SAP is one of the world’s largest software companies and is used by over 400,000 companies, including some of the largest companies in the world. They provide a vast array of applications ranging from their core ERP to procurement, expense and travel management, Human Capital Management (HCM), and field management. Additionally, all SAP customers also use applications from other vendors for things like CRM (MS 365 CRM, Salesforce), FP&A (Planful, Anaplan), and service (ServiceNow), to name a few. All of this data needs to be integrated into a corporate-wide data warehouse strategy for purposes of analytics, machine learning, and, more than ever, AI.

Integrating data from such a vast ecosystem of SAP and non-SAP applications is a significant technical challenge. Connecting to the various application APIs, normalizing the data, data typing, dealing with custom fields, and incremental loading are all required to make the data business ready with full automation.

Historically, the challenge has been solved with large and, in many cases, long-term development efforts. The result is a complex solution requiring significant ongoing maintenance and cost. More recently, some companies have started offering more packaged solutions. The following is an analysis of the top four vendors offering data integration (ETL/ELT) solutions in the SAP ecosystem.

The criteria considered for this comparison include the following:

• Total number of supported data sources, including SAP and non-SAP
• Ease of implementation, including adding new data sources
• Support for native SAP environments, including Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud
• Established customer base in the SAP community
• Overall cost and time-to-value during implementation

Based on these criteria we have established the following comparison and rankings for SAP ETL/ELT tools in the overall marketplace.

Top SAP ETL/ELT Tools

#1 Precog

Precog provides the most comprehensive suite of connectors for the SAP universe, including all SAP applications and thousands of non-SAP applications. It has native integration with SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud but also supports Snowflake, Google Big Query, Redshift, Kafka, and MS SQL Server as data destinations. Precog is the only mainstream ELT vendor to fully leverage AI to deliver powerful no-code integrations that require very little ongoing maintenance. With its AI-first approach, Precog can add entirely new data source connections in hours.

#2 SAP Data Integration Suite

It goes without saying that SAP provides capabilities to create integrations with their own applications and also some third party applications. This includes their Data Integration suite, which is suited for application-to-application integrations. They also provide some open connectors based on oData specifications. And they provide excellent integration with Datasphere. However, the tradeoff comes in the form of lots of customization and development work found in the application-to-application world. In most cases, new integrations can take weeks or months to complete, if at all. SAP Data Integration Suite is suitable for small data downloads and simpler use cases but lacks the change data capture capability necessary for the analytical, machine learning, and GenAI use cases. With large data sets, users will reach API throttling limits if they do not implement change data capture. Similarly, oData connectors provide basic integration support for many SAP applications, but typically fail with more complex use cases and with many SAP applications such as Ariba or Concur.

#3 Qlik

Qlik’s QCDI solution provides very good support for most SAP applications. This cloud-based solution works with most SAP applications and many non-SAP applications. It also has best-in-class support for database replication from all popular RDBMS, including Hana, Oracle, DB2, and MS SQL Server. On top of the QCDI solution, Qlik provides a complete suite of best-in-class analytics and machine learning tools. These include Qlik Sense analytics and AI.

#4 Fivetran

Fivetran supports some SAP applications and a wide variety of non-SAP applications. Their SaaS-based solution is popular in the Snowflake community but does not provide native support for SAP Datasphere or SAC. Adding new connectors typically takes 4-8 weeks and can be costly. They provide excellent integration with tools like DBT for data modeling, but Datasphere provides native tools for modeling as well, so the DBT support is less valuable in the SAP ecosystem.

SAP ETL/ELT Comparison Table

Summary

Companies have several choices for ELT integrations for their SAP environments, including some of the native tools provided by SAP. However, most of these solutions are limited in their ability to support the full breadth of SAP and non-SAP applications. Further, other than SAP itself, Precog is the only vendor with native support for ELT into the Datasphere and SAC environments. This, combined with the greatest support for Non-SAP applications in the industry, makes Precog a powerful choice for any company that runs their business primarily on SAP but also uses other applications and needs to combine the data into a single source of truth for their business analytics.