Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs SAP Business Warehouse comparison

Microsoft and SAP are both solutions in the Cloud Data Warehouse category. Microsoft is ranked #6 with an average rating of 7.7, while SAP is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.0. Microsoft holds a 6.0% 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

6,890 Views
4,547 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

SAP Business Warehouse

Read 26 SAP Business Warehouse reviews

2,199 Views
1,297 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: August 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. SAP Business Warehouse

August 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

6th

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 August 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is 6.0%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 2.4%, up from 1.7% 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	6.0%
SAP Business Warehouse	2.4%
Other	91.6%

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 most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is the pipeline that is the ETL tool. It's very well designed and is overall very good. We usually don't use the ETL tool in Databricks, but we use the ETL tool in this solution."

"I like SQL post, which is for storage and distributed computing. Another good feature is the copy activity."

"The solution's scalability is very, very good. It's one of the most important aspects for us."

"Synapse makes it easy to integrate and onboard data from other Microsoft and Azure sources. The interface is familiar because we were using Azure Data Factory before Synapse. It made the transition even easier because the Synapse interface is exactly the same."

"One central workspace to manage everything for your data warehouse including visualization."

"The architecture, including compute and storage, is good."

"Can capture all the transactional data throughout a company."

"The fact that we can ingest from different types of sources, whether they are internal systems or external sources."

More Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics pros

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

"What I like most about SAP Business Warehouse is that it's a seamless integration platform."

"Getting high volume data is most valuable for us; it is really fast and it has great integration with SAP ERP or a non-SAP system."

"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."

"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."

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

"My advice would be if you have a data block and if you really want a big solution on the reporting side of it with slicing and dicing, definitely go ahead with BW when it comes to SAP related data."

"I like that it integrates to open-source."

More SAP Business Warehouse pros

Cons

"Customer service and support for Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics need improvement. They are slow to respond and not very knowledgeable."

"There are some limitations. The filing can be improved."

"Scalability is a little laggy or jittery. Sometimes, when jobs are running in production, it might show some faults, and recovering from such scenarios becomes a bit problematic or time-consuming."

"I would like my team to be able to build pipelines that integrate with the Azure Data Factory."

"Its stability is an issue. They have been releasing a version every six months to one year, which means that there are many versions available, and clients are not up to speed on the latest one that they're offering. From a stability point of view, they could do better. They're still upgrading their Synapse Analytics workspace, and it is not that stable. Its scalability can also be better."

"With respect to what needs to be improved, concurrent connectivity has some limitations."

"It would be beneficial to take the top vendors and identify some kind of straightforward action to work with them. Instead of having to employ a separate vendor tool to be able to move this, it would be nice to be able to go through Microsoft."

"An area for improvement in Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is its user interface. You can use it for analytical purposes, but its platform should be a little bit more user-friendly. Another small point for improvement in Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is its stability. It's good currently, but it could still be improved. Microsoft is combining different tools and technologies into one solution, so in the future, I'm expecting to see even more improvement in Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics. An additional feature I'd like to see in the next version of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is the drag-and-drop feature. If you're doing some integrations where you can write Scala or you have SPARK programming or SQL, or you're combining different programming, the process should be seamless, and you should be able to drag and drop in Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics. When doing reporting in the solution, you should also be able to drag and drop. There should be connectors available and a drag-and-drop feature available in the user interface of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, so you won't have to worry about how all processes would work together. You need to be able to drag and drop even from the backend, and having this feature will make the solution more user-friendly."

More Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics cons

"There are a lot of things that could be improved especially in terms of data cleansing, data management, data lineage, etc. The solution needs to offer more flexibility in terms of formulas and the query designer."

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

"From a support perspective, SAP Business Warehouse is quite a complex module."

"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."

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

"There is room for improvement from a technical perspective."

"We are very unhappy with technical support. First of all, they send their sales agents or pre-sales agents and most of them who don't know the solution as a properly trained tech would. We have an on-site SAP representative who is supposed to help us with our high priority and production issues, and they're not satisfactory to say the least."

"The visualization should be improved, as well as the dashboards and advanced analytics."

More SAP Business Warehouse cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is subscription-based. You can also pay to use the product as you go."

"The solution is expensive at the enterprise level."

"Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics can be costly, however, a cost-effective approach would be to purchase it in advance through reservation for either one or three years. This will significantly reduce the overall expenses incurred."

"The solution could improve by having better costing information."

"The product is expensive."

"Its price could be better. It was a school project, and I got it for free. If I try to pay through my company, it is a little bit more expensive as compared to Oracle."

"This is a cost-effective product."

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

More Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics pricing and cost advice

"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."

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

"The solution is quite expensive."

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

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Outsourcing Company

Construction Company

Manufacturing Company

13%

Construction Company

11%

Healthcare Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	28
Midsize Enterprise	18
Large Enterprise	60

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...

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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 needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?

I am hoping that in the future Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics may have AI support.

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 20% of the time

Amazon Redshift vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

Compared 9% of the time

Azure Data Factory vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

Compared 6% of the time

Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

Compared 6% of the time

Oracle Exadata vs Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

Compared 4% of the time

More Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Competitors

Snowflake vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 17% of the time

BigQuery vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 12% of the time

SAP Business Data Cloud vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 8% of the time

Databricks vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 7% 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

July 2026

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics report

Download Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics product report

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse

July 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

August 2026

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

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