Exasol Data Warehouse vs SAP HANA comparison

Exasol and SAP are both solutions in the Relational Databases Tools category. Exasol is ranked #32, while SAP is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.2. Exasol holds a 1.4% mindshare in SQL, compared to SAP’s 7.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Exasol users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of SAP users who would recommend it.

Exasol Data Warehouse

Read 8 Exasol Data Warehouse reviews

677 Views
596 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

SAP HANA

Read 93 SAP HANA reviews

6,000 Views
4,860 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

Exasol Data Warehouse

SAP HANA

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

SAP HANA and Exasol Data Warehouse are two significant players in the data warehousing market, consistently competing in delivering fast and efficient data processing solutions. SAP HANA tends to have an edge due to its comprehensive features and integration capabilities.

Features: SAP HANA includes advanced analytics, in-memory computing, and real-time data processing which provides quick insights and makes it a valuable tool for large enterprise needs. Exasol is noted for its exceptional speed, automatic optimization, and robust support for SQL, ensuring efficient performance for analytical queries. SAP HANA excels in integration, making it suitable for complex system landscapes.

Room for Improvement: For SAP HANA, some users note that the system can be resource-intensive and complex, requiring a significant setup and integration effort. Additionally, optimization for big data solutions would enhance its capabilities further. On the other hand, Exasol could improve by offering more flexible role management and documentation that caters to beginners for easier onboarding and usability. It can also benefit from better integration capabilities to match SAP HANA's comprehensive suite.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SAP HANA offers extensive documentation and strong technical support, ensuring that even complex deployments are well-supported. However, this also makes it more resource-intensive. Exasol is praised for its simplicity and faster setup, requiring fewer resources and less dependency on support, though the documentation could be more beginner-friendly.

Pricing and ROI: SAP HANA comes with a higher initial cost but offers substantial ROI through its extensive features and integration capabilities. It is often seen as a justified investment for enterprises needing comprehensive solutions. Conversely, Exasol provides a more cost-effective setup, with a promising ROI driven by its efficient performance and rapid deployment, making it attractive for businesses seeking quicker returns with lower upfront expenses.

To learn more, read our detailed Exasol Data Warehouse vs. SAP HANA Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Exasol Data Warehouse vs. SAP HANA

December 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:

Categories and Ranking

Exasol Data Warehouse

Ranking in Relational Databases Tools

32nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

SAP HANA

Ranking in Relational Databases Tools

3rd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Virtualization (2nd), Embedded Database (2nd), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of Exasol Data Warehouse is 1.4%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP HANA is 7.5%, down from 11.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Relational Databases Tools Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
SAP HANA	7.5%
Exasol Data Warehouse	1.4%
Other	91.1%

Relational Databases Tools

Featured Reviews

Shubham-Agarwal

Manager Projects at Cognizant

Fast query processing and easy-to-store all the data

There are very few companies that are using Exasol, but the majority of companies are using SQL Server, Cloud or IBM Db2 Database, or any other databases. Therefore, the resources are limited, which is my only concern. So if I face any issues, limited resources are available to help me resolve the issue with Exasol. From that perspective, it can be a bit of a struggle for me to find a solution. In the next release, I would like to see better compatibility issues. Currently, Exasol has limited compatibility with other software like Python and R. For example, If I talk about SQL Server, we can connect it to big data or Python, which is also compatible with different servers.

Read full review

Hari Priya

SAP Analytics Lead at Miracle Software Systems, Inc

Performs well with high database and reporting performance

We face difficulties replicating the AC DOCA table, which is a huge table, from S/4HANA to SAP HANA BAS, Business Application Studio, or HANA Studio using SLT. For developing Power BI reports using the AC DOCA table, we are replicating full data daily. We want to implement delta load, and while we used OData service for one client, the delta OData service link is not properly updating delta records. Licensing costs with SAP HANA are very high. Due to high pricing, many clients are moving from BW on SAP HANA and S/4HANA to Azure SQL. I have worked with several clients who have moved all data flows to Azure and developed Power BI queries on top of Azure. Many clients are also using Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The certification costs are also very high, more than ₹1,40,000 INR. Previously, it was ₹30,000 to ₹40,000. I want to pursue three certifications but am unable to do so due to the cost.

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

"The most valuable feature of Exasol is its speed."

"We can quickly scale the solution as it works on an MPP system."

"The solution is hands-off; you set it up insert your data and it self tunes queries."

"Its speed is great."

"The speed is very good compared to other databases, like SQL Server or Oracle."

"It is easy to scale."

"We mainly chose Exasol for its performance reasons."

"Performance is a top priority, and it excels in this aspect."

"The memory is the solution's most valuable feature. It's the main feature of HANA. Others are still the regular IT databases that are on storage and are therefore much slower than HANA. The solution is quite fast."

"The benefits include high database loading performance, superior reporting performance, and ease of use."

"Our operations have grown from a hundred data operations a day to as many in a couple of seconds."

"The functionality is of the solution is very good."

"SAP HANA is a stable solution."

"The most valuable feature of SAP HANA is the interaction it provides with external suppliers and clients."

"Probably the main feature is its in-memory database."

"It's very convenient and very innovative."

More SAP HANA pros

Cons

"They should improve the security features for MPP processing."

"It's not cloud-native so many maintenance operations require downtime."

"The only area where we found it could improve was in custom role creation and security, and it was difficult to work with."

"You have to install Exasol drivers, and it's not easy to find or implement a driver into different systems."

"Lacks a cloud-based platform."

"There are limited resources available to help me resolve the issue with Exasol."

"They don't talk very well to with other products when it comes to connectivity. Integration is lacking."

"It would be beneficial if the updates would occur more often."

"It would be nice to know when SAP plans to stop its maintenance of a previous version of SAP ECC ERP because, at this point, anyone utilizing SAP will have no choice but to go on S/4HANA Database."

"There could be better management for faster updates, last year there were some changes in India to the e-invoicing feature."

"The SAP HANA interface has room for improvement because it takes more work to manage than the Microsoft SQL Server interface."

"The user experience should be better. Its user interface is not good. I also don't like the transition concept."

"It could be a bit more scalable."

"The interface is a little bit hard to customize. You almost have to consult the SAP original developer to change it."

"The initial setup of SAP HANA is quite difficult as it has a steep learning curve."

"The support is lacking and not worth the premium price. If support was just a nominal fee, it would be perceived differently."

More SAP HANA cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's cost is mid-ranged."

"Set up a consortium of consulting partners and hardware vendors to define your tech. Landscape TCO (total cost of ownership) and then approach the OEM for pricing (on-premise or on cloud or a hybrid model). Check if you can bring your own licenses for some of the existing application licenses on the new platform, to reduce TCO."

"It comes with a significant cost."

"SAP HANA is expensive, but unfortunately, we do not have any alternatives."

"The price is on the expensive side, at eight out of ten, with ten being expensive."

"People who are technical will accept the cost, but financially they will assess whether this solution will bring them revenue or not. People often ask, how will I profit when the cost is so high?"

"The tool is expensive compared to other products, like Oracle R or Microsoft, but it offers a range of all the company's functions."

"SAP HANA is more expensive than other solutions."

"The cost of SAP HANA is high, and I would rate the price at eight out of ten."

More SAP HANA pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Logistics Company

Insurance Company

Retailer

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	1
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	26
Midsize Enterprise	12
Large Enterprise	62

Questions from the Community

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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...

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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...

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Comparisons

Oracle Database vs Exasol Data Warehouse

Compared 15% of the time

SQL Server vs Exasol Data Warehouse

Compared 14% of the time

Teradata vs Exasol Data Warehouse

Compared 13% of the time

Oracle Database In-Memory vs Exasol Data Warehouse

Compared 12% of the time

SingleStore vs Exasol Data Warehouse

Compared 7% of the time

More Exasol Data Warehouse Competitors

Oracle Database vs SAP HANA

Compared 28% of the time

SQL Server vs SAP HANA

Compared 14% of the time

IBM Db2 Database vs SAP HANA

Compared 7% of the time

MySQL vs SAP HANA

Compared 7% of the time

DuckDB vs SAP HANA

Compared 4% of the time

More SAP HANA Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Exasol Data Warehouse

January 2026

Download Exasol Data Warehouse product report

Buyer's Guide

SAP HANA

January 2026

Download SAP HANA product report

Also Known As

No data available

SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance, HANA

Overview

Exasol is a high-performance data warehouse solution that accelerates BI and reporting features. Its speed, stability, and self-tuning queries make it valuable, and it doesn't require a database administrator. It's a backend database for Tableau dashboards, resulting in faster report loading times and increased efficiency in querying data.

Exasol's high performance allows users to connect insights and fire queries instead of looking at cached dashboards. It has impressive aggregation capabilities that help calculate metrics on the fly based on user-selected filters.

Exasol

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

1&1 Internet SE 11880 Internet Services AG AB Svenska Spel Accarda AG Aera Technology Inc. AGRAVIS Raiffeisen AG Apotheken-Rechen-Zentrum GmbH AQR Capital Management, LLC arvato distribution GmbH ARZ Allgemeines Rechenzentrum GmbH Badoo Limited Baur Versand (GmbH & Co. KG) BIScience Ltd Blocket Blue Yonder GmbH Codilink UK Ltd T/A Coniq crealytics GmbH dailyme TV GmbH Dailymotion S.A. Dataforce Verlagsgesellschaft für Business Information mbH Deutsche Postbank AG Digitales Rezept Zentrum GmbH DIKW Groep direct services Gütersloh GmbH DR Technologies Ltd. dress-for-less GmbH econda GmbH emetriq GmbH empiriecom GmbH & Co. KG Flaconi GmbH Fresenius Netcare GmbH Fyber GmbH GfK SE Grant Street Group, Inc. Gruner + Jahr GmbH Gymshark UK Hahn Air Lines GmbH Hermes Einrichtungs Service GmbH & Co. KG INNOVATIVE SCHEDULING, LLC internetstores GmbH INTERSPORT Deutschland eG IQVIA Commercial GmbH & Co. OHG IQVIA Commercial Sp. z o.o. IQVIA Incorporated iVantage Health Analytics K - Mail Order GmbH & Co. KG LIQ CORP SA Manor AG Basel Match2Lists Limited MEDION AG Midasplayer AB Monsoon Accessorize Limited m-pathy GmbH msales Ltd. MTG Modern Services AB MW Aviation GmbH & Co. KG Myntra Designs Pvt Ltd Netzeffekt GmbH New Company Services Ltd. NOVENTI HealthCare GmbH Olympus Europa SE & Co. KG Operation Fistula OpsDataStore OTTO (GmbH & Co KG) Panda Retail Co. PAPSTAR GmbH Piedmont Healthcare, Inc. Questback GmbH RatePAY GmbH Revolut Ltd. Saarland-Sporttoto GmbH Sagarmatha Ltd. SIA Damara Technologies Supermärkte Nord Vertriebs GmbH & Co. KG The National Research Center for College & University Admissions, Inc. United Utilities Water Ltd. Verlag C.H. Beck oHG Vocal Planet Ltd. Vodafone Group Services GmbH Webtrekk GmbH wer liefert was? GmbH Windeln.de SE Wooga GmbH XING SE Zalando SE

Unilever, NHS 24, adidas Group, CHIO Aachen, Hamburg Port Authority (HPA), Bangkok Airways Public Company Limited

Buyer's Guide

Exasol Data Warehouse vs. SAP HANA

December 2025

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