SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
SAP BW
Score 8.4 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Business Warehouse, or SAP BW (formerly SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse) is SAP's legacy data warehouse solution, now superseded by SAP BW/4HANA, and the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud which was launched in 2019.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 8.8 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 WarehouseSnowflake
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
SAP BWSnowflake
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
SAP Business WarehouseSnowflake
Considered Both Products
SAP BW
Chose SAP Business Warehouse
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
Snowflake
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. …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
SAP Business WarehouseSnowflake
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
SAP Business Warehouse
8.8
3 Ratings
0% below category average
Snowflake
-
Ratings
Multi-User Support (named login)9.63 Ratings00 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)8.93 Ratings00 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)9.63 Ratings00 Ratings
Location-Based Data Governance6.93 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Modeling
Comparison of Data Modeling features of Product A and Product B
SAP Business Warehouse
9.0
3 Ratings
13% above category average
Snowflake
-
Ratings
Data model creation9.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Exploration
Comparison of Data Exploration features of Product A and Product B
SAP Business Warehouse
5.6
3 Ratings
4% above category average
Snowflake
-
Ratings
Visualization5.63 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Warehouse
Comparison of Data Warehouse features of Product A and Product B
SAP Business Warehouse
7.7
3 Ratings
0% above category average
Snowflake
-
Ratings
High-Volume Data Processing8.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Warehouse Management9.33 Ratings00 Ratings
Administrative Automation7.63 Ratings00 Ratings
Self-Optimization5.93 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
SAP Business WarehouseSnowflake
Small Businesses
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.7 out of 10
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub
Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub
Score 9.0 out of 10
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Oracle Exadata
Oracle Exadata
Score 9.4 out of 10
Teradata Vantage
Teradata Vantage
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
SAP Business WarehouseSnowflake
Likelihood to Recommend
8.4
(14 ratings)
8.9
(43 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.3
(19 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.9
(8 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
SAP Business WarehouseSnowflake
Likelihood to Recommend
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
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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.
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Pros
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.
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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
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Cons
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.
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.
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Likelihood to Renew
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
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Usability
SAP
No answers on this topic
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.
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Support Rating
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.
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Alternatives Considered
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.
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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.
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Return on Investment
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.
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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.
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ScreenShots

Snowflake Screenshots

Screenshot of Snowflake Installation