TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Amazon Redshift vs. SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake

Save this comparison

Save this comparison

Add Product

Recommended Comparisons

    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Amazon Redshift

    Score8.9 out of 10
    N/AAmazon Redshift is a hosted data warehouse solution, from Amazon Web Services.

    $0.24

    per GB per month

    SAP BW

    Score8.8 out of 10
    N/ASAP Business Warehouse, or SAP BW (formerly SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse) is SAP's legacy data warehouse solution, now superseded by SAP BW/4HANA, and the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud which was launched in 2019.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

    Score8.7 out of 10
    N/AThe 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
    Amazon RedshiftSAP BWSnowflake
    Editions & Modules
    Redshift Managed Storage
    $0.24
    per GB per month
    Current Generation
    $0.25 - $13.04
    per hour
    Previous Generation
    $0.25 - $4.08
    per hour
    Redshift Spectrum
    $5.00
    per terabyte of data scanned
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Amazon RedshiftSAP BWSnowflake
    Free Trial
    NoNoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details———
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Amazon RedshiftSAP BWSnowflake
    Considered Multiple Products
    Amazon AWS
    Chose Amazon Redshift
    Amazon Redshifts has fewer features but at the same time, you also have some gains once it is running on AWS Cloud and it is really easy to set up. Besides that, in our case, it is a bit cheaper and we don't really need the extra features that you can find on Snowflake. Another …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon Redshift
    Amazon Redshift, BigQuery, and Snowflake are all fully managed data warehouse services that are designed to handle large volumes of structured data and support business intelligence and analytics efforts. However, Amazon Redshift has the upper hand with its cost-effective …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon Redshift
    Biggest advantage of Amazon Redshift is it's part of the aws ecosystem. When tuned well it is also very cheap compared to something like Snowflake. And compared to spark or databricks, Amazon Redshift is a solid warehouse that's well suited for tabular data. We use it for user …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon Redshift
    Redshift leapfrogged Hive back when Hive was trying to figure out how to implement indexes, providing a more stable, standardized (postgres), easy to use (any postgres client), easier to administer, and scalable solution for querying server logs and raw usage data.

    Now, Snowflak…
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon Redshift
    We like Snowflake for its separation of computing and storage and also the separation of data warehouse different users. We replaced Redshift with Snowflake. However, Snowflake is great for its pay for performance kind of methodology.
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon Redshift
    Azure SQL Database was discarded because of a less attractive licensing, costs, plus its integrates poorly with many of the Azure offerings as say Azure Data Factory - it is not a true ETL yet. Also, the rest of the tools used were of Open Source type and it did not look like a …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon Redshift
    We are currently on Redshift, because it was out before Snowflake. However, Snowflake looks promising. It's the new shiny toy that gives options that Redshift does not provide for. The big thing is that storage and compute can be scaled separately, whereas you cannot do that in …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon Redshift
    Most of our stack is on AWS, so while Snowflake and BigQuery was a viable option from a performance perspective, it was easier to integrate with RedShift. We considered hosting SQL Server on AWS or using Amazon RDS (Postgres or MySQL), however, the self-service aspect of …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon Redshift
    Snowflake supports semi-structured data types and provided solutions to manage/process the semi-structured data. It supported sharing data between the different accounts and makes it easy in the scale and scale down process. Snowflake doesn't limit users on the database.
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon Redshift
    We evaluated [Amazon] Redshift vs BigQuery vs Amazon EMR, back in 2014.
    Back then BigQuery cost was slightly higher than that of [Amazon] Redshift price structure.
    Amazon EMR, needs lots more management (Admin tasks) and EMR is designed to be ephemeral and not designed to be a …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon Redshift
    Amazon Redshift is one of the fastest service offerings available in the market now. Plus you get an advantage of using a cutting edge compute service offering from AWS. Other technologies are fast but not as good as Amazon Redshift, I would say. Our business is interested in …
    Incentivized
    SAP
    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
    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
    Snowflake Computing
    Chose Snowflake
    We use these tools for applications they are better suited for vs a Snowflake. For e.g. MS Fabric has powerful agentic AI capabilities; Redshift is our go to choice for the TMT vertical within the organization and Databricks is the default choice for AI/ML applications.
    Incentivized
    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
    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
    Chose Snowflake
    Redshift and Hive both have unique architecture. Both have their own cons. My guess is that Snowflake is made up by using the concepts of the two architecture concepts such as Amazon Redshift and Haddop, addressed the issues or gaps found in Redshift and Hadoop.
    Incentivized
    Chose Snowflake
    Snowflake is much faster and more intuitive than Amazon Redshift. We currently use AWS for other aspects of our data ingestion process but found that Snowflake is extremely compatible and the user interface is unmatched.
    Incentivized
    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
    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
    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
    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
    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
    Chose Snowflake
    Snowflake beats these other products in every category it was rated against
    Incentivized
    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
    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
    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
    Chose Snowflake
    For us our previous solution in this space was Redshift which we found to be much less reliable and was hardware capped. There may very well be cloud options that our company just wasn't utilizing. For us, queries constantly ran out of memory and failed. Even when they didn't …
    Incentivized
    Chose Snowflake
    • Delivered as an easy-to-use data warehouse service, Snowflake enables you to process and analyze all your diverse data, build multiple databases, query with a common robust ANSI SQL environment, and execute ACID transnational capabilities.
    • No need to create indexes and optimize …
    Incentivized
    Chose Snowflake
    The average percentage of time that a data warehouse is actually doing something is around 20%. Given this, the price by query estimate becomes an important pricing consideration.

    For this, Snowflake crucially decouples of storage and compute. With Snowflake you pay for 1) …
    Incentivized
    Chose Snowflake
    More flexible and faster compared to Redshift, more functionality compared to BigQuery e.g. - per minute billing, instant spin up of warehouse. Overall, the cost and time savings swayed us in favor of Snowflake.
    Incentivized
    Chose Snowflake
    Instant provisioning of computing resources and data sharing is something we have not seen with any other vendor. Being HIPAA compliant at the time of evaluation was a must for us. Other vendors were late on this. Onboarding on support during implementation was also excellent.
    Incentivized
    Chose Snowflake
    I evaluated Redshift and Panoply when making the choice for Snowflake. Panoply is built on Redshift, so the two are equal in drawbacks: Redshift requires a cluster to be running 24/7 for your data to live there. We produce terabytes of data every day, so this was not an option …
    Incentivized
    Chose Snowflake
    • Low-cost, Scalable cloud storage
    • Elastic compute on demand
    • Optimized for semi-structured and structured data
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    78%
    Would buy again
    14 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    8 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    30 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    82%
    Delivers good value for the price
    14 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    7 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    28 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    78%
    Happy with the feature set
    14 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    8 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    30 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    93%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    14 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    96%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    23 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    16 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    8 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    25 Answers
    Features
    Amazon RedshiftSAP BWSnowflake
    Access Control and Security
    Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Amazon Redshift and SAP Business Warehouse and Snowflake
    Feature
    Amazon Redshift
    -
    Ratings
    SAP Business Warehouse
    9.5
    7 Ratings
    5% above category average
    Snowflake
    -
    Ratings
    Multi-User Support (named login)00 Ratings9.37 Ratings00 Ratings
    Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)00 Ratings9.77 Ratings00 Ratings
    Single Sign-On (SSO)00 Ratings9.37 Ratings00 Ratings
    Location-Based Data Governance00 Ratings9.87 Ratings00 Ratings
    Data Modeling
    Comparison of Data Modeling features of Amazon Redshift and SAP Business Warehouse and Snowflake
    Feature
    Amazon Redshift
    -
    Ratings
    SAP Business Warehouse
    9.3
    6 Ratings
    4% below category average
    Snowflake
    -
    Ratings
    Data model creation00 Ratings9.36 Ratings00 Ratings
    Data Exploration
    Comparison of Data Exploration features of Amazon Redshift and SAP Business Warehouse and Snowflake
    Feature
    Amazon Redshift
    -
    Ratings
    SAP Business Warehouse
    7.6
    7 Ratings
    3% below category average
    Snowflake
    -
    Ratings
    Visualization00 Ratings7.67 Ratings00 Ratings
    Data Warehouse
    Comparison of Data Warehouse features of Amazon Redshift and SAP Business Warehouse and Snowflake
    Feature
    Amazon Redshift
    -
    Ratings
    SAP Business Warehouse
    8.0
    7 Ratings
    7% below category average
    Snowflake
    -
    Ratings
    High-Volume Data Processing00 Ratings8.57 Ratings00 Ratings
    Data Warehouse Management00 Ratings9.07 Ratings00 Ratings
    Administrative Automation00 Ratings7.27 Ratings00 Ratings
    Self-Optimization00 Ratings7.27 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Amazon RedshiftSAP BWSnowflake
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    Snowflake
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub
    Score9 out of 10
    Amazon Redshift
    Score8.9 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Snowflake
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Oracle Exadata
    Score9.8 out of 10
    Amazon Redshift
    Score8.9 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Amazon RedshiftSAP BWSnowflake
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.0
    (38 ratings)
    8.3
    (18 ratings)
    9.0
    (44 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.0
    (3 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (10 ratings)
    9.0
    (4 ratings)
    8.8
    (20 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.0
    (7 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.9
    (8 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Amazon RedshiftSAP BWSnowflake
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Amazon AWS
    If the number of connections is expected to be low, but the amounts of data are large or projected to grow it is a good solutions especially if there is previous exposure to PostgreSQL. Speaking of Postgres, Redshift is based on several versions old releases of PostgreSQL so the developers would not be able to take advantage of some of the newer SQL language features. The queries need some fine-tuning still, indexing is not provided, but playing with sorting keys becomes necessary. Lastly, there is no notion of the Primary Key in Redshift so the business must be prepared to explain why duplication occurred (must be vigilant for)
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SAP
    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
    Read full review
    Snowflake Computing
    Snowflake is well suited when you have to store your data and you want easy scalability and increase or decrease the storage per your requirement. You can also control the computing cost, and if your computing cost is less than or equal to 10% of your storage cost, then you don't have to pay for computing, which makes it cost-effective as well.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Amazon AWS
    • [Amazon] Redshift has Distribution Keys. If you correctly define them on your tables, it improves Query performance. For instance, we can define Mapping/Meta-data tables with Distribution-All Key, so that it gets replicated across all the nodes, for fast joins and fast query results.
    • [Amazon] Redshift has Sort Keys. If you correctly define them on your tables along with above Distribution Keys, it further improves your Query performance. It also has Composite Sort Keys and Interleaved Sort Keys, to support various use cases
    • [Amazon] Redshift is forked out of PostgreSQL DB, and then AWS added "MPP" (Massively Parallel Processing) and "Column Oriented" concepts to it, to make it a powerful data store.
    • [Amazon] Redshift has "Analyze" operation that could be performed on tables, which will update the stats of the table in leader node. This is sort of a ledger about which data is stored in which node and which partition with in a node. Up to date stats improves Query performance.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SAP
    • It tracks bin locations for parts which can be really helpful.
    • SAP Business Warehouse tells you who has a part checked out so you can find it.
    • It shows current parts shortages so buyers are flagged to get parts on order based on current demand.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Snowflake Computing
    • 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
    Read full review
    Cons
    Amazon AWS
    • We've experienced some problems with hanging queries on Redshift Spectrum/external tables. We've had to roll back to and old version of Redshift while we wait for AWS to provide a patch.
    • Redshift's dialect is most similar to that of PostgreSQL 8. It lacks many modern features and data types.
    • Constraints are not enforced. We must rely on other means to verify the integrity of transformed tables.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SAP
    • 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
    Read full review
    Snowflake Computing
    • 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
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    SAP
    No answers on this topic
    Snowflake Computing
    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
    Read full review
    Usability
    Amazon AWS
    Just very happy with the product, it fits our needs perfectly. Amazon pioneered the cloud and we have had a positive experience using RedShift. Really cool to be able to see your data housed and to be able to query and perform administrative tasks with ease.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SAP
    The overall usability is robust. The tool offers lot of native feature to achieve all the data warehousing functions. Starting from data modelling to reporting and authorisation, the tool provided native features for almost all the areas of analytics. Integration of hybrid modelling with hana studio opened the usage of sql functions with the sap analytics
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Snowflake Computing
    Because the fact that you can query tons of data in a few seconds is incredible, it also gives you a lot of functions to format and transform data right in your query, which is ideal when building data models in BI tools like Power BI, it is available as a connector in the most used BI tools worldwide.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Amazon AWS
    The support was great and helped us in a timely fashion. We did use a lot of online forums as well, but the official documentation was an ongoing one, and it did take more time for us to look through it. We would have probably chosen a competitor product had it not been for the great support
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SAP
    No answers on this topic
    Snowflake Computing
    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
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Amazon AWS
    Than Vertica: Redshift is cheaper and AWS integrated (which was a plus because the whole company was on AWS).
    Than BigQuery: Redshift has a standard SQL interface, though recently I heard good things about BigQuery and would try it out again.
    Than Hive: Hive is great if you are in the PB+ range, but latencies tend to be much slower than Redshift and it is not suited for ad-hoc applications.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SAP
    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
    Read full review
    Snowflake Computing
    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 to store a large amount of data. All these functionalities give the better edge to Snowflake.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    Amazon AWS
    Redshift is relatively cheaper tool but since the pricing is dynamic, there is always a risk of exceeding the cost. Since most of our team is using it as self serve and there is no continuous tracking by a dedicated team, it really needs time & effort on analyst's side to know how much it is going to cost.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SAP
    No answers on this topic
    Snowflake Computing
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    Amazon AWS
    • Our company is moving to the AWS infrastructure, and in this context moving the warehouse environments to Redshift sounds logical regardless of the cost.
    • Development organizations have to operate in the Dev/Ops mode where they build and support their apps at the same time.
    • Hard to estimate the overall ROI of moving to Redshift from my position. However, running Redshift seems to be inexpensive compared to all the licensing and hardware costs we had on our RDBMS platform before Redshift.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SAP
    • Positive - This tool report output is in Excel so it's a good tool if your users are familiar with Excel.
    • Positive: this tool has rich BI content so developing extractors for standard processes from SAP ECC can be done in minutes.
    • Negative: It lacks lot of features which are available in other newer tools today. For ex. - rich charts, rich filtering, exporting capabilities, user interface.
    • Negative: Its not a plug and play tool like Qlikview, Lumira, or Tableau. Even a single report development in this tool takes a lot of time compared to others.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Snowflake Computing
    • 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
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Snowflake Screenshots

    Screenshot of Snowflake Installation