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Amazon Redshift vs SAP Business Warehouse comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

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

Amazon Redshift
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
8th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
72
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (5th), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (8th)
SAP Business Warehouse
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
14th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon Redshift is 7.2%, up from 6.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 2.3%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon Redshift7.2%
SAP Business Warehouse2.3%
Other90.5%
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

PJ
Data Analytics, Ai & Automation Lead at a venture capital & private equity firm with 10,001+ employees
Performance optimization and scaling adaptations enable efficient data management
Amazon Redshift does not work alone and requires integration with other AWS tools like S3 and Glue for a complete ecosystem. They should bring the entire ETL data management process into Amazon Redshift. Either they should move Amazon Redshift under Glue, or Glue should be brought under Amazon Redshift. The initial setup could also be improved, particularly in terms of sizing, as it requires trial and error to get right.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The feature that we find most useful is the ability to do analytics on the fly."
"The main benefit is that our portal for end users is running in AWS, so we can easily connect it to other AWS services."
"Though Amazon Redshift is good, it depends on what kind of business you're trying to do, what type of analytics you need, and how much data you have."
"Easy to build out our snowflake design and load data."
"Redshift is a major service of Amazon and is very scalable. It enables faster recalculations and data management, helping to retrieve data quickly."
"The most valuable feature is the scalability, as it grows according to our needs."
"Its simplicity in configuration, cost-effectiveness due to being in the cloud and close to our data sources, and the fact that it's a managed service that is scalable and reliable are highly valuable."
"It is quite simple to use and there are no issues with creating the tables."
"Predominantly, our company uses SAP Business Warehouse for reporting purposes across various departments, especially for managers to gain a quick understanding of their current standing and make informed decisions."
"The most valuable feature of SAP Business Warehouse is its hybrid functionality, allowing users to leverage both SQL-based data warehouse capabilities from HANA and feature-based data warehousing from BW."
"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."
"The most useful feature has been he ability to feed data into multiple systems in various formats."
"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."
"With the technical support, the response has been pretty good from the SAP side."
"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."
"The warehouse is the solution's most valuable feature."
 

Cons

"If you require a highly scalable solution, I would not recommend Amazon Redshift."
"I would like to improve the pricing and the simplicity of using this solution."
"The explain panel in the Redshift database could be better."
"It is not easy to deal with queries in Amazon Redshift and see the same data."
"The speed of the solution and its portability needs improvement."
"For people who struggle with IAM or role-based management, the setup isn't easy."
"Amazon Redshift does not have the capability to dynamically increase the VM file."
"In the next release, a pivot function would be a big help. It could save a lot of time creating a query or process to handle operations."
"In the next release, my suggestion would be to have user-friendly interfaces and performance issues be addressed."
"The advanced structuring can be complicated and the interface is not very intuitive."
"I would like to see a different end solution in order to read the data and attract internal users."
"It's a product that is at the end of life so they will not improve it anymore."
"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."
"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."
"So far, the initial setup process in our company has not been easy enough for us to understand."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's pay per use. You can have multiple models."
"The cost will depend on how you set up your warehouse and what kind of data you store."
"For Amazon Redshift, we pay around INR 60,000 annually. The cost factor also depends on the number of existing customers."
"Redshift is very cost effective for a cloud based solution if you need to scale it a lot. For smaller data sizes, I would think about using other products."
"The cost is comparable to Snowflake."
"The cost must be improved."
"It's not very pricey compared to other tools. I would rate the price as 5 out of 10."
"The product is cheap considering what it provides; I rate it five out of five for affordability."
"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."
"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."
"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."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Transportation Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Retailer
9%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise28
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

How does Amazon Redshift compare with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?
Amazon Redshift is very fast, has a very good response time, and is very user-friendly. The initial setup is very straightforward. This solution can merge and integrate well with many different dat...
What do you like most about Amazon Redshift?
The tool's most valuable feature is its parallel processing capability. It can handle massive amounts of data, even when pushing hundreds of terabytes, and its scaling capabilities are good.
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...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Liberty Mutual Insurance, 4Cite Marketing, BrandVerity, DNA Plc, Sirocco Systems, Gainsight, Blue 449
Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Redshift vs. SAP Business Warehouse and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.
881,733 professionals have used our research since 2012.