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Amazon Aurora vs SAP HANA comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and SAP are both solutions in the Relational Databases Tools category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.5, while SAP is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.2. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 2.9% mindshare in SQL, compared to SAP’s 10.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of SAP users who would recommend it.
Amazon Aurora
Read 18 Amazon Aurora reviews
  • 2,181 Views
  • 1,427 Comparison Views
100% willing to recommend
SAP HANA
Read 89 SAP HANA reviews
  • 6,723 Views
  • 4,613 Comparison Views
91% willing to recommend
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

SAP HANA and Amazon Aurora compete in the enterprise database management category. Amazon Aurora seems to have the upper hand in terms of cost-efficiency and ease of integration with cloud services, while SAP HANA is recognized for its high-performance capabilities.

Features: SAP HANA offers real-time processing capabilities, robust in-memory computing, and a high-performance architecture that facilitates big data management for large enterprises. It is known for its strong data management and real-time analytics features. Amazon Aurora excels in scalability, providing compatibility with MySQL and PostgreSQL, and a managed environment with auto-scaling and high availability, simplifying integration with other AWS services.

Room for Improvement: SAP HANA is criticized for its high cost and complex interface, necessitating better customization and open-source integration. It also faces challenges in speed and scalability in certain environments. Amazon Aurora could improve in pricing, enhance cryptography, and further develop scalability features while simplifying database migration processes.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SAP HANA supports diverse deployment models, including on-premises and private cloud setups, providing flexibility for specific infrastructure requirements. Its technical support is seen as adequate, with notes on the need for improved documentation and response times. Amazon Aurora provides straightforward public cloud deployment, which simplifies infrastructure management. Customer service is generally well received, particularly for cloud management and AWS integration.

Pricing and ROI: SAP HANA is often viewed as expensive, particularly for SMEs, despite delivering significant functionality and performance. The associated licensing and hardware requirements contribute to the total cost. In contrast, Amazon Aurora is perceived as more cost-effective considering its managed services, which reduce the need for extensive on-premise infrastructure while maintaining performance.

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Buyer's Guide
Amazon Aurora vs. SAP HANA
June 2025
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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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.4
Switching to Amazon Aurora saved 30% in costs and improved performance, reducing operational expenses and enhancing customer satisfaction.
Sentiment score
6.1
Companies have mixed experiences with SAP HANA, benefiting from efficiency but facing potential unforeseen costs and integration challenges.
Using Amazon Aurora has saved us significantly in terms of manpower costs, with nearly fifty percent savings compared to an on-premises solution.
For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon Aurora report
We do not feel we're getting value for the investment due to the additional resources needed for integration and maintenance.
For more quotes and insights, download the SAP HANA report
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.6
Amazon Aurora offers responsive support for premium subscribers, with enterprise-level 24/7 assistance, though access varies for personal accounts.
Sentiment score
6.0
SAP HANA support is generally positive but needs improvements in response times and issue prioritization, varying by user experience.
Technical support from Amazon is rated very highly.
The initial support could improve by having engineers familiarize themselves with the issue content to provide more specialized assistance from the start.
For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon Aurora report
The community support is better than the official SAP support.
While issues are resolved eventually, the first level of support is not as good as we would like.
When we raise a ticket for AWS or Azure issues, we find their support is very proactive, while SAP's support is quite passive.
For more quotes and insights, download the SAP HANA report
SP
Adnan Shafiq - PeerSpot reviewer
HP
RS
Dhiraj Jankar - PeerSpot reviewer
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
Amazon Aurora seamlessly scales to meet high-performance demands, handling large data volumes efficiently, vital for growing businesses.
Sentiment score
7.8
SAP HANA is praised for its scalable, adaptable infrastructure, efficiently managing large-scale deployments despite potential speed impacts.
This scalability is critical as it allows for runtime expansion, which is essential for businesses moving from on-premises to the cloud.
For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon Aurora report
Our operations have grown from a hundred data operations a day to as many in a couple of seconds.
There is enough scalability offered by SAP to meet our deployment needs.
The scalability rating is based on the ability to expand.
For more quotes and insights, download the SAP HANA report
Adnan Shafiq - PeerSpot reviewer
AK
RS
VM
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Amazon Aurora maintains high reliability and performance, with occasional downtimes, quickly resolving initial bugs for minimal user interruptions.
Sentiment score
7.8
SAP HANA is highly stable and reliable, with ongoing updates improving performance and most users rating its stability highly.
It offers a stable environment, ensuring consistent performance.
For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon Aurora report
We recently faced customer data loss during the cluster handover or failover fallback.
We have not had any problems in the last seven to eight years.
Regarding stability, they are using legacy systems and have implemented SAP HANA.
For more quotes and insights, download the SAP HANA report
Adnan Shafiq - PeerSpot reviewerDhiraj Jankar - PeerSpot reviewer
RS
HP
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon Aurora users seek better pricing, Oracle integration, enhanced AI features, scalability, PostgreSQL extensions, and improved serverless query tools.
SAP HANA is criticized for high cost, integration challenges, cumbersome interface, complex setup, and need for better customization.
There are technical challenges, such as the inability to provision the database using a PostgreSQL snapshot directly.
Keeping extensions up-to-date with PostgreSQL releases would enhance Aurora's functionality.
For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon Aurora report
The main issue is the ecosystem, which lacks the widespread support that SQL enjoys.
The setup process and deployment process for SAP HANA is complex.
Licensing costs with SAP HANA are very high.
For more quotes and insights, download the SAP HANA report
SP
Adnan Shafiq - PeerSpot reviewer
AK
VM
HP
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users find Amazon Aurora's pricing reasonable, cost-effective compared to similar products, though costly versus self-managed solutions.
SAP HANA is costly, especially on-premise, but cloud deployment offers a more affordable option for smaller businesses.
The pricing is reasonable and not overly expensive.
Amazon Aurora is not very expensive as other solutions with similar features from other vendors come at almost the same cost.
For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon Aurora report
It's a recurring subscription model, which is expensive compared to legacy systems with just a maintenance fee.
SAP is not a cheap company, and its licenses are expensive.
I would rate the price for SAP HANA as high.
For more quotes and insights, download the SAP HANA report
SP
Adnan Shafiq - PeerSpot reviewer
AK
RS
Dhiraj Jankar - PeerSpot reviewer
 

Valuable Features

Amazon Aurora offers scalability, AWS integration, high availability, speed, and features enhancing performance, cost-efficiency, and operational ease.
SAP HANA's in-memory computing offers fast data processing, seamless integration, robust security, and efficient analytics for enhanced database management.
Amazon Aurora offers a 99.9% SLA compared to PostgreSQL. This ensures a high level of availability for our applications.
It replicates data across multiple Availability Zones, ensuring high availability and geographical redundancy, which can be considered a GR instead of a DR.
For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon Aurora report
This architecture allows for faster data processing and real-time analytics that were not possible with traditional databases.
The concept enhances speed, allowing the database to serve and move data quickly.
One of our dashboards using Excelsius was previously developed on normal BW on Oracle data, which took 10 minutes to open. After developing the same calculation views using those tables and replacing them with calculation views in Excelsius, the dashboard opened in seconds.
For more quotes and insights, download the SAP HANA report
SP
Adnan Shafiq - PeerSpot reviewer
AK
RS
HP
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Aurora
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
7th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SAP HANA
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
89
Ranking in other categories
Data Virtualization (2nd), Embedded Database (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of Amazon Aurora is 2.9%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP HANA is 10.5%, down from 11.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Relational Databases Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Adnan Shafiq - PeerSpot reviewer
High availability and geographical redundancy ensure reliable performance and cost efficiency
Amazon Aurora ( /products/amazon-aurora-reviews ) provides up to fifteen to sixteen read replicas. It replicates data across multiple Availability Zones, ensuring high availability and geographical redundancy, which can be considered a GR instead of a DR. As a managed service, maintenance tasks like backup and restore are handled by AWS ( /products/amazon-aws-reviews ), saving my organization significant time and money. Additionally, its fast cloning feature allows us to create a new clone from a large database swiftly, similar to a zero-copy cloning feature in Snowflake ( /products/snowflake-reviews ). This makes Amazon Aurora a compelling choice for my organization.
Read full review
Dhiraj Jankar - PeerSpot reviewer
Users appreciate the mix of in-memory architecture and ease of backend management
The most valuable SAP HANA features are that, compared to Oracle, there is less administrative work and less complex work to handle, making it very straightforward. The tool itself takes care of the backend work. The main benefits SAP HANA provides to users include its architecture, which combines both column store and row store capabilities. Some places find the row feature important, whereas others find column store important. It allows some tables to be stored in a column base, others in a row base, and the In-Memory functionalities are mostly the highlight of SAP HANA, especially compared to disk-based memory users. This was the main reason SAP HANA was introduced initially.
Read full review
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
6%
Healthcare Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Aurora?
Aurora's compatibility with MySQL or PostgreSQL benefited our database management. The migration from on-premise MySQL to Aurora was similar, so we didn't need to change our source code.
See all answers
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Aurora?
Amazon Aurora is not very expensive as other solutions with similar features from other vendors come at almost the same cost. I rated it as two to three on a scale where ten is very expensive.
See all answers
What needs improvement with Amazon Aurora?
Amazon Aurora should upgrade its base PostgreSQL ( /products/postgresql-reviews ) versions more frequently and offer all PostgreSQL extensions. Keeping extensions up-to-date with PostgreSQL release...
See all answers
What are the biggest benefits of using SAP HANA?
Based on my work with SAP HANA, the biggest benefit that it can bring to your business is total data management. This product is by SAP - a company that serves almost all needs a client may have co...
See all answers
Is SAP HANA’s customer and technical support reliable?
We have been using SAP HANA for a fairly short period of time and have only taken advantage of their customer support. So far, we have not had issues that required specialized help from technical s...
See all answers
Is SAP HANA difficult to set up and start using?
SAP HANA is fairly easy to set up, however, I do not think a complete beginner can do it. You certainly need some preparation - either you need to have experience with similar solutions, or with ot...
See all answers
 

Comparisons

SQL Server vs Amazon Aurora Logo
SQL Server vs Amazon Aurora
Compared 28% of the time
Oracle Database vs Amazon Aurora Logo
Oracle Database vs Amazon Aurora
Compared 19% of the time
Citus Data vs Amazon Aurora Logo
Citus Data vs Amazon Aurora
Compared 8% of the time
MariaDB vs Amazon Aurora Logo
MariaDB vs Amazon Aurora
Compared 7% of the time
MySQL vs Amazon Aurora Logo
MySQL vs Amazon Aurora
Compared 4% of the time
More Amazon Aurora Competitors
Oracle Database vs SAP HANA Logo
Oracle Database vs SAP HANA
Compared 23% of the time
SQL Server vs SAP HANA Logo
SQL Server vs SAP HANA
Compared 21% of the time
MySQL vs SAP HANA Logo
MySQL vs SAP HANA
Compared 11% of the time
IBM Db2 Database vs SAP HANA Logo
IBM Db2 Database vs SAP HANA
Compared 8% of the time
Apache Spark vs SAP HANA Logo
Apache Spark vs SAP HANA
Compared 5% of the time
More SAP HANA Competitors
 

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide
Amazon Aurora
June 2025
Amazon Aurora reportDownload Amazon Aurora product report
Buyer's Guide
SAP HANA
March 2025
SAP HANA reportDownload SAP HANA product report
 

Also Known As

No data available
SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance, HANA
 

Overview

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.

Amazon Aurora is up to five times faster than standard MySQL databases and three times faster than standard PostgreSQL databases. It provides the security, availability, and reliability of commercial databases at 1/10th the cost. Amazon Aurora is fully managed by Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), which automates time-consuming administration tasks like hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.

Amazon Aurora features a distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system that auto-scales up to 64TB per database instance. It delivers high performance and availability with up to 15 low-latency read replicas, point-in-time recovery, continuous backup to Amazon S3, and replication across three Availability Zones (AZs).

Visit the Amazon RDS Management Console to create your first Aurora database instance and start migrating your MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

SAP HANA, also known as SAP High-performance Analytics Appliance, is a multi-model database that stores data in its memory, allowing users to avoid disk storage. The product combines its robust database with services for creating applications. SAP HANA is faster than other database management systems (DBMS) because it stores data in column-based tables in main memory and brings online analytical processing (OLAP) and online transaction processing (OLTP) together.

The column-oriented in-memory database design allows users to run high-speed transactions alongside advanced analytics, all in a single system. This provides companies with the ability to process very large amounts of data with low latency and query data in an instant. By combining multiple data management capabilities, the solution simplifies IT, helps businesses with innovations, and facilitates digital transformation.

The solution is structured into five groups of capabilities, categorized as:

  • Database design
  • Database management
  • Application development
  • Advanced analytics
  • Data virtualization

There are three more SAP products that work alongside SAP HANA and complete the experience for users together. SAP S/4HANA Cloud is a ready-to-run cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP). SAP BW/4HANA is a packaged data warehouse, based on SAP HANA, which allows users to consolidate data across the enterprise to get a consistent view of their data. Finally, SAP Cloud is a single database as a service (DBaaS) foundation for modern applications and analytics across all enterprise data. All three products can combine with SAP HANA to deliver to users an optimized experience regarding their data.

SAP HANA Features

Each architectural group of capabilities of SAP HANA has various features that users can benefit from. These include:

  • Parallel processing database: SAP HANA utilizes a single platform to run transactional and analytical workloads.

  • ACID compliance: This feature ensures compliance with requirements for Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID) standards.

  • Multi-tenancy: This feature allows multiple tenant databases to run in one system while sharing the same memory and processors.

  • Multi-tier storage and persistent memory support: SAP HANA's native storage extension is a built-in capability to manage between memory and persistent storage, including SAP HANA Cloud Data Lake.

  • Scaling: The scaling feature supports terabytes of data in a single server and distributes large tables across multiple servers in a cluster to scale further.

  • Data modeling: This feature consists of graphical modeling tools that enable collaboration between stakeholders and the creation of models to execute complex business logic and data transformation in real time.

  • Stored procedures: The product has a native language to build stored procedures and uses advanced capabilities to create complex logic.

  • Administration: This feature consists of administration tools for various platform lifecycle, performance, and management operations and automations.

  • Security: SAP HANA provides its users with real-time data anonymization features to extract value from data while protecting privacy.

  • Availability and recovery: The tool supports high availability and disaster recovery through an array of techniques, including backup, storage mirroring, synchronous, asynchronous, and multitarget system replication.

  • Extended application services: Through its built-in application server, users can develop services such as REST and ODATA, as well as web applications that can run on multiple locations.

  • Client access: The product offers clients the ability to access it via other application platforms and languages, including Java, JavaScript, R, and Go.

  • Application lifecycle management: This set of features facilitates the building and packaging of applications, transporting them for development to test to production, and then deploying them.

  • Application development: This feature consists of a set of tools that offer application development on premises and in the Cloud. The programming language ABAP includes additional optimized features to build extensions to SAP applications.

  • Search: The search feature uses SQL to locate text promptly across multiple columns and textual content.

  • Spatial processing: This product feature provides native support for spatial data types and spatial functions.

  • Graph: Through this feature, users of the product can store and process highly connected data using a property graph.

  • Streaming analytics: This feature combines various data sources that users can utilize to discover trends over a set period.

  • Data integration and replication: The solution offers comprehensive features to handle all data integration scenarios.

  • Data federation: This feature allows users to perform queries on remote data sources in real time with data federation.

  • Caching: The capacity to cache data provides users with the ability to optimize federated queries against remote sources of data.

SAP HANA Benefits

SAP HANA provides many benefits for its users. These include:

  • This solution offers a high level of data and application security, beginning from a secure setup and providing continuous support.

  • SAP HANA offers augmentation for applications and analytics with built-in machine learning (ML).

  • The solution works in a timely manner, as it provides a response to queries within seconds in large production applications.

  • SAP HANA simplifies work, as it provides a single gateway to all user data with advanced data virtualization.

  • The product is very flexible, as it allows users to deploy applications in a public or private cloud, in multiple clouds, on premises, or hybrid.

  • SAP HANA scales easily for data volume and concurrent users across a distributed environment.

  • This is a powerful solution in terms of querying large datasets with a massively parallel processing (MPP) database.

  • SAP HANA is a versatile product that supports hybrid transactional and analytical processing as well as many data types.

  • The product provides a smaller data footprint with no data duplication or advanced compression, and reduces data silos.

Reviews from Real Users

According to a database consultant at a pharma/biotech company, SAP HANA is a very robust solution with good data access.

Bruno V., owner at LAVORO AUTOM INF E COM LTDA, likes SAP HANA because the product offers advanced features, helps reduce hours, and makes it easy to find what you need.

SAP
 

Sample Customers

Dow Jones, Arizona State University, Verizon, Capital One, United Nations, Nielsen, Autodesk, Fanduel
Unilever, NHS 24, adidas Group, CHIO Aachen, Hamburg Port Authority (HPA), Bangkok Airways Public Company Limited
Buyer's Guide
Amazon Aurora vs. SAP HANA
June 2025
Free Report: Amazon Aurora vs. SAP HANA
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Aurora vs. SAP HANA and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
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