SAP BW/4HANA vs. Snowflake

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
Snowflake
Score 8.7 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 BW/4HANASnowflake
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
SAP BW/4HANASnowflake
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
SAP BW/4HANASnowflake
Considered Both Products
SAP BW/4HANA
Chose SAP BW/4HANA
We use a mix of different tools, primarily Snowflake and SAP BW/4HANA - the first as our main Data Lake and integrated with other reporting and visualization tools, and the second as the main source of BI/Reporting into the ERP layer - Operations, Logistics, Inventory, Finance. …
Snowflake

No answer on this topic

Features
SAP BW/4HANASnowflake
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
SAP BW/4HANA
9.2
2 Ratings
3% above category average
Snowflake
-
Ratings
Multi-User Support (named login)9.92 Ratings00 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)9.92 Ratings00 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)9.92 Ratings00 Ratings
Location-Based Data Governance7.12 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Modeling
Comparison of Data Modeling features of Product A and Product B
SAP BW/4HANA
9.6
2 Ratings
8% above category average
Snowflake
-
Ratings
Data model creation9.62 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Exploration
Comparison of Data Exploration features of Product A and Product B
SAP BW/4HANA
9.3
2 Ratings
25% above category average
Snowflake
-
Ratings
Visualization9.32 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Warehouse
Comparison of Data Warehouse features of Product A and Product B
SAP BW/4HANA
7.8
2 Ratings
4% below category average
Snowflake
-
Ratings
High-Volume Data Processing9.82 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Warehouse Management9.82 Ratings00 Ratings
Administrative Automation5.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Self-Optimization6.52 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
SAP BW/4HANASnowflake
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
Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub
Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub
Score 9.0 out of 10
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises
Oracle Exadata
Oracle Exadata
Score 9.9 out of 10
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
SAP BW/4HANASnowflake
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(9 ratings)
9.0
(43 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(2 ratings)
9.3
(19 ratings)
Support Rating
9.7
(7 ratings)
9.9
(8 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
SAP BW/4HANASnowflake
Likelihood to Recommend
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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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
  • High speed data warehouse regardless of data volumes.
  • Excellent integration with SAP systems and Data sets.
  • Simplified data modelling due to columnar data base.
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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
  • 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.
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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
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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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
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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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 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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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 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.
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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

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.

Snowflake Screenshots

Screenshot of Snowflake Installation