SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake

SAP Business Warehouse

Snowflake

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
SAP BW	Score 8.6 out of 10	N/A	SAP Business Warehouse, or SAP BW (formerly SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse) is SAP's legacy data warehouse solution, now superseded by SAP BW/4HANA, and the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud which was launched in 2019. SAP BW versions up to 7.4 have reached end of maintenance. SAP BW 7.5 support is extended to align with SAP Business Suite with NetWeaver components. For existing customers maintenance is scheduled to continue through 2027, with extended support available through 2030.	N/A
Snowflake	Score 8.9 out of 10	N/A	The Snowflake Cloud Data Platform is the eponymous data warehouse with, from the company in San Mateo, a cloud and SQL based DW that aims to allow users to unify, integrate, analyze, and share previously siloed data in secure, governed, and compliant ways. With it, users can securely access the Data Cloud to share live data with customers and business partners, and connect with other organizations doing business as data consumers, data providers, and data service providers.	N/A

Pricing

SAP Business Warehouse

Snowflake

Editions & Modules

No answers on this topic

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
SAP BW	Snowflake
Free Trial
No	Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

—

More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	SAP Business Warehouse	Snowflake
Considered Both Products	SAP BW Juan Carlos Crespo Rojas Senior SAP Consultant Chose SAP BW The word "against" would not be the right word to describe this question. These applications coexist and interact, as all of them play a specific role in the SAP landscape. The use of any of these applications should be aligned with the data strategy in an Organization. Incentivized Helpful? Parijatam S Lead Consultant Chose SAP BW Its good for data modelling and ease of reporting capabilities. Even designing base master data models is complex but once done it makes life very easy for any reporting that involves hierarchies/ text & direct/indirect attributes even. It does not have capabilities for … Incentivized Helpful? Niloofar Keshvari Nia IT Operations and Support Specialist Chose SAP BW Coordination and integration with other SAP software and products, as well as its speed and simplicity in reporting, make it one of our current choices Incentivized Helpful? Kartik Chavan Business Data Analyst Chose SAP BW The main reason we chose SAP was the price. SAP Business Warehouse was relatively cheaper compared to other alternatives. SAP Business Warehouse is very popular software for reporting purposes and data storage. But also, it is hard to shift to a newer software once the roots … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SAP BW None Incentivized Helpful? Julius Shen Senior System Analyst Chose SAP BW SAP Business Warehouse scores higher in data warehouse functionalities for integration to SAP ERP and other SAP solutions such as SAP CRM, SAP APO, and SAP SRM. Standard SAP data source extractors which are available in SAP ERP can be used immediately for full or delta … Incentivized Helpful? BB Brandi Brown-Lang Sales and Purchasing Administrator Chose SAP BW SAP Business Warehouse just has better visibility on warehouse flows than some of the other SAP software. I think it is easier to use, and it makes some really great reports that are able to export to excel without much effort. This makes it easy to send customers as well as … Incentivized Helpful? Gustavo Porporato Daher CFO (Chief Financial Officer) Chose SAP BW We evaluated against Microsoft and database systems. SAP stands out due to simplicity to get the data coming from SAP ERP. Incentivized Helpful? Sam Figueroa Associate Staff Systems Specialist Chose SAP BW SAP business warehouse was chosen years ago along with our current ERP software. It currently doesn't stack up well against newer software such as IBM Cognos, or SAS Business Intelligence. The positive side, is that the software has been around for many years and it is easy to … Incentivized Helpful? Vivek Gupta BI Consultant Chose SAP BW My client was an SAP shop client where they have SAP ECC. Using SAP BW helps them to save development time on extractors which are readily available in SAP BW. Also, the tight integration with SAP ECC helps to further reduce the time. The users here were Excel friendly so they … Incentivized Helpful? Mark Liston Solutions Architect Chose SAP BW I have previously used Microstrategy Analytics for reporting and I can confidentially say this is a better option. First, we can do all ETL in the system and not have to rely on another tool. Second, it is easy to integrate with the SAP Lumira platform which seems to be much … Incentivized Helpful? SP Sandesh Pasari Marketing manager Chose SAP BW Zoho Analytics and Tableau Prep Incentivized Helpful?	Snowflake Verified User Anonymous Chose Snowflake Snowflake provides various features, such as integration with Python using Snowpark. The reporting feature that caters to your small reporting needs is Snowsight. The Snowflake data marketplace is where you can get multiple data for free and even some of the data which you can … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Snowflake These are comparable products that can make sense depending on the specific needs of your organization. All are certainly serviceable and have varying pros and cons. Snowflake seems to provide the greatest degree of flexibility and easy scalability as new data gets brought into … Incentivized Helpful? ML Matt Lee Sr Data Analyst Chose Snowflake Snowflake stacks up well against many of the other players in the space. We used Teradata before and it seems to perform better. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Snowflake We needed scalability and a new way of organizing our data; Snowflake allowed us to have a clearer view of our data warehouses and schemas. Snowflake is also way superior in terms of speed and quick insights from the raw data you query, which is very valuable to us. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Snowflake Snowflake has an attractive pricing model with auto-suspend and auto-resume and pay per use. AWS Redshift requires higher administrative efforts to maintain and scale the platform whereas with Snowflake those admin tasks are not needed or automatically taken care of. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Snowflake Cloud -Native architecture, Separation of Storage and Compute provides flexibility, Scalable Compute, Cost and Data Security Incentivized Helpful? Jeremy Pierce, MBA Data Warehouse Engineer Chose Snowflake We had a MS SQL server with over 2 TB of ram & 51 processors that we were using, that could no longer handle our workload. Snowflake can handle 3 times that workload with ease and efficiency. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Snowflake Snowflake is much faster and easier to write queries and pull data. But the visualization part of Snowflake is not as good as them. Also, Snowflake only supports SQL queries but not python or other languages. So basically Snowflake is the expert in its field but not suitable … Incentivized Helpful? David Williams Head of Engineering Chose Snowflake We particularly liked Snowflake's security model as well as its unique storage (whereby everything is essentially a pointer to immutable micro-partitions, which is the key behind its zero-copy cloning, its secure sharing, its time travel, etc.). and also how it separates … Incentivized Helpful? Yogesh Kulkarni Principal Consultant Chose Snowflake While Snowflake is more open to cloud eco system, SAP integrated well with SAP eco system products like SAP ECC or SAP S/4. So for people who have invested heavily in SAP eco system including SAP ECC or S/4, it makes sense to go with SAP DWC which is also evolving very rapidly. … Incentivized Helpful? Harvey Wyche Director of Technical Product Management Chose Snowflake In my opinion, the other tools have similar and some different features; however, when I ran proof of technologies between Synapse and Snowflake. Snowflake did things better or just had functionality that the other tools did not. One that stuck out at the time was scale up … Incentivized Helpful? DW dave withers Sr Director Chose Snowflake Each of the other solutions were cloud vendor specific, Snowflake can ride on either Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. The fact that they are ANSI-sql compliant and have an effective means of offloading data makes them portable and easy to sell to teams … Incentivized Helpful? MS Michael Sprague Director Chose Snowflake Azure and Snowflake compared very similarly, but Snowflake provided more options to integrate and connect with tools/companies that were not partners. It seemed to be a more flexible environment. The barrier for entry on Oracle and Google we just too complicated. In particular, … Incentivized Helpful? RV Rounak Verma Data Analyst Chose Snowflake I have had the experience of using one more database management system at my previous workplace. What Snowflake provides is better user-friendly consoles, suggestions while writing a query, ease of access to connect to various BI platforms to analyze, [and a] more robust system … Incentivized Helpful? Darren Mihalic Business Development Manager Chose Snowflake Snowflake has won the match because it is giving an excellent performance with its efficient features and reliable results. This is a totally secure program for our precious and important data. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Snowflake Our initial data warehousing solution was Treasure Data. We had issues with the costly pricing model, which would be exhorbitant if we want to hold our data in memory and query using Presto. As a result, some heavy lifting was done in Hive (managed by Treasure Data); … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Snowflake Snowflake beats these other products in every category it was rated against Incentivized Helpful? Brian Bickell Data Practice Director Chose Snowflake In my experience running the data management practice at InterWorks, we believe that cloud data warehouse products will eventually serve the majority of data warehousing use cases and power data analytics at most companies. Of this cohort, we believe that Snowflake is the best … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Snowflake Redshift compute and storage can be scaled up/down together (though they added some features recently, they don't quite add up). I haven't tried Avalanche or Firebolt but would love to in the near future, due to their pedigree or revolutionary billing methods. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Snowflake - Cost was the main aspect on the decision. - Performance was in par or better compared to other tools in the market. - Snowflake in my opinion stacks better than other tools I have used in the past. Incentivized Helpful? Sudarshan Kothari Lead Analyst Chose Snowflake Accommodates future data types such as JSON and XML. Scalability is another advantage. Pay per use is beneficial for organizations like yours. Direct connectors with AWS help us to go with it. No limit on user creation and clone data not eating up extra disk space are a few … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Snowflake Since we switch from amazon redshift to Snowflake, we found Snowflake is much better than redshift in many ways, including the data integrate and data pull. However, comparing directly pull data from amazon s3, Snowflake is quite slow in terms of data pull speed and the more … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Snowflake Compared to Amazon Redshift, Snowflake is slightly easier and faster to achieve ROI but based on the user's perspective, the two tools have very little difference since both are leveraging SQL to pull data from AWS S3. Snowflake is also working with Microsoft Azure but it is … Incentivized Helpful? Duncan Hernandez Product Owner, Business Intelligence Chose Snowflake Our issue with Redshift was that it was very expensive. On top of that, queries were still slow and if we used more of Redshift's memory, then it would have cost even more. Snowflake is not cheap, but less costly for us. Plus, the performance was much better. Also, we got to … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Snowflake Snowflake is a lot faster, feels more lightweight, and is overall easier for our BI team to manage and grant warehouse accesses. Incentivized Helpful?

Features

SAP Business Warehouse

Snowflake

Access Control and Security

Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
	SAP Business Warehouse 8.5 Ratings 3% below category average	Snowflake - Ratings
Multi-User Support (named login)	9.50 Ratings	00 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)	8.50 Ratings	00 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)	9.50 Ratings	00 Ratings
Location-Based Data Governance	6.40 Ratings	00 Ratings

Data Modeling

Comparison of Data Modeling features of Product A and Product B
	SAP Business Warehouse 8.7 Ratings 10% above category average	Snowflake - Ratings
Data model creation	8.70 Ratings	00 Ratings

Data Exploration

Comparison of Data Exploration features of Product A and Product B
	SAP Business Warehouse 5.4 Ratings 3% above category average	Snowflake - Ratings
Visualization	5.40 Ratings	00 Ratings

Data Warehouse

Comparison of Data Warehouse features of Product A and Product B
	SAP Business Warehouse 7.5 Ratings 2% below category average	Snowflake - Ratings
High-Volume Data Processing	7.90 Ratings	00 Ratings
Data Warehouse Management	9.00 Ratings	00 Ratings
Administrative Automation	7.50 Ratings	00 Ratings
Self-Optimization	5.60 Ratings	00 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	SAP Business Warehouse	Snowflake
Small Businesses	Google BigQuery Score 8.4 out of 10	Google BigQuery Score 8.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub Score 9.0 out of 10	Google BigQuery Score 8.4 out of 10
Enterprises	Oracle Exadata Score 10.0 out of 10	Google BigQuery Score 8.4 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	SAP Business Warehouse	Snowflake
Likelihood to Recommend	8.4 (0 ratings)	9.2 (0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	- (0 ratings)	10.0 (0 ratings)
Usability	- (0 ratings)	9.3 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	- (0 ratings)	9.9 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	SAP Business Warehouse	Snowflake
Likelihood to Recommend	SAP BW is best for: 1. Large enterprises 2. Enterprises with 3+ legacy systems with entrenched users (politically difficult to merge) 3. Enterprises with employees who can understand both the technical capabilities of SAP BW and the needs of the business users - ability to speak both languages, otherwise the program could be unwieldy and potentially underutilized (it's not particularly inexpensive) SAP BW is less appropriate for: 1. Small enterprises 2. Enterprises who have well established, same location, CRM and UFS - the integration of data analysis will be easier and less expensive with other solutions 3. HANA Incentivized Jeff Looby, CPA Associate Read full review	If you need a quick query, snowflake is the way to go. It's super simple and scalable; we were struggling before with Azure, and with Snowflake, everything runs smoothly, and we have more control over our schemas and warehouses. Snowflake, in my opinion, is the next step when you want to scale your business and manage data. If your company is still small, there may be cheaper options. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Pros	ETL, great at taking data from OLTP source, flat file, etc... Easy drag and drop for transformations. Great reporting possibilities, easy to connect with BO, BPC, etc... Great Master Data Management (MDM )for BPC - helps us maintain master data for BPC. Incentivized Mark Liston Solutions Architect Read full review	Snowflake scales appropriately allowing you to manage expense for peak and off peak times for pulling and data retrieval and data centric processing jobs Snowflake offers a marketplace solution that allows you to sell and subscribe to different data sources Snowflake manages concurrency better in our trials than other premium competitors Snowflake has little to no setup and ramp up time Snowflake offers online training for various employee types Incentivized Harvey Wyche Director of Technical Product Management Read full review
Cons	Age of software is showing as it struggles with very large data modules, which were not as prevalent in its early years Querying performance at times can be very slow Support and development for BEx has been discontinued or hard to find. Incentivized Sam Figueroa Associate Staff Systems Specialist Read full review	Add constraints for views and not just for tables Do not force customers to renew for same or higher amount to avoid loosing unused credits. Already paid credits should not expire (at least within a reasonable time frame), independent of renewal deal size. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	No answers on this topic	SnowFlake is very cost effective and we also like the fact we can stop, start and spin up additional processing engines as we need to. We also like the fact that it's easy to connect our SQL IDEs to Snowflake and write our queries in the environment that we are used to Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Usability	It needs minimal trainings and can perform tasks of data management and reporting. Incentivized Sandesh Pasari Marketing manager Read full review	The interface is similar to other SQL query systems I've used and is fairly easy to use. My only complaint is the syntax issues. Another thing is that the error messages are not always the easiest thing to understand, especially when you incorporate temp tables. Some of that is to be expected with any new database. Incentivized Jake Schlingman Product Manager Read full review
Support Rating	No answers on this topic	We have had terrific experiences with Snowflake support. They have drilled into queries and given us tremendous detail and helpful answers. In one case they even figured out how a particular product was interacting with Snowflake, via its queries, and gave us detail to go back to that product's vendor because the Snowflake support team identified a fault in its operation. We got it solved without lots of back-and-forth or finger-pointing because the Snowflake team gave such detailed information. Incentivized David Williams Head of Engineering Read full review
Alternatives Considered	SAP Business Warehouse scores higher in data warehouse functionalities for integration to SAP ERP and other SAP solutions such as SAP CRM, SAP APO, and SAP SRM. Standard SAP data source extractors which are available in SAP ERP can be used immediately for full or delta replication into SAP Business Warehouse. System governance in SAP Business Warehouse is top-notch with change management support for migration between system landscape from the development system to production system. Incentivized Julius Shen Senior System Analyst Read full review	Snowflake provides various features, such as integration with Python using Snowpark. The reporting feature that caters to your small reporting needs is Snowsight. The Snowflake data marketplace is where you can get multiple data for free and even some of the data which you can buy according to your needs. And the integration options with various tools like Sigma are add-ons. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Return on Investment	It has helped cut down on parts shortages with the minimum stock flags. People are able to track down parts easier because they can see where they were last used. Our sales team has better visibility on lead times so they can accurately quote our customers. Incentivized BB Brandi Brown-Lang Sales and Purchasing Administrator Read full review	With separate compute and storage feature, the queries get executed quickly and it improves our overall productivity. Earlier we were using a different product for analytical purposes, but with Snowflake's in-built analytical feature we are now able to save money. Snowflake is cost efficient, features like auto suspend for compute resources helped to control the costs. Incentivized Sahil Khan Data Analyst Read full review
ScreenShots		Snowflake Screenshots