SAP Business Warehouse vs Snowflake comparison

SAP and Snowflake Computing are both solutions in the Cloud Data Warehouse category. SAP is ranked #14 with an average rating of 7.3, while Snowflake Computing is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.1. SAP holds a 2.3% mindshare in CDW, compared to Snowflake Computing’s 16.1% 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

912 Views
547 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Snowflake

Read 103 Snowflake reviews

8,769 Views
5,875 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

SAP Business Warehouse

Snowflake

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 26, 2025

Snowflake and SAP Business Warehouse compete in the data warehousing category. Snowflake appears to have the upper hand due to its superior cloud scalability, ease of use, and flexible deployment options.

Features: Snowflake offers features like Time Travel for data recovery, quick environment creation, and strong security compliance. Its cloud scalability and seamless integration with third-party ETL tools are notable. Users find it user-friendly and easy to set up. SAP Business Warehouse, on the other hand, is known for its integration with SAP applications and real-time data capabilities, although it may not be as intuitive to use.

Room for Improvement: Snowflake could improve transparency in data processing and pricing, and enhance integration with AI and machine learning. Users also desire better reporting analytics and automation tools. SAP Business Warehouse faces challenges with its complex setup, high licensing costs, and limited flexibility. Its programming language can be complex and integration with non-SAP tools might not be seamless.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Snowflake primarily uses public cloud deployment, offering accessibility and flexibility on a global scale. Its customer service is known to be responsive and helpful. Conversely, SAP Business Warehouse often relies on private and on-premises cloud solutions, which can limit deployment speed and flexibility. While its technical support is efficient, it may not be as agile as Snowflake’s given its more traditional approach.

Pricing and ROI: Snowflake's pay-as-you-go pricing model can be costly if not managed, yet its performance and flexibility offer significant value. Many users experience ROI due to its scalability and ease of use. In contrast, SAP Business Warehouse tends to have higher pricing, which varies based on company revenue and usage tiers. Although immediate ROI might not always be evident, its deep integration with SAP ecosystems can justify the costs for large enterprises.

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

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake

January 2026

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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

Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse

14th

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

7.0

Number of Reviews

103

Ranking in other categories

Data Warehouse (1st), AI Synthetic Data (1st), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (5th), AI Software Development (10th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 2.3%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 16.1%, down from 22.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Data Warehouse Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Snowflake	16.1%
SAP Business Warehouse	2.3%
Other	81.6%

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.

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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

"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."

"We are currently in a basic stage of analytics and the first goal we have is to make sure the numbers are correct. BW has some features that help you to build factors and ETL in such a way that it's easy to get to correct responses. That's the number one condition that you have to have in an analytic solution."

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

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

"SAP Business Warehouse is a scalable solution."

"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."

"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."

"Having the back-end data set with the right information is the best qualification for this solution."

More SAP Business Warehouse pros

"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."

"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."

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

"As long as you don't need to worry about the storage or cost, this solution would be one of the best ones on the market for scalability purposes."

"It helped us to build MVP (minimum viable product) for our idea of building a data warehouse model for small businesses."

"From a data warehouse perspective, it's an excellent all-round solution. It's very complete."

"Snowflake is a data lake on the cloud where all processing happens in memory, resulting in very fast query responses."

"The product is quite fast."

More Snowflake pros

Cons

"Areas for improvement in SAP Business Warehouse include enhancing scheduling and monitoring tools, as well as improving communication about hidden features to make them more accessible to users."

"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."

"There is room for improvement from a technical perspective."

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

"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."

"The way the data is stored is kind of rigid in SAP BW as a product. It could be more flexible so that when we are designing a solution, we can design our own data structures and try to improve performance."

"SAP Business Warehouse could improve by having more out-of-the-box use cases to cover more business types or operations."

More SAP Business Warehouse cons

"Currently there isn't end-to-end or B2B sharing of data."

"Sometimes it can be tricky to manage multiple environments if you're purely using Snowflake as your scripting and pipeline environment."

"These aren't as crucial, but there are common errors sometimes where the database is down, or a table is nullified and a new table is added and you are not given access to that. With those errors, you don't have permissions."

"The complexity of the initial setup of Snowflake depends on the use case. However, Snowflake itself, we don't set it up. The difficulty comes from the ingestion patterns, depending on what data I'm putting in, what kind of enrichment, and what additional value we have to add. However, it does tend to get complex because we have a lot of semi-structured data which we need to handle in Snowflake. There have been some challenges."

"It doesn't enforce typical relational database constraints. Quite expensive."

"The solution could improve by allowing non-structured data, such as PDFs, images, or videos. We cannot see the data."

"I think that Snowflake could improve its user interface. The current one is not interactive."

"It would benefit from an administration that allows you to be aware of your credit consumption once you have the service so that you may be sure how many credits you are consuming when you use the platform and to make sure that you are making the most efficient use of these resources. In other words, to improve their interface so that you may monitor the consumption of your credits on Cloud."

More Snowflake cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

"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 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."

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

"Snowflake goes by credits. For a financial institution where you have 5,000 employees, monthly costs may run up to maybe $5,000 to $6,000. This is actually based on the usage. It is mostly the compute cost. Your computing cost is the variable that is actually based on your usage. It is pay-per-use. In a pay-per-use case, you won't be spending more than $6,000 to $7,000 a month. It is not more than that for a small or medium enterprise, and it may come down to $100K per year. Storage is very standard, which is $23 a terabyte. It is not much for any enterprise. If you have even 20 terabytes, you are not spending more than $400 per month, which may turn out to be $2,000 to $3,000 per annum."

"I believe that pricing is reasonable for this solution."

"The pricing part is based on the computing and storage. The costs are different and then there are services costs as well."

"Pricing is approximately $US 50 per DB. Terabyte is around $US 50 per month."

"We're based on credits. So, we're paying four and a half dollars of credit. There are no additional costs. I would rate it a two out of five in terms of pricing."

"Snowflake is a cost-effective solution."

"We used Snowflake to see if it is cheaper than using BigQuery. It was just to maintain the cost or the KPI regarding the cost of connectivity by users. Snowflake wasn't cheaper than BigQuery, and its affordability was the main issue."

"Snowflake is cost-effective."

More Snowflake pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

13%

Retailer

10%

Energy/Utilities Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing 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	29
Midsize Enterprise	20
Large Enterprise	58

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 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 do you like most about Snowflake?

The best thing about Snowflake is its flexibility in changing warehouse sizes or computational power.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake?

It is complicated to understand how requests impact warehouse size. Unlike competitors such as Microsoft and Databricks ( /products/databricks-reviews ), Snowflake lacks transparency in estimating ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Snowflake?

Snowflake is currently stable, but it can be improved further. They have a couple of information schemas that can track account usage. If more connectors were brought in and more visibility feature...

See all answers

Comparisons

Databricks vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 19% of the time

BigQuery vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 18% of the time

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 11% of the time

SAP BW4HANA vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 10% of the time

Teradata vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 7% of the time

More SAP Business Warehouse Competitors

Teradata vs Snowflake

Compared 8% of the time

Azure Data Factory vs Snowflake

Compared 7% of the time

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs Snowflake

Compared 7% of the time

Amazon Redshift vs Snowflake

Compared 5% of the time

Dremio vs Snowflake

Compared 5% of the time

More Snowflake Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse

January 2026

Download SAP Business Warehouse product report

Buyer's Guide

Snowflake

January 2026

Download Snowflake product report

Also Known As

No data available

Snowflake Computing, Snowflake Data Cloud

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

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

January 2026

Free Report: SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake

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