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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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

"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."

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

"BW is our bread and butter."

"Now, because of the HANA integration, the hard disk and RAM are together, and because of that, the output is very quick and very fast actually."

"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 is definitely the speed."

"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."

More SAP Business Warehouse pros

"It requires no maintenance on our part. They handle all that. The speed is phenomenal. The pricing isn't really anything more than what you would be paying for a SQL server license or another tool to execute the same thing. We have zero maintenance on our side to do anything and the speed at which it performs queries and loads the data is amazing. It handles unstructured data extremely well, too. So, if the data is in a JSON array or an XML, it handles that super well."

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

"The feature that is really striking is the ability to translate the SQL workloads into the NoSQL version that can be used by Snowflake."

"You can create a connection and be up and running within half an hour."

"The thing I find most valuable is that scalability, space storage, and computing power is separate. When you scale up, it is live from one second to the next — constantly available as you scale — so there is no downtime or interruption of services."

"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."

"The most valuable features of Snowflake are that you have to pay per usage, and you don't have to worry about the maintenance of the data warehouse because it is on the cloud."

"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."

More Snowflake pros

Cons

"What I'd like improved in SAP Business Warehouse is its setup. It could be more flexible, and it could be a configuration-based setup."

"The advanced structuring can be complicated and the interface is not very intuitive."

"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."

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

"The way the data is stored is kind of rigid in SAP BW as a product."

"We are running an older version; it is doing what we need it to do but there is some limitation due to its version."

"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."

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

More SAP Business Warehouse cons

"The scheduling system can definitely be better because we had to use external airflow for that. There should be orchestration for the scheduling system. Snowflake currently does not support machine learning, so it is just storage. They also need some alternatives for SQL Query. There should also be support for Spark in different languages such as Python."

"There is room for improvement in Snowflake's integration with Python. We do a lot of SQL programming in Snowflake, but we go to a different tool to program when we have to in Python."

"I don't know about GCP, if they have connected for GCP. If they don't, they should allow for it."

"If you're running a procedure, it just gives a standard error instead of the exact error captured."

"For the Snowflake database, there should be some third-party features for the ETL."

"Portability is a big hurdle right now for our clients. Porting all of your existing SQL ecosystem, such as stored procedures, to Snowflake is a major pain point."

"From an improvement perspective, Snowflake can evolve in terms of writing costly, expensive queries with less cost and try to see if pipeline development can be made a little easier."

"I have heard people having difficulty with the machine learning model, so there may be room for improvement."

More Snowflake cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

"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."

"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 solution is costly, making it unsuitable for midsize organizations due to its price."

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

"The price of Snowflake is very reasonable."

"Pricing can be confusing for customers."

"Snowflake has consumption-based costs; users only pay for storage and computing."

"It is on a monthly basis. It is based on your usage. There are no additional costs from the point of the licensing fee. We do give some kind of evaluation to the customers about how much it is going to be. You can decide in Snowflake the virtual machine that you are using for customers. There are several kinds of virtual machines that you can use. It is similar to the clothing sizes: small to extra large. If you need more power in the coming month, you can decide in advance and take a more powerful machine. You can just select it from the platform. You can also decide which machine you want to take for extracting data."

"On average, with the number of queries that we run, we pay approximately $200 USD per month."

"It is hard to say because we're usually engaged in the transition as opposed to the long term. Their storage costs are easily within pennies of what AWS S3 would normally cost. Most of the clients I've been working with are in the financial sector, and they're relatively small. I would put them in an SMB connection. The first thing we have to bring up for people is that they're going to build this. They shouldn't store their data in S3. They should pipeline directly into Snowflake and use it on their storage. So, the cost is a big issue because these are small to medium size companies, and that is the biggest thing we had to price point for them."

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

Healthcare Company

Computer Software 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...

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What needs improvement with SAP Business Warehouse?

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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...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake?

I am not the person who manages pricing, setup cost, and licensing. Our team is not limited in pricing. The only experience we have had in terms of running and reprocessing a large number of histor...

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What needs improvement with Snowflake?

Snowflake can be improved in terms of its recent switch to a new user interface, which feels less intuitive compared to the old one. Moving to this new interface is something that I would like to s...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Snowflake?

My main use case for Snowflake is building ETL pipelines and ad-hoc analytics on data that we have. A specific example of a pipeline and ad-hoc analytics task I have worked on using Snowflake invol...

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Comparisons

BigQuery vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 11% of the time

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 10% of the time

SAP Business Data Cloud vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 9% of the time

Databricks vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 9% 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

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs Snowflake

Compared 5% of the time

Amazon Redshift 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

May 2026

Download SAP Business Warehouse product report

Buyer's Guide

Snowflake

May 2026

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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

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