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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 1.2% compared to last year.
SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, on the other hand, focuses on Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS), holds 1.3% mindshare, down 1.7% since last year.
Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SAP Business Warehouse2.4%
Snowflake14.9%
Databricks10.2%
Other72.5%
Cloud Data Warehouse
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud1.3%
Amazon AWS16.2%
Microsoft Azure9.0%
Other73.5%
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

"I think BW is one of the best products at the moment."
"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."
"All our processes such as funds management, grant, payroll transactions are processed automatically through this system and BW helps to collect the data for analytic needs of the department users and board members."
"Getting high volume data is most valuable for us; it is really fast and it has great integration with SAP ERP or a non-SAP system."
"The customer support is wonderful. If your technical team is stuck somewhere, they are there to help."
"The features that I have found most valuable are its capabilities to connect to Excel and to slice and dice."
"The real-time information is great."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the integration with SAP ERP."
"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."
"There's a minimum amount of downtime when using the solution. This platform is very effective."
"The solution does provide quite a lot of support, upgrades, automated batch updates, etc."
"The real-time data processing and the ability to track all leasing processes and contracts are particularly valuable."
"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."
"It is a stable and scalable product."
"It is a scalable solution if you have a good cloud infrastructure."
"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."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"When some things go wrong, it becomes extremely unreliable."
"SAP Business Warehouse could integrate better with other ETL tools."
"I'm not sure if our issue is related to BW or the Analysis Office. However, we're having performance issues in terms of time. It takes a long time to generate the report."
"People are getting frustrated as they have to spend lots of time - 10 minutes to 15 minutes - generating the report."
"Integration with SAP Business Warehouse's ETL tools is not straightforward."
"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."
"The product must provide more details of the errors."
"The customer has a lot of dependencies on SAP which means they don't have much flexibility to go and update the system when or if they need to. They will need to wait for the quarterly updates. It's possible to maybe raise a special request with SAP if it is absolutely necessary."
"This product is not mature enough at this point in time."
"This product is not mature enough at this point in time."
"The solution is scalable from an infrastructure point of view. However, it becomes more complex over time because technology is changing so fast."
"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."
"There are a lot of dependencies on SAP. A customer doesn't have much flexibility to go and update the systems as they wish."
"The price of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is quite expensive compared to solutions such as Data Fabric in Azure and Redshift on Amazon, which are quite cheap in comparison."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."
"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."
"SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"The license for SAP Business Warehouse is paid yearly, and there's no extra cost in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."
"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."
"The solution's cost is reasonable."
"If you choose the minimum, it will probably cost around $1,000 USD per month if you take a contract for a year or two."
"The price is on little bit higher. For SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, we see roughly five crores per annum."
"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 product itself is relatively expensive."
"The solution could be less expensive."
"Our pricing is based on a yearly contract."
"The pricing is reasonable when compared to other vendors like Oracle who offer technology enterprise resource software."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Healthcare Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
 

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 Enterprise17
 

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: May 2026.
896,467 professionals have used our research since 2012.