Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs SAP Business Warehouse comparison

Microsoft and SAP are both solutions in the Cloud Data Warehouse category. Microsoft is ranked #7 with an average rating of 7.7, while SAP is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.0. Microsoft holds a 5.6% mindshare in CDW, compared to SAP’s 2.4% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of SAP users who would recommend it.

Microsoft Azure Synapse Ana...

Read 98 Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics reviews

5,492 Views
3,460 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

SAP Business Warehouse

Read 26 SAP Business Warehouse reviews

1,658 Views
945 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Microsoft Azure Synapse Ana...

SAP Business Warehouse

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics and SAP Business Warehouse compete in the data management category. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is favored due to cost-effective pricing and broader deployment options, though SAP Business Warehouse excels in integration within the SAP ecosystem.

Features: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is known for its integration capabilities, scalability, and robust analytics functions, including pipeline creation and monitoring. SAP Business Warehouse stands out for its integration with SAP ERP, supporting structured data reporting and facilitating Excel use for end users.

Room for Improvement: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics requires enhanced user-friendliness, AI, and machine learning advancements, alongside better governance and non-Azure integration features. SAP Business Warehouse could benefit from a simplified user interface, setup, and improved connectivity with non-SAP systems to lessen visualization tool dependencies.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics offers flexible deployment across public and hybrid cloud models with generally responsive customer service. SAP Business Warehouse is primarily on-premises, benefiting those in SAP environments, though user feedback indicates a need for more intuitive support and faster response times.

Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics provides competitive, consumption-based pricing models, beneficial for companies moving from traditional infrastructure to reduce capital expenses. SAP Business Warehouse's revenue-based pricing is complex and costly, potentially limiting for smaller enterprises despite recognized ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. SAP Business Warehouse Report (Updated: May 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. SAP Business Warehouse

May 2026

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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

Microsoft Azure Synapse Ana...

Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse

7th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

SAP Business Warehouse

Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse

15th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is 5.6%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 2.4%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics	5.6%
SAP Business Warehouse	2.4%
Other	92.0%

Cloud Data Warehouse

Featured Reviews

AnandTiwari

CTO at New Turn Technologies

Has consistently supported integration across diverse environments and streamlined deployment processes

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics could improve their pricing structure. They currently have two separate pricing tiers: full log and partial log. I suggest they implement a single price and reduce charges on logs. They could implement a cap with some free tier or price tier based on the GBs of log collected. This would help customers use Azure more effectively. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is an excellent product because it includes both SIEM and orchestration capabilities with playbooks, but the log management part is very costly. Regarding future improvements, I would appreciate more application connectors for integration, particularly for on-premise based solutions. Many customers still maintain on-premise infrastructure, so having more integration possibilities for these environments would be beneficial.

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VishnuReddy2

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product provides a seamless and adaptable approach to data processing and analytics."

"Synapse Analytics' best feature is its ability to process large files."

"Data can be stored any way you want in the data warehouse."

"Fills the gap between big data and classic data warehouses."

"The stability is pretty good."

"One of the most valuable features in Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is the ability to write your own ETL code using Azure Data Factory, which is a component within Synapse."

"In general, Microsoft support is pretty good."

"The most valuable features of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics are the user experience because it is easy to make analyses, load different databases, and different resources, and our end users can do the analysis by themselves without IT supervising."

More Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics pros

"Having the integration with the reporting tool which is provided by SAP is great."

"SAP Business Warehouse is a scalable solution."

"Having the back-end data set with the right information is the best qualification for this solution."

"The fact that it can integrate with Microsoft Excel is the solution's most valuable feature."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the advanced structuring of data capabilities. You can get different structures of data to suit your needs."

"Out-of-the-box reports are very useful."

"Technical support is very good, and we were very satisfied with their level of support when we needed it."

"The real-time information is great."

More SAP Business Warehouse pros

Cons

"Scaling this solution up and down is not quick and easy. This could be improved."

"When I was trying to link services to an SFTP site it was not able to do all the possible encryption that I needed. They can improve by adding more encryption options."

"The only concern for us is the cost part. When it comes to the implementation and the support and maintenance, we see high-cost implications."

"Right now, we are really struggling with the performance. It's not as good as we had hoped."

"Unfortunately, we have had some issues with the dashboard reporting. Sometimes, the data for specific periods would just appear blank on the dashboard. To investigate this, we worked with a Microsoft incident agent and it turned out to be a result of bugs in the platform when dealing with specific types of queries in Azure Data Factory."

"The major pro of Synapse is the service, and the major con is that when you decide to move out of Synapse, you would have to rewrite the entire thing, whereas, with Snowflake, it would be just simple migration to different cloud providers."

"The scalability of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is a concern, depending on the size of the data warehouse to be built."

"Could have more connectors and better integration for Hadoop."

More Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics cons

"The big minuses are its not being user friendly."

"What I'd like improved in SAP Business Warehouse is its setup. It could be more flexible, and it could be a configuration-based setup."

"It takes more work to get the data, including reporting on that data, because some coding is required, and a significant level of transformation is needed when using SAP Business Warehouse."

"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."

"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."

"More integration with Microsoft Office products (not just Excel) would be helpful."

"In the next release, my suggestion would be to have user-friendly interfaces and performance issues be addressed."

"The solution could offer better connectivity with other databases."

More SAP Business Warehouse cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Price is dependent of the use case of the customer. Customers are not likely to only use this as an individual platform/database, they are likely to bundle it with the Azure stack."

"I'm not sure of the exact cost, however, it is around $100,000 a year."

"I understand that Synapse Analytics' pricing is lower than Informatica's."

"We have a licensing cost to pay."

"You have to be very careful with one specific service inside Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics which is called the Sequel Data Warehouse Dedicated. It is very reliable and performs well, but it's expensive. You need to define the tier well because you can choose between several tiers and you have to define which suits your needs and not overperform the tier because it's quite expensive."

"It's very difficult to price unless you know exactly how the customer is using it."

"Microsoft's pricing is relatively high, and it varies according to the extent of our usage. The pricing is directly tied to our consumption. This decision is ultimately a business choice."

"The price of the package not expensive and depends on how much it is used."

More Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics pricing and cost advice

"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."

"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 license for SAP Business Warehouse is paid yearly, and there's no extra cost in addition to the standard licensing fees."

"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."

"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."

"SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."

"The solution is quite expensive."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

Government

Manufacturing Company

11%

Healthcare Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

Marketing Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	29
Midsize Enterprise	18
Large Enterprise	56

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	15

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?

The product is easy to use, and anybody can easily migrate to advanced DB.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?

I think the licensing cost for Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is very high, but I have a local system to support that, so I don't consider that in the near future.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with SAP Business Warehouse?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for SAP Business Warehouse?

I am using SAP Business Warehouse in my organization for data warehousing as well as an ETL tool. Integration with SAP Business Warehouse's ETL tools is not straightforward. Integration with SAP ER...

See all answers

Comparisons

Snowflake vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

Compared 18% of the time

Amazon Redshift vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

Compared 8% of the time

Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Data Factory vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

Compared 6% of the time

Amazon EMR vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

Compared 4% of the time

More Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Competitors

Snowflake vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 13% of the time

BigQuery vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 12% of the time

Databricks vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 10% of the time

SAP Business Data Cloud vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 10% of the time

SAP BW4HANA vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 7% of the time

More SAP Business Warehouse Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

April 2026

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics report

Download Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics product report

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse

April 2026

Download SAP Business Warehouse product report

Also Known As

Azure Synapse Analytics, Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Microsoft Azure SQL DW, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, MS Azure Synapse Analytics

No data available

Overview

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics integrates data warehousing and big data analytics seamlessly. It provides scalability and user-friendly features for efficient, real-time reporting and data management.

Azure Synapse Analytics is designed for seamless data integration, allowing users to scale their operations effectively while providing extensive analytics capabilities. It supports both traditional data warehousing and big data solutions with real-time reporting through an interactive interface that integrates well with Power BI. The platform's serverless flexibility optimizes cost while ensuring robust security, leveraging users' familiarity with SQL technologies. Scalability allows processing of large datasets efficiently, empowering companies to connect disparate data sources and support industry-specific needs. Despite its strengths, Synapse users often seek improved governance, schema management, and technical support. Enhanced integration with Microsoft and third-party tools, along with better data loading capabilities, are also desired.

What are the key features of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?

SQL Pooling: Provides a dedicated SQL pool for scalable data processing.
Massively Parallel Processing: Architecture that enhances efficiency for big data workloads.
Pipelines: Streamlines data orchestration and workflow automation.
Real-Time Reporting: Delivers quick insights by processing data in real time.
Power BI Integration: Seamlessly connects with Power BI for advanced data visualization.
Serverless Flexibility: Optimizes cost management by allowing on-demand resources.

What benefits and ROI should be considered in reviews of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?

Scalability: Efficiently handles expanding data loads.
Cost Management: Serverless architecture provides cost-efficient resource usage.
Security Features: Ensures data protection and compliance.
Data Integration: Connects various data sources for unified analytics.
SQL Familiarity: Leverages common SQL skills for ease of use.

Azure Synapse Analytics is extensively implemented across sectors like healthcare, finance, marketing, and government. Organizations use it to build data pipelines, perform analytics modeling, and facilitate reporting. It supports data transformation, migration, and orchestration, enhancing business intelligence and decision-making capabilities by efficiently handling big data and connecting disparate data sources.

Microsoft

SAP Business Warehouse integrates real-time data access via HANA, with Microsoft Excel and SAP ERP for enhanced data transformation and reporting. Known for its speed and hybrid features, it meets diverse data governance needs.

SAP Business Warehouse is designed to streamline data access and transformation with its integration capabilities. Its speed and efficiency are complemented by advanced reporting features and a robust authorization model. Users benefit from drag-and-drop reporting and alert systems that enhance operational efficiency. Despite its strengths, improvements are necessary in user friendliness, data integration, and reporting speed. Users require better trend analysis tools, increased visualization capabilities, and a more flexible configuration to optimize use. Real-time data access remains an area for development.

What features define SAP Business Warehouse?

HANA Integration: Enables real-time data access
Excel and ERP Integration: Seamless interaction with popular tools
Advanced Reporting: Delivers high-quality reporting capabilities
Hybrid Functionality: Offers versatile use cases
Drag-and-Drop: Simplifies reporting and analysis tasks
Authorization Model: Ensures secure data handling

What benefits and ROI can users expect?

Operational Efficiency: Enhanced by alert and monitoring tools
Data Governance: Robust models meet diverse needs
Centralized Data: Comprehensive data storage and access
Decision-Making Support: BI tools inform strategic planning

SAP Business Warehouse plays a crucial role in industries like finance and supply chain, leveraging data warehousing, ETL processes, and powerful BI applications to enhance decision-making with tools like Business Objects, Tableau, and Power BI. It serves as a central data repository, facilitating extensive reporting and analysis capabilities.

SAP

Sample Customers

Toshiba, Carnival, LG Electronics, Jet.com, Adobe,

Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. SAP Business Warehouse

May 2026

Free Report: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. SAP Business Warehouse

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