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Amazon Redshift vs SAP IQ comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
6.0
Some entities quickly achieved cost savings and ROI, while others face challenges with optimization and evaluating benefits.
Sentiment score
6.2
SAP IQ boasts high ROI with substantial hardware savings, low maintenance costs, though some users lack authorization to confirm it.
We earned back our investment in Amazon Redshift within the first year.
Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.8
Amazon Redshift support is efficient yet costly, praised for documentation, but phone contact and complex issue resolution face delays.
Sentiment score
5.6
Customer service is 24/7 but varies in quality; technical support lacks experts, causing slow escalation and limited advanced assistance.
Documentation that allows anyone with prior knowledge of Redshift or SQL to resolve technical issues.
Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Whenever we need support, if there is an issue accessing stored data due to regional data center problems, the Amazon team is very helpful and provides optimal solutions quickly.
Analyst at Cepstrum(EEE Students Society), IIT Guwahati
It's costly when you enable support.
Senior Analyst at ESRI INDIA
It seems very difficult to get proper advanced assistance on advanced or complicated problems.
Tech Director at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The quality of support from SAP is very good; if it's a known problem, they will have a knowledge base, so we will get immediate assistance.
Tech Lead, Database Section. at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Amazon Redshift is highly scalable with flexible cluster adjustments, despite some challenges at larger scales and heavy loads.
Sentiment score
7.4
SAP IQ offers scalable solutions with Simplex and Multiplex architectures, accommodating vast data volumes across PCs or servers.
The scalability part needs improvement as the sizing requires trial and error.
Data Analytics, Ai & Automation Lead at a venture capital & private equity firm with 10,001+ employees
We have successfully increased our storage space, which was a smooth process without server crashes before or after scaling.
Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
We can span the read and write load into multiple nodes, and that scalability is there.
Tech Lead, Database Section. at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
If we wanted to add more servers into this entire setup, that would be fairly easy, so it's rather good when it comes to scalability.
Tech Director at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Opinions on Amazon Redshift's stability vary, with some praising reliability and others noting issues in large clusters or maintenance.
Sentiment score
6.0
SAP IQ is stable, effectively managing complex transactions despite occasional issues, making it a reliable choice for implementations.
Amazon Redshift is a stable product, and I would rate it nine or ten out of ten for stability.
Data Analytics, Ai & Automation Lead at a venture capital & private equity firm with 10,001+ employees
It's usually something external, such as lack of disk space or problems arising from the integration to other systems.
Tech Director at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon Redshift users face challenges with performance, integration, cost, and features, preferring improved solutions like Snowflake's offerings.
SAP IQ faces challenges with high costs, inadequate training, stability issues, and integration limitations, impacting performance and adoption.
Integration with AI features could elevate its capabilities and popularity.
Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Integration with AI could be a good improvement.
Analyst at Cepstrum(EEE Students Society), IIT Guwahati
They should bring the entire ETL data management process into Amazon Redshift.
Data Analytics, Ai & Automation Lead at a venture capital & private equity firm with 10,001+ employees
If the CPU utilization is very high, there is no direct way we can find out which query is taking the most CPU.
Tech Lead, Database Section. at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
When there is an issue, the error messaging we get is not always sufficient to do a fast and solid fix.
Tech Director at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Setup Cost

Amazon Redshift offers mid-to-high pricing, seen as reasonable due to its scalability and potential cost-effectiveness compared to competitors.
SAP IQ is cost-effective with various licensing models, though price understanding and negotiation are essential for optimal implementation.
It's a pretty good price and reasonable for the product quality.
Data Analytics, Ai & Automation Lead at a venture capital & private equity firm with 10,001+ employees
The cost of technical support is high.
Senior Analyst at ESRI INDIA
The pricing of Amazon Redshift is expensive.
Co-Founder, Director at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
 

Valuable Features

Amazon Redshift offers scalability, fast queries, AWS integration, flexibility, security, cost-effectiveness, easy setup, and compatibility for complex data management.
SAP IQ features column-based architecture, high compression, rapid queries, large-scale data handling, and integration with SAP BusinessObjects.
The specific features of Amazon Redshift that are beneficial for handling large data sets include fast retrieval due to cloud services and scalability, which allows us to retrieve data quickly.
Analyst at Cepstrum(EEE Students Society), IIT Guwahati
Scalability is also a strong point; I can scale it however I want without any limitations.
Co-Founder, Director at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Amazon Redshift's performance optimization and scalability are quite helpful, providing functionalities such as scaling up and down.
Data Analytics, Ai & Automation Lead at a venture capital & private equity firm with 10,001+ employees
We can get historical data quickly, and you can fetch information very quickly because every column is indexed.
Tech Lead, Database Section. at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
The most valuable feature of SAP IQ for us is that it works very effectively with the SAP BusinessObjects which we use it with.
Tech Director at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Redshift
Ranking in Data Warehouse
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
73
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (6th), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (8th)
SAP IQ
Ranking in Data Warehouse
14th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Relational Databases Tools (23rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon Redshift is 4.6%, down from 7.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP IQ is 3.1%, up from 2.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Amazon Redshift4.6%
SAP IQ3.1%
Other92.3%
Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Hemanthreddy Vakiti - PeerSpot reviewer
Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Optimized restaurant analytics has driven faster insights and streamlined daily reporting
Amazon Redshift offers massive parallel processing capability, allowing it to handle millions of records, along with integration with other AWS features such as S3 and QuickSight. The column-level storage supports high performance and easy data retrieval compared to other tools. The integration with S3 has helped my team immensely since S3 is our starting source, and the direct integration with Amazon Redshift simplifies the transformation and loading process. Columnar storage has benefited our performance significantly, allowing us to extract specific rows from tables with years of data much faster than other tools with row-level storage. Amazon Redshift has positively impacted our organization by significantly improving query performance and speed. Features such as easy integration with S3 allow us to process millions of records efficiently, ultimately saving us nearly one hour per day for our project.
KK
Tech Director at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Works well with existing platform integration but could improve error messaging and technical support
I do not use SAP IQ's machine learning capabilities. I cannot assess the benefit of SAP IQ's distributed query processing for complex queries, as I am a non-technical operator. I am not sure if we use SAP IQ's data compression features. I think the compression we are doing is on the data storage level and not on the database level. I believe we do not use it, but I'm not certain. We do not utilize SAP IQ's support for unstructured data, as we do not have unstructured data. I do not have any strong opinions on SAP IQ's security features such as data encryption. It's not been something that has been much in focus, neither in our choice of the platform, nor in our daily operations. I guess they're satisfactory as they have not been a problem. I am not aware of the pricing and licensing of SAP IQ, as it's part of a bigger agreement, and I'm not the owner of that agreement. My impression is that SAP IQ is a rather expensive tool in terms of value for money. On a scale of 1-10, I rate SAP IQ a 7.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Construction Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
31%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise29
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise16
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Redshift?
My experience with pricing and setup cost is satisfactory, as we have been loyal clients of Amazon since the beginning of our organization. However, I am not aware of the exact costs associated wit...
What needs improvement with Amazon Redshift?
Amazon Redshift could improve by enhancing its UI to be more user-friendly for non-technical users and by offering better cost management, as similar tools tend to be less expensive. Additionally, ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP IQ?
IQ implementation costs about three thousand dollars. It's less expensive compared to alternatives like Teradata Base in terms of transactional efficiency.
What needs improvement with SAP IQ?
When it comes to SAP IQ, the areas that could be improved or enhanced include the error messaging and the locking capabilities, as that's where we often encounter problems. When there is an issue, ...
What is your primary use case for SAP IQ?
Our usual use cases for SAP IQ is that we have a Software-as-a-Service architecture where this database is the foundation for our SAP BusinessObjects platform. This is where it's getting its data f...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Sybase IQ
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Liberty Mutual Insurance, 4Cite Marketing, BrandVerity, DNA Plc, Sirocco Systems, Gainsight, Blue 449
ASR Group, Citrix, State of Indiana, PocketCard Co. Ltd.
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Redshift vs. SAP IQ and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.