Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Databricks vs SAP Business Warehouse 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Databricks
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
8th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
91
Ranking in other categories
Data Science Platforms (1st), Streaming Analytics (1st)
SAP Business Warehouse
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
14th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Databricks is 9.0%, up from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 1.6%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

ShubhamSharma7 - PeerSpot reviewer
Capability to integrate diverse coding languages in a single notebook greatly enhances workflow
Databricks offers various courses that I can use, whether it's PySpark, Scala, or R. I can leverage all these courses in a single notebook, which is beneficial for clients as they can access various tools in one place whenever needed. This is quite significant. I usually work with PySpark based on client requirements. After coding, I feed the Databricks notebooks into the ADF pipeline for updates. Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed. Furthermore, I can connect our Databricks notebook directly with Power BI and other visualization tools like Qlik. Once we develop code, it allows us to transform raw data into visualizations for clients using analysis diagrams, which is very helpful.
JavedKhan1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers powerful analytics and integration capabilities but requires improved upgrade processes
SAP Business Warehouse could have been better. There is room for improvement from a technical perspective. So, from a technical perspective, when we are upgrading a Business Warehouse server or we are migrating from one place to another, the capability required for this upgradation has many manual activities. It took us around a month to streamline our server. Let’s say there are some transaction codes. Transaction code is a set of programs, and when you want to run a program from the backend, you need to hit the transaction code. It is called a T-code. So during the upgrade, many transaction codes get affected, and as a security consultant, it is my responsibility to recheck those transaction codes which are affected. Sometimes more than 100 codes may get affected, sometimes 500, and sometimes more as well. So, it takes a hell lot of time to integrate them again. That is a limitation or defect within the SAP Business Warehouse. SAP Business Warehouse should come up with proper solutions. Upgradation is an automatic activity. It should happen by itself. We just need to initiate it, and the backend SAP server is automatically upgraded. But it should handle the transactional code as well. They should not get absolutely, and any authorization object should not get deleted from the transaction codes. So, that functionality SAP Business Warehouse should come up with.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"In the manufacturing industry, Databricks can be beneficial to use because of machine learning. It is useful for tasks, such as product analysis or predictive maintenance."
"Databricks is a unified solution that we can use for streaming. It is supporting open source languages, which are cloud-agnostic. When I do database coding if any other tool has a similar language pack to Excel or SQL, I can use the same knowledge, limiting the need to learn new things. It supports a lot of Python libraries where I can use some very easily."
"The Delta Lake data type has been the most useful part of this solution. Delta Lake is an opensource data type and it was implemented and invented by Databricks."
"Databricks has helped us have a good presence in data."
"The load distribution capabilities are good, and you can perform data processing tasks very quickly."
"Imageflow is a visual tool that helps make it easier for business people to understand complex workflows."
"Automation with Databricks is very easy when using the API."
"The integration with Python and the notebooks really helps."
"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."
"Out-of-the-box reports are very useful."
"The most useful feature has been he ability to feed data into multiple systems in various formats."
"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 key element in this solution is its rapid response. If you have a question about prices, buyers, customers, providers, or services, you need the answer in a minute or two. That's the key benefit for us that a solution like BW gives us."
"The most useful feature is definitely the speed."
"Having the integration with the reporting tool which is provided by SAP is great."
"With the technical support, the response has been pretty good from the SAP side."
 

Cons

"It would be better if it were faster. It can be slow, and it can be super fast for big data. But for small data, sometimes there is a sub-second response, which can be considered slow. In the next release, I would like to have automatic creation of APIs because they don't have it at the moment, and I spend a lot of time building them."
"The Databricks cluster can be improved."
"It would be very helpful if Databricks could integrate with platforms in addition to Azure."
"Can be improved by including drag-and-drop features."
"The biggest problem associated with the product is that it is quite pricey."
"The solution has some scalability and integration limitations when consolidating legacy systems."
"The product should provide more advanced features in future releases."
"Databricks' technical support takes a while to respond and could be improved."
"SAP Business Warehouse could integrate better with other ETL tools."
"One of our requirements is the ability to easily get answers regarding trends and exceptions. In BW, it is not that easy to get such information. I expect better trend and exception detection, better pattern detection."
"I would like to see a different end solution in order to read the data and attract internal users."
"You can start quickly but, when you have to get a little more detailed, when you have to change something, when you have to solve problems, it's not that easy. It's easy to start but evolving is not that easy."
"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."
"It's a product that is at the end of life so they will not improve it anymore."
"The solution should be more open to the cloud."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing costs of Databricks depend on how many licenses we need, depending on which Databricks provides a lot of discounts."
"I rate the price of Databricks as eight out of ten."
"Whenever we want to find the actual costing, we have to send an email to Databricks, so having the information available on the internet would be helpful."
"We implement this solution on behalf of our customers who have their own Azure subscription and they pay for Databricks themselves. The pricing is more expensive if you have large volumes of data."
"The price of Databricks is reasonable compared to other solutions."
"The solution requires a subscription."
"The solution is based on a licensing model."
"I would rate Databricks' pricing seven out of ten."
"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."
"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."
"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."
"SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Data Warehouse solutions are best for your needs.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which do you prefer - Databricks or Azure Machine Learning Studio?
Databricks gives you the option of working with several different languages, such as SQL, R, Scala, Apache Spark, or Python. It offers many different cluster choices and excellent integration with ...
How would you compare Databricks vs Amazon SageMaker?
We researched AWS SageMaker, but in the end, we chose Databricks. Databricks is a Unified Analytics Platform designed to accelerate innovation projects. It is based on Spark so it is very fast. It...
Which would you choose - Databricks or Azure Stream Analytics?
Databricks is an easy-to-set-up and versatile tool for data management, analysis, and business analytics. For analytics teams that have to interpret data to further the business goals of their orga...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP Business Warehouse?
The solution is quite expensive. We paid a yearly subscription fee.
What needs improvement with SAP Business Warehouse?
Over a period, we realized that the license and maintenance costs were quite expensive. Every day, we had to run the background job ODS. Eventually, we moved away from SAP Business Warehouse and bo...
 

Also Known As

Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
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 Databricks vs. SAP Business Warehouse and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.