SAP Business Warehouse vs Snowflake comparison

SAP and Snowflake Computing are both solutions in the Cloud Data Warehouse category. SAP is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.0, while Snowflake Computing is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.3. SAP holds a 2.4% mindshare in CDW, compared to Snowflake Computing’s 14.9% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of SAP users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Snowflake Computing users who would recommend it.

SAP Business Warehouse

Read 26 SAP Business Warehouse reviews

1,658 Views
945 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Snowflake

Read 105 Snowflake reviews

12,141 Views
6,556 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

SAP Business Warehouse

Snowflake

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 1, 2026

Snowflake and SAP Business Warehouse are significant players in the data warehousing market. Among the two, Snowflake appears to have a competitive edge due to its scalability and ease of use, although SAP Business Warehouse offers strong integration capabilities with SAP ERP.

Features: Snowflake provides robust scalability, allowing efficient handling of petabytes of data. Its distributed architecture enhances performance by processing large datasets quickly, and it offers flexibility through dynamic node adjustments, supporting multiple file formats for accessibility. SAP Business Warehouse is known for advanced data structuring and seamless integration with SAP ERP, excelling in environments where SAP systems are prevalent.

Room for Improvement: Snowflake could benefit from stronger geo-spatial capabilities and a simpler Snowpipe auto-ingest feature. Users desire a more intuitive command-line tool and greater cost transparency, along with integrated basic analytics for better data visualization. SAP Business Warehouse could enhance its user interfaces, provide more advanced analytics options, and improve integration with additional ETL tools.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Snowflake predominantly serves public and hybrid cloud environments, offering easy deployment and responsive customer support, despite the potential for better SLAs. SAP Business Warehouse is typically used in on-premises and private cloud setups, providing robust support but sometimes lacking in responsiveness and transparency compared to Snowflake.

Pricing and ROI: Snowflake's pricing model is flexible and perceived as cost-effective through pay-as-you-go, though costs can be unpredictable, especially with enterprise features. SAP Business Warehouse generally involves higher initial costs tied to company revenue, making it less attractive to smaller businesses. Snowflake users find potential ROI with efficient usage, while SAP offers value by integrating with existing SAP infrastructures.

To learn more, read our detailed SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake Report (Updated: May 2026).

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake

May 2026

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Helped 894,998 peers since 2012

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

Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse

15th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Snowflake

Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

105

Ranking in other categories

Data Warehouse (1st), AI Synthetic Data (1st), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (7th), AI Software Development (11th)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 2.4%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 14.9%, down from 19.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Snowflake	14.9%
SAP Business Warehouse	2.4%
Other	82.7%

Cloud Data Warehouse

Featured Reviews

VishnuReddy2

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.

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SunilPatil1

Asset Builder at Genpact - Headstrong

Have prioritized security while managing multi-agent data migration and cloud adoption

We utilize Time Travel with Snowflake because this is a very useful feature. Everyone finds it crucial because in conventional data platforms, it's very difficult to handle these kinds of things. This feature is essential, though I don't have the use cases currently; it is just there for implementation. Regarding Snowflake's automated scaling and suspension features, this auto-scaling is very significant. We had a comparison with Databricks and Snowflake a few months back, and this auto-scaling takes an edge within Snowflake; that's what our observation reflects.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"SAP Business Warehouse is a scalable solution."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the advanced structuring of data capabilities. You can get different structures of data to suit your needs."

"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."

"BW is our bread and butter."

"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 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."

"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 valuable aspect of the solution is the integration with SAP ERP."

More SAP Business Warehouse pros

"Its speed and performance were the most valuable. Easy configuration of Snowflake in any cloud was also a benefit."

"Snowflake has evolved significantly over time; initially, they started with scalability, but more recently, they have introduced streaming capabilities, real-time and dynamic tables, along with various connectors."

"It's user-friendly. It's SQL-driven. The fact that business can also go to this application and query because they know SQL is the biggest factor."

"The distributed architecture of Snowflake has the capacity to process huge datasets faster and allows us to scale up and down according to our needs."

"In addition to the database, Snowflake also provides ingestion capabilities."

"I like the ability to work with a managed service on the cloud and that is easy to start with."

"Snowflake solves many of the challenges that traditional data warehousing tools have such as a lack of agility, scalability and fine-tuning."

"The product is stable and the performance is excellent."

More Snowflake pros

Cons

"It's a product that is at the end of life so they will not improve it anymore."

"Integration with SAP Business Warehouse's ETL tools is not straightforward."

"They should reduce the product’s installation package size for easier downloading."

"It's a product that is at the end of life so they will not improve it anymore."

"I get all the information quickly, but it is one day old."

"People are getting frustrated as they have to spend lots of time - 10 minutes to 15 minutes - generating the report."

"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."

"When some things go wrong, it becomes extremely unreliable."

More SAP Business Warehouse cons

"There are some stored procedures that we've had trouble with. The solution also needs to fine-tune the connectors to be able to connect into the system source."

"This solution could be improved by offering machine learning apps."

"The solution could improve the user interface and add functionality to the system."

"Its pricing or affordability is one of the big challenges. Pricing was the only thing that we didn't like about Snowflake. In terms of technical features, it is a complete solution."

"They have a new console, but I couldn't figure out anything in the new console. So, if I shift to the old console, I can figure out where to create the database schema and other things, but I have no idea where to go in the new console. That's one thing they can improve. I don't know why they created a new console to confuse. The old, classic console is much better."

"Maybe there could be some more connectors to other systems, but this is what they are constantly developing anyway."

"An additional feature I'd like to see is called materialized views, which can speed up some run times. I'd like it to be able to be used where you can have multiple tables inside them; materialized view. That would be nice. As well as being able to run cursors, to be able to do some bulk updates and some more advanced querying, table building on the fly."

"The complexity of the initial setup of Snowflake depends on the use case. However, it does tend to get complex because we have a lot of semi-structured data which we need to handle in Snowflake."

More Snowflake 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."

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

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

"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."

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

"The license for SAP Business Warehouse is paid yearly, and there's no extra cost in addition to the standard licensing fees."

"The solution is quite expensive."

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

"Snowflake licensing is more flexible and it is cheaper than other solutions. I can use it for only 10 days for MVP, or three years, and for flexible models. I can scale up, or down, and the pricing is based on the volume and duration. There are many licensing permutation combinations available."

"I have worked with multiple clouds, and cost-wise, it is a bit costlier than others, such as Redshift. Its price should be reduced."

"Oracle is less expensive than Snowflake."

"Snowflake is cost-effective. However, the cost can depend on how it's being used and how efficiently the code is written. If engineers don't write efficient code and usage is billed based on processing, it can become costly. If they write optimal code and choose the best solution, it can reduce costs in comparison to other options, such as Oracle."

"It's expensive."

"You pay based on the data that you are storing in the data warehouse and there are no maintenance costs."

"There is a separation of storage and compute, so you only pay for what you use."

"The pricing for Snowflake is competitive."

More Snowflake pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

11%

Healthcare Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

Marketing Services Firm

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	15

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	30
Midsize Enterprise	20
Large Enterprise	60

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with SAP Business Warehouse?

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake?

For pricing, setup cost, and licensing, everything is managed smoothly. Regarding licensing, it is inexpensive. The setup cost is low, mainly due to AWS Marketplace; we only need to pay for serverl...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Snowflake?

Snowflake is already quite improved, but they have recently introduced AI features. AI integration would be beneficial for direct data capturing from systems such as SAP and Salesforce to Snowflake...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Snowflake?

Snowflake is primarily used to handle the data warehousing part, for creating data modeling, and also keeping the raw data and creating reporting data so that it is further used for data analytics....

See all answers

Comparisons

BigQuery vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 12% of the time

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 10% of the time

Databricks vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 10% of the time

SAP Business Data Cloud vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 10% of the time

SAP BW4HANA vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 7% of the time

More SAP Business Warehouse Competitors

Teradata vs Snowflake

Compared 7% of the time

Amazon Redshift vs Snowflake

Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs Snowflake

Compared 5% of the time

Databricks vs Snowflake

Compared 5% of the time

Dremio vs Snowflake

Compared 4% of the time

More Snowflake Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse

April 2026

Download SAP Business Warehouse product report

Buyer's Guide

Snowflake

April 2026

Download Snowflake product report

Also Known As

No data available

Snowflake Computing, Snowflake Data Cloud

Overview

SAP Business Warehouse integrates real-time data access via HANA, with Microsoft Excel and SAP ERP for enhanced data transformation and reporting. Known for its speed and hybrid features, it meets diverse data governance needs.

SAP Business Warehouse is designed to streamline data access and transformation with its integration capabilities. Its speed and efficiency are complemented by advanced reporting features and a robust authorization model. Users benefit from drag-and-drop reporting and alert systems that enhance operational efficiency. Despite its strengths, improvements are necessary in user friendliness, data integration, and reporting speed. Users require better trend analysis tools, increased visualization capabilities, and a more flexible configuration to optimize use. Real-time data access remains an area for development.

What features define SAP Business Warehouse?

HANA Integration: Enables real-time data access
Excel and ERP Integration: Seamless interaction with popular tools
Advanced Reporting: Delivers high-quality reporting capabilities
Hybrid Functionality: Offers versatile use cases
Drag-and-Drop: Simplifies reporting and analysis tasks
Authorization Model: Ensures secure data handling

What benefits and ROI can users expect?

Operational Efficiency: Enhanced by alert and monitoring tools
Data Governance: Robust models meet diverse needs
Centralized Data: Comprehensive data storage and access
Decision-Making Support: BI tools inform strategic planning

SAP Business Warehouse plays a crucial role in industries like finance and supply chain, leveraging data warehousing, ETL processes, and powerful BI applications to enhance decision-making with tools like Business Objects, Tableau, and Power BI. It serves as a central data repository, facilitating extensive reporting and analysis capabilities.

SAP

Snowflake provides a modern data warehousing solution with features designed for seamless integration, scalability, and consumption-based pricing. It handles large datasets efficiently, making it a market leader for businesses migrating to the cloud.

Snowflake offers a flexible architecture that separates storage and compute resources, supporting efficient ETL jobs. Known for scalability and ease of use, it features built-in time zone conversion and robust data sharing capabilities. Its enhanced security, performance, and ability to handle semi-structured data are notable. Users suggest improvements in UI, pricing, on-premises integration, and data science functions, while calling for better transaction performance and machine learning capabilities. Users benefit from effective SQL querying, real-time analytics, and sharing options, supporting comprehensive data analysis with tools like Tableau and Power BI.

What are Snowflake's Key Features?

Scalability: Easily adjusts to handle growing data volumes.
Seamless Integration: Works with a wide range of platforms.
Consumption-Based Costs: Pay only for what you use.
Time Travel: Access historical data effortlessly.
Data Sharing: Secure and efficient sharing of datasets.
Time Zone Conversion: Built-in feature for global operations.
Security: Robust measures to protect sensitive information.
Compute and Storage Separation: Independent scaling for optimal performance.

What Benefits Should You Look for?

Cost Efficiency: Optimized pricing models for minimal waste.
Enhanced Performance: Fast queries and processing times.
Flexibility: Handles both structured and semi-structured data.
Analytics Capabilities: Supports advanced data analysis and reporting.

In industries like finance, healthcare, and retail, Snowflake's flexible data warehousing and analytics capabilities facilitate cloud migration, streamline data storage, and allow organizations to consolidate data from multiple sources for advanced insights and AI-driven strategies. Its integration with analytics tools supports comprehensive data analysis and reporting tasks.

Snowflake Computing

Sample Customers

Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone

Accordant Media, Adobe, Kixeye Inc., Revana, SOASTA, White Ops

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake

May 2026

Free Report: SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake

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