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 7.7, while Snowflake Computing is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.1. SAP holds a 1.7% mindshare in CDW, compared to Snowflake Computing’s 17.8% 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

721 Views
548 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Snowflake

Read 101 Snowflake reviews

10,613 Views
7,747 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

SAP Business Warehouse

Snowflake

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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: August 2025).

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake

August 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 August 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 1.7%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 17.8%, down from 23.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

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 warehouse is the solution's most valuable feature."

"What I like most about SAP Business Warehouse is its ability to feed data into new, multiple systems in various formats. It can open its data to any system over gateway services or a portal or application that needs to consume and analyze data."

"The product is very stable."

"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 solution has functionality that makes it easy for end-users to readily extract data directly from Business Warehouse into Excel and carry on their analysis on their own."

"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the integration with SAP ERP."

"SAP Business Warehouse is a scalable solution."

More SAP Business Warehouse pros

"I have found the solution's most valuable features to be storage, flexibility, ease of use, and security."

"I like Snowflake's data exchange capabilities. It can exchange data with downstream systems and other vendor partners as well."

"The solution speeds up the process of onboarding."

"Working with Parquet files is support out of the box and it makes large dataset processing much easier."

"The speed of data loading and being able to quickly create the environment are most valuable."

"The overall ecosystem was easy to manage. Given that we weren't a very highly technical group, it was preferable to other things we looked at because it could do all of the cloud tunings. It can tune your data warehouse to an appropriate size for controlled billing, resume and sleep functions, and all such things. It was much more simple than doing native Azure or AWS development. It was stable, and their support was also perfect. It was also very easy to deploy. It was one of those rare times where they did exactly what they said they could do."

"All the people who are working with Snowflake are extremely happy with it because it is designed from a data-warehousing point of view, not the other way around. You have a database and then you tweak it and then it becomes a data warehouse."

"It is very fast and the performance is great."

More Snowflake pros

Cons

"A few things which are missing include the visualization of reports. That's where your costs and licensing become heavy. When it comes to this database compared Microsoft Warehouse, it's an expensive solution."

"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."

"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."

"SAP Business Warehouse could improve by having more out-of-the-box use cases to cover more business types or operations."

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

"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."

"SAP Business Warehouse could integrate better with other ETL tools."

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

More SAP Business Warehouse cons

"To ensure the proper functioning of Snowflake as an MDS, it relies heavily on other partner tools."

"I would like to see more transparency in data processing, ATLs, and compute areas - which should give more comfort to the end users."

"We would like to have an on-premises deployment option that has the same features, including scalability."

"I don't know about GCP, if they have connected for GCP. If they don't, they should allow for it."

"We are yet to figure out how to integrate tools, such as Liquibase, to release changes to our data warehouse model."

"These aren't as crucial, but there are common errors sometimes where the database is down, or a table is nullified and a new table is added and you are not given access to that. With those errors, you don't have permissions."

"The cost of the solution could be reduced."

"Cost reduction is one area I would like Snowflake to improve. The product is not very cheap, and a reduction in costs would be appreciated."

More Snowflake cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

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

"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."

"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."

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

"The solution is quite expensive."

"They give a different price for every single company. I don't know if I negotiated that well, but we got the enterprise tier for $3 a credit, and the other two were a dollar-ninety a credit. I suspect we don't have almost zero compute usage, but I know that our annual contract packages are below all of their minimums."

"I am not much aware of the price, but based on what I have analyzed so far, its cost is reasonable as compared to on-prem data warehouse solutions. It provides a great deal for production."

"Snowflake goes by credits. For a financial institution where you have 5,000 employees, monthly costs may run up to maybe $5,000 to $6,000. This is actually based on the usage. It is mostly the compute cost. Your computing cost is the variable that is actually based on your usage. It is pay-per-use. In a pay-per-use case, you won't be spending more than $6,000 to $7,000 a month. It is not more than that for a small or medium enterprise, and it may come down to $100K per year. Storage is very standard, which is $23 a terabyte. It is not much for any enterprise. If you have even 20 terabytes, you are not spending more than $400 per month, which may turn out to be $2,000 to $3,000 per annum."

"I believe that pricing is reasonable for this solution."

"We're based on credits. So, we're paying four and a half dollars of credit. There are no additional costs. I would rate it a two out of five in terms of pricing."

"You need to be aware of the bloating costs. It is easy to use, but if you don't use it wisely, then your monthly bill can bloat a lot. You need to be a bit aware of its consumption cost."

"The whole licensing system is based on credit points. You can also make a license agreement with the company so that you buy credit points and then you use them. What you do not use in one year can be carried over to the next year."

"It is pay-as-you-go. Its cost is in the medium range."

More Snowflake pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

15%

Retailer

Government

Energy/Utilities Company

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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 24% of the time

BigQuery vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 23% of the time

Amazon Redshift vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 21% of the time

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs SAP Business Warehouse

Compared 21% of the time

More SAP Business Warehouse Competitors

Azure Data Factory vs Snowflake

Compared 13% of the time

Dremio vs Snowflake

Compared 8% of the time

Teradata vs Snowflake

Compared 7% of the time

Amazon EMR vs Snowflake

Compared 7% of the time

SAP BW4HANA vs Snowflake

Compared 6% of the time

More Snowflake Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SAP Business Warehouse

July 2025

Download SAP Business Warehouse product report

Buyer's Guide

Snowflake

July 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

August 2025

Free Report: SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake

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