SAP Business Warehouse vs Snowflake comparison

SAP and Snowflake Computing are both solutions in the Cloud Data Warehouse category. SAP is ranked #14 with an average rating of 7.0, while Snowflake Computing is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.1. SAP holds a 2.1% mindshare in CDW, compared to Snowflake Computing’s 17.7% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of SAP users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Snowflake Computing users who would recommend it.

SAP Business Warehouse

Read 25 SAP Business Warehouse reviews

730 Views
511 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Snowflake

Read 101 Snowflake reviews

9,251 Views
6,568 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

SAP Business Warehouse

Snowflake

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2025

Snowflake and SAP Business Warehouse are significant contenders in the data warehousing category. Snowflake appears to have the upper hand due to its scalability, performance, and flexible pricing, which is recognized for delivering promising ROI and operational cost reductions.

Features: Snowflake stands out with its scalability, performance, and flexibility, offering diverse data processing capabilities. It is known for efficiently handling massive datasets, powered by its ability to load petabytes of data and perform quick transformations. SAP Business Warehouse is notable for its deep integration with other SAP systems and its strength in structurally managing complex datasets, which is a significant advantage for businesses using a complete SAP suite.

Room for Improvement: Snowflake can enhance its spatial support, streamline Snowpipe auto-ingest features, and improve pricing transparency. Users point out challenges with integration and desire more user-friendly interfaces. SAP Business Warehouse is considered expensive, with suggestions for improving its intuitive design, flexibility, and integration with newer SAP solutions, as well as reducing complexity in setup configurations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Snowflake utilizes the public cloud, ensuring speedy deployment and solid customer support, although some users mention occasional delays. SAP Business Warehouse operates on private and hybrid clouds, benefiting from robust integration with on-premise systems. Its customer service is praised, but there are concerns about its cost and response speed.

Pricing and ROI: Snowflake has a cost-effective model based on capacity and usage, though some users find it complex and expensive. Its transparency allows scaling according to business needs. In contrast, SAP Business Warehouse is seen as more costly, especially for smaller businesses, with licensing costs tied to company revenue, making it somewhat opaque. Users report a significant ROI from Snowflake related to operational cost reductions, whereas SAP Business Warehouse incurs high consultancy and maintenance costs.

To learn more, read our detailed SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake

September 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

SAP Business Warehouse

Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse

14th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Snowflake

Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

101

Ranking in other categories

Data Warehouse (1st), AI Synthetic Data (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 2.1%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 17.7%, down from 22.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Data Warehouse Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Snowflake	17.7%
SAP Business Warehouse	2.1%
Other	80.2%

Cloud Data Warehouse

Featured Reviews

Srini-Dhanaraj

Founder & CEO at imfine.club

The solution enables seamless connection, but it is expensive, and the information is one day old

Out-of-the-box reports are very useful. The product provides a seamless connection between the SAP operation system and the data warehouse. It also moves the data from the operating system to the data warehouse in a 3D format. The report generation is easy. It’s a drag-and-drop process. People who want to do a project need not reinvent the wheel. Everything is designed, built, and delivered out of the box. All we have to do is interact with the customers to understand the kind of reports they need and check whether they are already available in the out-of-the-box report. If they are available, we just have to enable them and give the URLs to the customers. The Integration between the SAP operating system and data warehouse is excellent. The UI is good.

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Snehasish Das

Technology Leader at eTCaaS

Transformation in data querying speed with good migration capabilities

Snowflake is a data lake on the cloud where all processing happens in memory, resulting in very fast query responses. One key feature is the separation of compute and storage, which eliminates storage limitations. It also has tools for migrating data from legacy databases like Oracle. Its stability and efficiency enhance performance greatly. Tools in the AI/ML marketplace are readily available without needing development.

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 features that I have found most valuable are its capabilities to connect to Excel and to slice and dice."

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

"We are currently in a basic stage of analytics and the first goal we have is to make sure the numbers are correct. BW has some features that help you to build factors and ETL in such a way that it's easy to get to correct responses. That's the number one condition that you have to have in an analytic solution."

"SAP Business Warehouse is a scalable solution."

"The real-time information is great."

"With the technical support, the response has been pretty good from the SAP side."

"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 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."

More SAP Business Warehouse pros

"The most valuable features are sharing data, Time Travel, Zero Copy Cloning, performance, and speed."

"The most valuable feature has been the Snowflake data sharing and dynamic data masking."

"Scaling is a big plus point of Snowflake."

"It's ultra-fast at handling queries, which is what we find very convenient."

"The most valuable feature of Snowflake is its performance. We can access the data quickly. Additionally, it handles structured and non-structured data."

"It is a very good platform. It can handle structured and semi-structured data, and it can be used for your data warehouse or data lake. It can load and deal with any data that you have. It can extract data from an on-premises database or a website and make it available in the cloud. It has very fast implementation and integration as compared to other solutions. There is no need for the DBA to manage or do the day-to-day DBA tasks, which is one of the greatest things about it."

"I like the idea that you can assign roles and responsibilities, limiting access to data."

"Snowflake is an enormously useful platform. The Snowpipe feature is valuable because it allows us to load terabytes and petabytes of data into the data mart at a very low cost."

More Snowflake pros

Cons

"It's a product that is at the end of life so they will not improve it anymore."

"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."

"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 solution could offer better connectivity with other databases."

"The problem with BW, and the factor that differentiated it from the original BW, is that you only get limited functionality with your runtime license. So, you have to pay extra for extracting data."

"I get all the information quickly, but it is one day old."

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

"The solution should be more open to the cloud."

More SAP Business Warehouse cons

"Room for improvement would be writebacks. It doesn't support extensively writing back to the database, and it doesn't support web applications effectively. Ultimately, it's a database call, so if we are building web applications using Snowflake, it isn't that effective because there is some turnaround time from the database."

"Its transaction application needs improvement."

"It's difficult to know how to size everything correctly."

"They should improve the reporting tools."

"An additional feature I'd like to see is called materialized views, which can speed up some run times. I'd like it to be able to be used where you can have multiple tables inside them; materialized view. That would be nice. As well as being able to run cursors, to be able to do some bulk updates and some more advanced querying, table building on the fly."

"The cost of the solution could be reduced."

"We would like to see more security including more masking and more encryption at the database level."

"There is a scope for improvement. They don't currently support integration with some of the Azure and AWS native services. It would be good if they can enhance their product to integrate with these services."

More Snowflake cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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 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."

"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."

"On average, with the number of queries that we run, we pay approximately $200 USD per month."

"It's expensive."

"It is per credit. It has a use-it-as-you-go model. We bought a chunk of 20,000 credits, and they were lasting us for at least a year. We didn't have the scale of data like a much larger company to consume more credits. For us, it was very inexpensive. Their strategy is just to leverage what you've got and put Snowflake in the middle. It doesn't make it expensive because most of the organizations already have reporting tools. Now, if you were starting from scratch, it might be cheaper to go a different way."

"The price of Snowflake is very reasonable."

"Comparing Snowflake to on-prem options such as Oracle or SAP, it seemed more cost-effective."

"Part of the problem with the pricing is that it is very difficult for businesses to get an idea of how expensive it might be until they actually start using Snowflake."

"We use Snowflake pretty heavily. We pay a significant amount of money for the tool. I'd say we pay $300k to $400K every year."

"Snowflake is expensive, but when I consider what we get for that price, it's fair. I rate the solution three out of five for affordability, right in the middle."

More Snowflake pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

12%

Retailer

10%

Energy/Utilities Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	15

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	28
Midsize Enterprise	20
Large Enterprise	56

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about SAP Business Warehouse?

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

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP Business Warehouse?

The solution is quite expensive. We paid a yearly subscription fee.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Snowflake?

The best thing about Snowflake is its flexibility in changing warehouse sizes or computational power.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake?

It is complicated to understand how requests impact warehouse size. Unlike competitors such as Microsoft and Databricks ( /products/databricks-reviews ), Snowflake lacks transparency in estimating ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Snowflake?

Pricing is quite high for Snowflake Data Cloud, which is an area that could be improved. Snowflake Data Cloud is still beneficial to use, but only if you can afford it. It can be cost-effective if ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Databricks vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 30% of the time

BigQuery vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 26% of the time

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 21% of the time

Amazon Redshift vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 10% of the time

More SAP Business Warehouse Competitors

Azure Data Factory vs Snowflake

Compared 11% of the time

Teradata vs Snowflake

Compared 7% of the time

Dremio vs Snowflake

Compared 7% of the time

Amazon EMR vs Snowflake

Compared 6% of the time

SAP BW4HANA vs Snowflake

Compared 6% of the time

More Snowflake Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse

September 2025

Download SAP Business Warehouse product report

Buyer's Guide

Snowflake

September 2025

Download Snowflake product report

Also Known As

No data available

Snowflake Computing, Snowflake Data Cloud

Overview

Reporting, analysis and interpretation of business data are crucial to preserve and enhance the competitive edge of companies by optimizing processes and enabling them to react quickly and in line with market needs. SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) provides tools and functions that enable companies to attain these goals. In SAP BW, you can integrate, transform, and consolidate relevant business information from productive SAP applications and external data sources. SAP BW provides you with a high-performance infrastructure that helps you evaluate and interpret data. Decision makers can make well-founded decisions and identify target-orientated activities on the basis of the analyzed data.

SAP

Snowflake provides a modern data warehousing solution with features designed for seamless integration, scalability, and consumption-based pricing. It handles large datasets efficiently, making it a market leader for businesses migrating to the cloud.

Snowflake offers a flexible architecture that separates storage and compute resources, supporting efficient ETL jobs. Known for scalability and ease of use, it features built-in time zone conversion and robust data sharing capabilities. Its enhanced security, performance, and ability to handle semi-structured data are notable. Users suggest improvements in UI, pricing, on-premises integration, and data science functions, while calling for better transaction performance and machine learning capabilities. Users benefit from effective SQL querying, real-time analytics, and sharing options, supporting comprehensive data analysis with tools like Tableau and Power BI.

What are Snowflake's Key Features?

Scalability: Easily adjusts to handle growing data volumes.
Seamless Integration: Works with a wide range of platforms.
Consumption-Based Costs: Pay only for what you use.
Time Travel: Access historical data effortlessly.
Data Sharing: Secure and efficient sharing of datasets.
Time Zone Conversion: Built-in feature for global operations.
Security: Robust measures to protect sensitive information.
Compute and Storage Separation: Independent scaling for optimal performance.

What Benefits Should You Look for?

Cost Efficiency: Optimized pricing models for minimal waste.
Enhanced Performance: Fast queries and processing times.
Flexibility: Handles both structured and semi-structured data.
Analytics Capabilities: Supports advanced data analysis and reporting.

In industries like finance, healthcare, and retail, Snowflake's flexible data warehousing and analytics capabilities facilitate cloud migration, streamline data storage, and allow organizations to consolidate data from multiple sources for advanced insights and AI-driven strategies. Its integration with analytics tools supports comprehensive data analysis and reporting tasks.

Snowflake Computing

Sample Customers

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

Accordant Media, Adobe, Kixeye Inc., Revana, SOASTA, White Ops

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake

September 2025

Free Report: SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake

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