Azure Synapse Analytics vs. SAP BW/4HANA

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Azure Synapse Analytics
Score 7.6 out of 10
N/A
Azure Synapse Analytics is described as the former Azure SQL Data Warehouse, evolved, and as a limitless analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. It gives users the freedom to query data using either serverless or provisioned resources, at scale. Azure Synapse brings these two worlds together with a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning needs.
$4,700
per month 5000 Synapse Commit Units (SCUs)
SAP BW/4HANA
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
SAP BW/4HANA is a next-generation data warehouse solution. It is specifically designed to use the advanced in-memory capabilities of the SAP HANA platform. For example, SAP BW/HANA can integrate many different data sources to provide a single, logical view of all the data. This could include data contained in SAP and non-SAP applications running on-premise or in the cloud, and data lakes, such as those contained in the Apache Hadoop open-source software framework. With SAP BW/4HANA,…N/A
Pricing
Azure Synapse AnalyticsSAP BW/4HANA
Editions & Modules
Tier 1
$4,700
per month 5,000 Synapse Commit Units (SCUs)
Tier 2
$9,200
per month 10,000 Synapse Commit Units (SCUs)
Tier 3
$21,360
per month 24,000 Synapse Commit Units (SCUs)
Tier 4
$50,400
per month 60,000 Synapse Commit Units (SCUs)
Tier 5
$117,000
per month 150,000 Synapse Commit Units (SCUs)
Tier 6
$259,200
per month 360,000 Synapse Commit Units (SCUs)
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure Synapse AnalyticsSAP BW/4HANA
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Azure Synapse AnalyticsSAP BW/4HANA
Features
Azure Synapse AnalyticsSAP BW/4HANA
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Azure Synapse Analytics
-
Ratings
SAP BW/4HANA
9.2
2 Ratings
3% above category average
Multi-User Support (named login)00 Ratings9.92 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)00 Ratings9.92 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)00 Ratings9.92 Ratings
Location-Based Data Governance00 Ratings7.12 Ratings
Data Modeling
Comparison of Data Modeling features of Product A and Product B
Azure Synapse Analytics
-
Ratings
SAP BW/4HANA
9.6
2 Ratings
8% above category average
Data model creation00 Ratings9.62 Ratings
Data Exploration
Comparison of Data Exploration features of Product A and Product B
Azure Synapse Analytics
-
Ratings
SAP BW/4HANA
9.3
2 Ratings
26% above category average
Visualization00 Ratings9.32 Ratings
Data Warehouse
Comparison of Data Warehouse features of Product A and Product B
Azure Synapse Analytics
-
Ratings
SAP BW/4HANA
7.8
2 Ratings
4% below category average
High-Volume Data Processing00 Ratings9.82 Ratings
Data Warehouse Management00 Ratings9.82 Ratings
Administrative Automation00 Ratings5.01 Ratings
Self-Optimization00 Ratings6.52 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Azure Synapse AnalyticsSAP BW/4HANA
Small Businesses
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.8 out of 10
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Snowflake
Snowflake
Score 8.7 out of 10
Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub
Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Snowflake
Snowflake
Score 8.7 out of 10
Oracle Exadata
Oracle Exadata
Score 9.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Azure Synapse AnalyticsSAP BW/4HANA
Likelihood to Recommend
7.7
(12 ratings)
8.0
(9 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(5 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
9.6
(2 ratings)
9.7
(7 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Azure Synapse AnalyticsSAP BW/4HANA
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
It's well suited for large, fastly growing, and frequently changing data warehouses (e.g., in startups). It's also suited for companies that want a single, relatively easy-to-use, centralized cloud service for all their data needs. Larger, more structured organizations could still benefit from this service by using Synapse Dedicated SQL Pools, knowing that costs will be much higher than other solutions. I think this product is not suited for smaller, simpler workloads (where an Azure SQL Database and a Data Factory could be enough) or very large scenarios, where it may be better to build custom infrastructure.
Read full review
SAP
SAP BW/4HANA is certainly an excellent choice when it comes to setting up a data warehousing platform within a landscape of existing SAP systems ecosystem for realizing quick time to value and ROI over the long term. Many non-SAP analytics tools such as Power BI , Qlik also now offer connectors to leverage SAP BW/4HANA data as additional options to deploy third party visualization tools which make it a more open ended platform of choice. But with the future roadmap of SAP and industry in general being focused towards cloud based offerings (SAC and Datasphere) infused with AI capabilities one has to make a judicious choice among these depending on the use case, capabilities of platforms and existing systems landscape and the overall long term IT strategy. SAP BW/4HANA may not be a good platform of choice if starting a native greenfield data warehousing implementation with cloud first approach which would require data integration across SAP and Non-SAP sources and one should consider other SAP cloud offerings which however still have some time to reach a level of maturity as SAP BW/4HANA has reached over the years.
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Pros
Microsoft
  • Quick to return data. Queries in a SQL data warehouse architecture tend to return data much more quickly than a OLTP setup. Especially with columnar indexes.
  • Ability to manage extremely large SQL tables. Our databases contain billions of records. This would be unwieldy without a proper SQL datawarehouse
  • Backup and replication. Because we're already using SQL, moving the data to a datawarehouse makes it easier to manage as our users are already familiar with SQL.
Read full review
SAP
  • High speed data warehouse regardless of data volumes.
  • Excellent integration with SAP systems and Data sets.
  • Simplified data modelling due to columnar data base.
Read full review
Cons
Microsoft
  • With Azure, it's always the same issue, too many moving parts doing similar things with no specialisation. ADF, Fabric Data Factory and Synapse pipeline serve the same purpose. Same goes for Fabric Warehouse and Synapse SQL pools.
  • Could do better with serverless workloads considering the competition from databricks and its own fabric warehouse
  • Synapse pipelines is a replica of Azure Data Factory with no tight integration with Synapse and to a surprise, with missing features from ADF. Integration of warehouse can be improved with in environment ETl tools
Read full review
SAP
  • Enterprise license pricing is very expensive and run-time license limits the usefulness of the tool.
  • Integration with SAP Analytics cloud for write-back to BW/4HANA. Live connection is only read from SAC.
  • Make run-time licenses more useful.
Read full review
Usability
Microsoft
The data warehouse portion is very much like old style on-prem SQL server, so most SQL skills one has mastered carry over easily. Azure Data Factory has an easy drag and drop system which allows quick building of pipelines with minimal coding. The Spark portion is the only really complex portion, but if there's an in-house python expert, then the Spark portion is also quiet useable.
Read full review
SAP
SAP BW/4HANA is a well-designed data warehousing solution that has matured over the years with even more capabilities esp. on the HANA platform making it a compelling choice for SAP customers. It is very well thought out both in design and development aspects from an IT standpoint as well as usability from a business user standpoint with excellent performance driven by HANA. It also goes beyond just analytics and offers data mining and planning capabilities that make it even more compelling.
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Support Rating
Microsoft
Microsoft does its best to support Synapse. More and more articles are being added to the documentation, providing more useful information on best utilizing its features. The examples provided work well for basic knowledge, but more complex examples should be added to further assist in discovering the vast abilities that the system has.
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SAP
SAP Max Attention and general support for SAP BW/4HANA is broadly available. Truth to be told, MaxAttention has a premium cost but brings great engineers. So this being an enterprise capability and extremely critical, we did not consider cost as the main factor since support works well. Just keep that in mind when making your selection.
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Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
In comparing Azure Synapse to the Google BigQuery - the biggest highlight that I'd like to bring forward is Azure Synapse SQL leverages a scale-out architecture in order to distribute computational processing of data across multiple nodes whereas Google BigQuery only takes into account computation and storage.
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SAP
SAP BW / 4HANA and SAP IQ are both used for warehouse; with quick consultations for business analysis and that allows us to obtain dashboards and KPIs efficiently. SAP IQ is columnar and SAP BW / 4HANA immemorial. SAP BW / 4HANA was selected for the response speed of the queries since it saves the information in cache.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Microsoft
Basically, the billing is predictable, and this all about it.
Read full review
SAP
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • Licensing fees is replaced with Azure subscription fee. No big saving there
  • More visibility into the Azure usage and cost
  • It can be used a hot storage and old data can be archived to data lake. Real time data integration is possible via external tables and Microsoft Power BI
Read full review
SAP
  • Positive impact on the availability of information for decision making.
  • Avoid the need for multiple databases for isolated data warehouses within the organization.
  • Immediate availability of information for managers and business users.
Read full review
ScreenShots

SAP BW/4HANA Screenshots

Screenshot of Next generation data warehousing with SAP BW/4HANA.Screenshot of SAP BW/4HANA user cockpit.Screenshot of Geolocation analytics in SAP BW/4HANA.Screenshot of Data modeling in SAP BW/4HANA.Screenshot of Modern user experience in SAP BW/4HANA.Screenshot of Monitor the performance of your business in real-time with SAP BW/4HANA.