloud access has improved reporting and sales operations across global locations
I cannot say anything about what areas of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud could be improved or enhanced because so far, we are happy with this implementation. We are not facing any problem, or I cannot say that this can be improved. Although SAP keeps improving themselves day by day, we cannot say that SAP needs to improve anything. One thing which we face, not as a problem, is the pricing. SAP pricing is a bit higher day by day. Before, it was not too much higher, but I don't know why they are increasing their price. They should see this thing, so other customers, such as SMBs customers or small and mid-sized customers, can also avail this thing. Otherwise, we don't have any problem. First, there is the limitation. If you are a SAP user, you don't feel any problem with the limitation because if you know how to use the product, you can easily implement this thing. Otherwise, if you don't know the business process or how to integrate and implement, it could be a problem. We have a limitation, but we developed some add-ons for this. So we fulfilled these requirements.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"What I like most about SAP Business Warehouse is that it's a seamless integration platform. A valuable feature in the tool is the monitoring alert that makes you aware of what process chain has failed. There's no manual monitoring required if you have configured an alert system, so the process chain can run in the background, and you can get alerts about it. The functionalities I find good in SAP Business Warehouse are alerting and monitoring. If you have configured the tool and have integrated it with SAP Solution Manager, then it's a good product to use."
"The most useful feature has been he ability to feed data into multiple systems in various formats."
"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."
"In terms of stability, comparatively, the solution is quite stable."
"What I like most about SAP Business Warehouse is its ability to feed data into new, multiple systems in various formats."
"The features that I have found most valuable are its capabilities to connect to Excel and to slice and dice."
"The most useful feature is definitely the speed."
"The real-time information is great."
"The solution's initial setup process is straightforward."
"It has significantly streamlined our operations."
"My company has not had any problems with the product's initial setup phase."
"One of the features that I've found most useful is that it's very simple; they take care of the technical aspects of the data, installations, patches and all those things, and I don't need to set up my data center."
"In SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, HANA has the best performance for hosting the data warehouse and analytics solution mainly, and this is the good feature in it."
"Now, with the cloud, we can move anywhere in the world and we can easily access it from SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, and even the client can also see the stock availability which they need to order."
"The most valuable feature is virtual modeling, which is beneficial because you don't really save the data multiple times the way we did in the past."
"The solution is stable and we have never had a problem. We started with one terabyte of data when the solution was first implemented and today we have around almost 600 gigabytes of data, which means means the compression works properly. Before migrating from ECC, we had nine terabytes of data."
 

Cons

"SAP Business Warehouse could integrate better with other ETL tools."
"SAP Business Warehouse could integrate better with other ETL tools."
"People are getting frustrated as they have to spend lots of time - 10 minutes to 15 minutes - generating the report."
"The way the data is stored is kind of rigid in SAP BW as a product."
"It's a product that is at the end of life so they will not improve it anymore."
"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."
"A few things which are missing include the visualization of reports. That's where your costs and licensing become heavy."
"SAP Business Warehouse could improve by having more out-of-the-box use cases to cover more business types or operations."
"They should probably offer more cloud services. Most of the cloud infrastructure providers we have make everything pretty transparent, you know what you're getting, you have all these metrics and measurements and everything in the dashboard."
"The price is expensive compared to the competition."
"Perhaps minor changes to the enterprise structure could be made, but the rest is fine."
"The stability needs to be improved to be able to handle large amounts of data."
"The licensing model for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud has changed, and it is not entirely clear for final customers. Instead of named users, they now have to calculate FUEs."
"The product must provide more details of the errors."
"This product is not mature enough at this point in time."
"They should probably offer more cloud services. Most of the cloud infrastructure providers we have make everything pretty transparent, you know what you're getting, you have all these metrics and measurements and everything in the dashboard. Here you have to go through the contracting negotiations and all those things."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"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."
"SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."
"The license for SAP Business Warehouse is paid yearly, and there's no extra cost in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"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."
"The pricing is reasonable when compared to other vendors like Oracle who offer technology enterprise resource software."
"It's very, very expensive."
"Our pricing is based on a yearly contract."
"The licensing of the solution is on a yearly basis. The normal price of the solution is quite high, but I received a special discount by making a purchase near the end of the year."
"The solution's cost is reasonable."
"The solution could be less expensive."
"I rate the product's price a five out of ten."
"The product itself is relatively expensive."
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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%
Construction Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
9%
 

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 Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud?
SAP HANA Cloud can be quite costly compared to other solutions. The high licensing costs make it an expensive option, particularly for smaller customers. However, they offer solutions for mid-sized...
What needs improvement with SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud?
I cannot say anything about what areas of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud could be improved or enhanced because so far, we are happy with this implementation. We are not facing any problem, or I cannot s...
What is your primary use case for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud?
The usual use cases for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud that I work with include many tools. At the time of the integration, SAP made it very easy for the integration. The key point is that now we have a...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone
FC Bayern Munich, Reuters News Agency, MEMEBOX
Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Teradata, Google and others in Cloud Data Warehouse. Updated: March 2026.
892,287 professionals have used our research since 2012.