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SAP IQ vs Snowflake Analytics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.2
SAP IQ boasts high ROI with substantial hardware savings, low maintenance costs, though some users lack authorization to confirm it.
Sentiment score
6.1
Snowflake Analytics offers potential 40-50% performance benefits and cost savings, though financial returns vary based on user needs.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.6
Customer service is 24/7 but varies in quality; technical support lacks experts, causing slow escalation and limited advanced assistance.
Sentiment score
7.1
Snowflake Analytics receives praise for responsive support, though some suggest improvements in complex issue resolution and occasional delay handling.
It seems very difficult to get proper advanced assistance on advanced or complicated problems.
The quality of support from SAP is very good; if it's a known problem, they will have a knowledge base, so we will get immediate assistance.
Recently we had a two-day session where the Snowflake Analytics team provided a demo on Cortex AI and its features.
The technical support for Snowflake Analytics is excellent based on what I have heard from others.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
SAP IQ offers scalable solutions with Simplex and Multiplex architectures, accommodating vast data volumes across PCs or servers.
Sentiment score
8.0
Snowflake Analytics efficiently manages large data volumes with dynamic cloud scaling, offering superior scalability and cost efficiency versus competitors.
We can span the read and write load into multiple nodes, and that scalability is there.
If we wanted to add more servers into this entire setup, that would be fairly easy, so it's rather good when it comes to scalability.
Storage is unlimited because they use S3 if it is AWS, so storage has no limit.
Maintaining security and data governance becomes easier with an entire data lake in place, and the scalability improves performance.
It supports both horizontal and vertical scaling effectively.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.0
SAP IQ is stable, effectively managing complex transactions despite occasional issues, making it a reliable choice for implementations.
Sentiment score
8.5
Snowflake Analytics is highly rated for its stable and reliable performance, ensuring minimal disruptions and high availability.
It's usually something external, such as lack of disk space or problems arising from the integration to other systems.
Snowflake Analytics has been stable and reliable in my experience.
Snowflake Analytics is stable, scoring around eight point five to nine out of ten.
 

Room For Improvement

SAP IQ faces challenges with high costs, inadequate training, stability issues, and integration limitations, impacting performance and adoption.
Snowflake Analytics requires enhancements in ML, cloud, legacy integration, cost transparency, user experience, and performance with large datasets.
If the CPU utilization is very high, there is no direct way we can find out which query is taking the most CPU.
When there is an issue, the error messaging we get is not always sufficient to do a fast and solid fix.
I would prefer Snowflake Analytics to improve their support response times, as sometimes the responses we receive are not very prompt and ticket assignments may not be timely.
If it offered flexibility similar to Oracle and supported more heterogeneous data sources and database connectivity, it would be even better.
AIML-based SQL prompt and query generation could be an area for enhancement.
 

Setup Cost

SAP IQ is cost-effective with various licensing models, though price understanding and negotiation are essential for optimal implementation.
Snowflake Analytics offers flexible usage-based pricing impacting cost, with views varying on expense and competitive pay-as-you-go benefits.
Snowflake is better and cheaper than Redshift and other cloud warehousing systems.
Snowflake Analytics is quite economical.
Snowflake charges per query, which amounts to a very minor cost, such as $0.015 per query.
 

Valuable Features

SAP IQ features column-based architecture, high compression, rapid queries, large-scale data handling, and integration with SAP BusinessObjects.
Snowflake Analytics provides efficient, secure, and scalable data management, supporting seamless integration and cost-effective analytics with advanced features.
We can get historical data quickly, and you can fetch information very quickly because every column is indexed.
The most valuable feature of SAP IQ for us is that it works very effectively with the SAP BusinessObjects which we use it with.
Snowflake Analytics supports data security with a single sign-on feature and complies with framework regulations, which is highly beneficial.
Running a considerable query on Microsoft SQL Server may take up to thirty minutes or an hour, while Snowflake executes the same query in less than three minutes.
The end-to-end encryption provided by Snowflake Analytics is very important because, in my previous firm, working in finance and investment management, data encryption is necessary due to the sensitive nature of customer data and the involvement of people's money.
 

Categories and Ranking

SAP IQ
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Relational Databases Tools (26th), Data Warehouse (14th)
Snowflake Analytics
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
41
Ranking in other categories
Web Analytics (2nd), Cloud Data Warehouse (10th)
 

Featured Reviews

Tejas Raj - PeerSpot reviewer
Columnar database, so pulling records is easy but there isn't enough documentation for installation
I've seen very few SAP IQ systems in recent years. So people are moving away from SAP IQ In the last three years, I've rarely encountered customers using it. Fewer systems with SAP IQ usage among our customers. Most of them have moved on to HANA. There are parallel products, and there are also viable alternatives from AWS, so many have migrated to those.
Garima Goel - PeerSpot reviewer
Have created secure cloud-based data lakes and improved real-time data processing using integrated AI features
There are many capabilities which Snowflake Analytics offers that I find valuable, such as the storage and compute engine that allows working with any cloud system such as AWS or Azure, alongside its efficiencies in storage computation and cost-effectiveness, which saves money compared to on-premise systems. We also have features such as pre-cached results, Time Travel, and fail-safe, which are very useful for restoring data if deleted accidentally, and the streams and data pipes that facilitate real-time ingestion are great features as well. Snowflake Analytics offers multiple new connectors, allowing me to connect it with Kafka, and with Snowpark, I can work with any programming language such as Python, Java, or Scala for data processing and analysis. The data sharing feature offered by Snowflake Analytics is good because it allows sharing specific sets of data to end customers or users from different Snowflake Analytics accounts without exposing the entire dataset for data security reasons. Snowflake Analytics' support for machine learning models and real-time insights has enhanced significantly. Originally, it wasn't strong in AI/ML, but now it has multiple models and forecasting capabilities, providing good competition to tools such as Databricks and Spark. In BI, I have worked majorly with Microsoft Power BI, and the integration with Snowflake Analytics is very easy. The way we integrate Snowflake Analytics with other on-premise systems just requires the warehouse details, username, passwords, and the account name, along with multiple options such as client ID and credentials for logging in and creating a session. The end-to-end encryption provided by Snowflake Analytics is very important because, in my previous firm, working in finance and investment management, data encryption is necessary due to the sensitive nature of customer data and the involvement of people's money. It's crucial to have encryption in transit and at rest, along with data masking features which Snowflake Analytics offers.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
36%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Retailer
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise21
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP IQ?
IQ implementation costs about three thousand dollars. It's less expensive compared to alternatives like Teradata Base in terms of transactional efficiency.
What needs improvement with SAP IQ?
When it comes to SAP IQ, the areas that could be improved or enhanced include the error messaging and the locking capabilities, as that's where we often encounter problems. When there is an issue, ...
What is your primary use case for SAP IQ?
Our usual use cases for SAP IQ is that we have a Software-as-a-Service architecture where this database is the foundation for our SAP BusinessObjects platform. This is where it's getting its data f...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake Analytics?
Snowflake Analytics is quite economical. It does not appear to incur significant extra expenses beyond the solution's initial cost. However, a complete pricing analysis is still in progress.
What needs improvement with Snowflake Analytics?
There are some minor issues encountered with Snowflake Analytics, such as problems when working with identity or row number generating different results or issues with referential integrity, which ...
 

Also Known As

Sybase IQ
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ASR Group, Citrix, State of Indiana, PocketCard Co. Ltd.
Lionsgate, Adobe, Sony, Capital One, Akamai, Deliveroo, Snagajob, Logitech, University of Notre Dame, Runkeeper
Find out what your peers are saying about SAP IQ vs. Snowflake Analytics and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,759 professionals have used our research since 2012.