SAP Business ByDesign

Do not evaluate this product for a new purchase. SAP withdrew SAP Business ByDesign from the market for new customers on 20 April 2026 and removed it from the official price list. It is listed here for buyers who encounter the name in research, in a legacy estate or in a due diligence exercise, not as an option to shortlist. Any supplier or review site presenting ByDesign as something you can still buy is out of date.

The important nuance is that withdrawal from sale is not the same as end of life, and the two are frequently conflated. No end of life date has been communicated. Existing customers continue to receive support and maintenance, and the German-speaking SAP user group DSAG has referred to support being available at least until 2032, a figure this pass could not confirm against a DSAG primary document. So a company already running ByDesign is not facing an imminent forced migration, but it is running a product that is closed to new customers, which over time affects the partner ecosystem, the availability of skills and the pace of functional investment.

SAP's own statements could not be read this pass because sap.com returned HTTP 403 Forbidden on every request. The dates and the support position recorded here come from an SAP implementation partner's published analysis of the withdrawal. The Wikipedia article on the product is stale and still describes it in the present tense as sold by SAP, with its most recent status statement dated December 2022, which is a useful illustration of how easily an out of date availability claim survives in secondary sources.

ByDesign was a multi-tenant cloud ERP suite aimed at midsized companies and at subsidiaries of larger groups. Because the vendor site could not be read, no functional capability is recorded below. Given the product is closed to new sales, that gap matters far less than the availability status, which is the finding that actually affects a buyer.

Who this entry is for. It is for three groups, none of whom are shopping for new ERP.

• Existing ByDesign customers. You are not under immediate pressure, because support continues and no end date has been set. The sensible posture is to plan rather than panic: establish your own timeline rather than inherit one, and get SAP to confirm the support commitment for your contract in writing instead of relying on the 2032 figure circulating in partner commentary.
• Buyers who found the name in research. Treat it as closed. The products to look at instead, on SAP s own indicated paths, are SAP Cloud ERP in the S/4HANA Cloud public edition for midsized companies and group subsidiaries, and SAP Business One for smaller companies. Both have their own profiles in this directory.
• Anyone doing diligence on a target company. A ByDesign installation is a known future migration cost even without a published end of life date, and it should be priced into the model.

If you are migrating off it. The partner analysis used here frames the S/4HANA Cloud public edition as the more direct successor specifically because it is also fully cloud based, whereas Business One is described as primarily on-premise and so represents a change of operating model as well as a change of product. That is a real difference in project shape and in ongoing running costs, and it should drive the choice at least as much as functional fit does.

A caution on third-party information. Because this product has been withdrawn, it is exactly the kind of case where review aggregators continue publishing pricing, ratings and buy-now calls to action for something that cannot be bought. No pricing figure is recorded below for that reason, and none should be trusted from such sources.