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SAP IQ vs Vertica comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

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 IQ
Ranking in Data Warehouse
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Relational Databases Tools (27th)
Vertica
Ranking in Data Warehouse
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
86
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of SAP IQ is 2.8%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vertica is 8.5%, down from 8.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Warehouse
 

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.
T Venkatesh - PeerSpot reviewer
Processes query faster through multiple systems simultaneously, but it could support different data types
We use the solution for various tasks, including preparing data marts and generating offers. It helps extract data based on rules from the policy team and provides insights to enhance business operations. We also analyze transactions to target customers and improve business performance The…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Unbeatable speed and compression with a colummn-structured relational database."
"All data is compressed and indexed, allowing for fast execution of transactions."
"Columnar storage allows high compression, high load rates and high query performance."
"IQ is a very high-performance and high-transaction database."
"The primary benefit of SAP IQ is its ability to limit the expansion of the costly SAP HANA database, which has limited storage capacity. This necessitates a form of data management that involves moving data from SAP HANA to SAP NLS, which is essentially archiving. This allows us to retain access to the data via a link whenever it is required."
"Valuable features for us include the compression, speed, fast response time, and easy object maintenance."
"The product is easy to learn."
"It is very robust for ad hoc DW queries and its columnar compression is unique and valuable."
"I have found the solution to be scalable."
"Eighty percent of the ETL operations have improved since implementing this solution."
"The solution has great capabilities. The tool that instructs the internal database forward is easy to use and is very powerful."
"Speed and resiliency are probably the best parts of this product."
"Vertica has a few features that I like. From an architecture standpoint, they have separated compute and storage. So you have low-cost object storage for primary storage and the ability to have several sub-clusters working off the same ObjectStore. So it provides workload isolation."
"Its projections and encoding are excellent tools for tuning large volumes."
"The performance is very good and the aggregate records are fast."
"The extensibility and efficiency provided by their C++ SDK."
 

Cons

"The room for improvement would be the marketing of the product, because this product is much better than advertised."
"The only negative aspect of IQ is the cost, which can be challenging for companies in Peru."
"The tool gets stuck sometimes."
"The solution works best when combined with other SAP solutions. If the environment has other systems other options might be better."
"Multiplex is very problematic. There are consistency problems in the metadata, meaning it is possible to lose metadata consistency. You should make sure you have healthy backups."
"Concurrency and functional error messaging."
"There is very little documentation available."
"I think the universe should be part of the Sybase IQ tool set."
"It should provide a GUI interface for data management and tuning."
"Vertica offers a platform-as-a-service version, but their software-as-a-service solution is only available on AWS. They need to get a SaaS version on Azure and GCP as fast as possible."
"Very bad support, I would rate it two out of 10."
"Fact-to-fact joins on multi-billion record tables perform poorly."
"Vertica's native cloud support could be improved, and its installation could be made easier."
"It's hard to make it slow for a small data volume. For large volumes, it's hard to make it work. It's also hard to make it faster, and to make it scale."
"If you do not utilize the tuning tools like projections, encoding, partitions, and statistics, then performance and scalability will suffer."
"In my opinion, Vertica's documentation could be improved. Currently, there is not enough documentation available to gain a comprehensive understanding of the platform."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The only costs after standard licensing fees are for add-ons and upgrades."
"Negotiation is very important."
"Evaluate all options; check to see if you need expensive add-ons."
"Negotiate based on the features required."
"The cost of implementation is about $3,000."
"It's not that costly. So, the pricing is cheap."
"The pricing depends on the license model because there are several. It depends on the client, but it's cheaper than other solutions. I think it's cheap for all the functionality and robustness. It's not very expensive to deploy."
"I think it's starting to get a little expensive. Open source products are starting to get more robust, so I think that's something that they need to start looking at in terms of licensing."
"Start with license per 1TB. Starting from hundreds of TB there is unlimited licensing to be considered. Move historical data to HDFS/S3 which are significantly cheaper or even free."
"The pricing could improve, it is a little expensive."
"It's free up to three nodes and 1TB, and then get in contact with their sales guys."
"The price of Vertica is less expensive than some competitors, such as Teradata."
"It's an expensive product"
"From a cost perspective, the software is less than most of its competitors."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
46%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Real Estate/Law Firm
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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?
The primary negative aspect is the cost, which can be a challenge due to the economic conditions in Peru.
What is your primary use case for SAP IQ?
I worked on implementing new databases, migration data in production, and developer environments with SAP IQ.
What do you like most about Vertica?
Vertica is easy to use and provides really high performance, stability, and scalability.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Vertica?
The solution is relatively cost-effective. Pricing and licensing are reasonable compared to other solutions.
What needs improvement with Vertica?
The product could improve by adding support for a wider variety of data types and enhancing features to better compete with other databases.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Sybase IQ
Micro Focus Vertica, HPE Vertica, HPE Vertica on Demand
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ASR Group, Citrix, State of Indiana, PocketCard Co. Ltd.
Cerner, Game Show Network Game, Guess by Marciano, Supercell, Etsy, Nascar, Empirix, adMarketplace, and Cardlytics.
Find out what your peers are saying about SAP IQ vs. Vertica and other solutions. Updated: May 2025.
851,491 professionals have used our research since 2012.