Welcome to the 2026 SAP Developer Insights Survey report. This annual survey targets SAP’s existing external developer audience. It is used to track demographics, usage patterns, and trends within that population. 2026 is the sixth year we have conducted the survey. The survey program is led by the SAP Developer Advocates team. Key support is provided by the SAP Customer, Competitive & Market Insights office. Several other SAP teams provide advice and inputs to survey content.
The 2026 survey was open for six weeks – from February 16th through March 30th.
Using the same pattern as in years past, we solicited responses via social media announcements, SAP's Developer News, and a web-popup on Community web sites. We invited all technical professionals in the SAP ecosystem to participate in the survey.
Each year's survey is composed of a mix of new topic questions and repeat select questions from past years to track trends.
These topics and others will be covered in more detail in the rest of the report. An index of topics is available on the right hand margin for quick navigation.
We included a number of general questions in the survey covering such topics as age, work location and status, as well as role.
SAP Developer Community Composition
“Which choice best describes your relation to SAP?”
We have seen no significant change in these breakdowns from year to year.
This shows increases in both the oldest age buckets for 2026. This was accompanied by similar decreases in the middle two age buckets (ranging from 25–44 years of age). The increases in the oldest age buckets and corresponding decreases in the 25–44 range warrant further investigation to understand whether this reflects demographic shifts in hiring or retention.
Workplace and Trends
Office Location
“As of right now, where do you primarily physically work from?”
Year-to-year trend in Workplace
This shows basically a halt to the trend of employees moving back to conventional offices from home. From a past Developer Survey, 29% of respondents reported they had primarily worked at home prior to the pandemic.
Part II. Narrowing the Response Set
A primary objective of our survey is to build a model of our community's usage patterns. It helps us build more effective programs. With that goal in mind, in the remainder of the report we will narrow the data to filter SAP employees and SAP contractors from the result sets. Unless otherwise indicated, all results below exclude SAP employees and SAP contractors.
Use of Generative AI for Developers
We repeated two questions from last year, looking for a general sense of the effectiveness of AI-assisted development.
Current Gen AI Use
“How would you characterize your team’s current use of Generative AI tools or LLMs in your day-to-day work? Consider tools from any vendor or open source. Examples might include Joule, SAP Generative AI Hub, GitHub Copilot, or open source LLMs. (select the most applicable statement)”
Important to our report: for the remainder of the AI section, we only asked these follow-up AI question to respondents who confirmed they, “are actively using Gen AI” today.
Gen AI Effectiveness for Developers
“Looking back on the past year, what is your own sense of how the use of Generative AI based tools or LLMs impacted the effectiveness or efficiency of your team?”
While one might say there's an element of Survivor Bias when asking this sentiment question, it is still dramatic to see that three quarters of the respondents agree that there was a “profound positive impact” in using these tools.
Using GenAI in Production Applications
“In the past year, did your team use Generative AI to help build a production application? (select the statement that best applies for each use case)”
Developing and Maintaining Software with Generative AI
For the first time this year, we asked respondents to rate the usefulness of GenAI tools across different phases of the software development lifecycle.
Generative AI by Software Development Lifecycle Phases
“Rate the usefulness of Generative AI tools for your team these different phases of software development – how valuable are they today or in the foreseeable future? (select the best response for each phase)”
Somewhat surprisingly, coding (“Implementation”) only comes in at fourth on this list, behind Documentation, Code Quality, and (tied with) Testing.
GenAI Tools Used for Development
“For the last production project where your team used GenAI tooling for development, which tool(s) did you use?”
Runtime LLM Interactions
“For the same project, did your architecture include runtime interactions with one or more LLMs?”
“For that same project, which GenAI tool(s) did you use as Agents to write code or perform other development functions?”
Developer Perceptions of GenAI Tools
We asked developers to rate their agreement with several statements about their experience using Generative AI tools.
GenAI Usage in Day-to-Day Work
“I am currently using one or more Generative AI tools in performing my day to day work”
Productivity with GenAI Tools
New Capabilities with GenAI
“I am now doing things that I never would have been able to do without Generative AI.”
GenAI First-Try Accuracy
“I find that these Generative AI tools often give me the correct outcome on their first try”
Using GenAI for Learning
“How often do you use these tools to explain concepts or even help you learn something that might not be directly related to solving a specific problem?”
Where are the Developers?
We asked, “Which country are you based in?”
| Position | Country | Respondent Count |
| 1 | India | 52 |
| 2 | Germany | 25 |
| 3 | United States of America | 19 |
| 4 | Switzerland | 8 |
| 5 | Canada | 7 |
| 6 | Brazil | 5 |
| 7 | Turkey | 5 |
| 8 | Portugal | 5 |
| 9 | Spain | 4 |
| 10 | Austria | 4 |
| 11 | Denmark | 3 |
| 12 | Pakistan | 3 |
The country proportions remain consistent with past surveys. SAP region composition varies from year to year.
Development Job Roles
We asked respondents which common development-related roles they perform.
“Which roles describe your day-to-day work? (Select all that apply)”
Top seven role overlaps in external SAP Developers
These patterns of overlap are very similar to those in past years.
It is unsurprising that the “Developer” role leads. Architecture roles as a group have increased each year.
Development Domains
For respondents selecting “Developer” as one of their roles, we were interested in the specific application Domains they work in:
“Which of the following development domains describe your day-to-day work? (select all that apply)”
Year to year, Integration came in higher than we expected. Mobile web front-end development is more common than native mobile application development. This isn't completely unexpected, but worth noting.
Recent SAP Project Experience?
“Have you developed integrations or extensions for any SAP products or technologies in the past 12 months?”
Extension and Integration are key scenarios for developers working with SAP applications. We wanted to focus on developers with recent experience in these areas. Roughly three quarters of developers answered “Yes” here.
Popular Programming Languages
“Which programming languages have you used in your development work over the past 12 months? Please select all that apply.”
This was posed as a multiple response question. ABAP dominates, as it has in every year of our survey. JavaScript is very popular as well, which could be attributed to its use in both SAPUI5 and CAP. Java and Python are roughly tied for third place. The relative positions of these top four languages hasn't changed much, year to year.
Popular Programming Frameworks
A few years back, we extended our survey beyond just language use to ask about popular frameworks. We asked respondents who are Developers to pick which common front and back-end frameworks they have worked with in the past year.
Front-Ends
Back-Ends
Application and Business Technology Platform Architectures
SAP applications can be extended using any one of several architectural approaches. These can be grouped into two major classes: on-stack (in-app) and side-by-side (essentially, BTP-based).
We were wondering which approaches are most popular.
Popular Extension Architectures
“For the most recent extension project that you were part of, what was the principal runtime architecture of the back-end elements?”
We don't distinguish between newer and older SAP applications (e.g., S/4HANA vs. ECC) — this likely explains the dominance of “on-stack ABAP”. Aside from the obvious dominance of ABAP, we can also see that CAP is relatively popular. As with last year's results on this question, we see Low Code products like Build Apps and Build Process Automation are popular — this question is asking about real production projects, and seeing those two account for roughly 10% of all extension projects highlights the value of these tools.
For the first time, CAP is now on-par with ABAP as a side-by-side extension option: 22% of reported deployed applications were CAP-based (Cloud Foundry, Kyma, and HANA deployments) compared to 21% for BTP ABAP Environment.
ABAP and CAP both have style or language variants in their respective frameworks. ABAP can be programmed as “ABAP for Cloud Development” or “ABAP Standard”. CAP is available in JavaScript or Java language variants. Where the respondent selected ABAP or CAP, we asked about the variant used on the project:
ABAP Variants
CAP Variants
In years past, the ABAP breakdown was closer to a 50-50 mix between older, “ABAP Standard” and “ABAP Cloud”. This year we see a marked increase for ABAP Cloud (almost 60% total).
CAP/JavaScript is plainly most popular for CAP projects. Consistent with last year, we do have more respondents reporting the use of pure CAP/Java projects, although the percentage is a modest 8 percent.
Which Integrated Development Environments are Developer Using
We were curious which Integrated Development Environments are most familiar to our respondents.
IDE Familiarity
“Which of these IDEs are are you comfortable working with? (select all that apply)”
BTP Guidance Framework
Awareness and Use of the BTP Guidance Framework
“The BTP Guidance Framework is intended to help architects, developers, and administrators design, build, and run solutions on the SAP Business Technology Platform. Which statement best described your level of familiarity with this document?”
Nearly half of respondents are still unaware of this document's release. Raising awareness for this and other related BTP framework documents would be a good goal for 2026.
Cloud Insights
We first asked respondents if they used any cloud providers for their projects. For those that answered, “yes”, we asked about the use of several major providers, including SAP BTP. We also asked if their use included SAP or non-SAP projects. This information was condensed into a chart depicting the relative use of each cloud provider.
Similar to the earlier questions around BTP Environments, these numbers do not reflect a tally of projects for each platform – instead it reflects developer exposure to each.
Using Cloud Providers?
“Are you using any cloud providers for your development projects?”
Relative Use of Cloud Providers
We asked, “Which cloud providers are you using for development projects?”
SAP Business Technology Platform
Microsoft Azure
Amazon Web Services
Google Cloud Platform
Alibaba Cloud
Low Code / No Code Tools
This is the fourth consecutive year in which we've asked questions around Low Code and No Code (LCNC) products. The list was composed of leaders in the then current Gartner LCNC Magic Quadrant Report and select SAP products.
For each product, we asked respondents to select the most applicable category reflecting their awareness or use. These questions were organized as a single large matrix of boxes in Qualtrics – There is no “I am unfamiliar with this product” response. Instead, the respondent simply would skip checking one of the other boxes.
We normalized these data over the reporting years to account for differences in total responses each year. We then tallied production use of each tool in the table below, ordering by use for the current year. Note that respondents may have deployed more that just one product each year, so column totals will not necessarily add up to 100%.
| Note: Figures for 2024–2025 differ from last year's report due to a correction to the original formula; relative rankings were unaffected.
| Tool Name | 2024% | 2025% | 2026% |
| SAP Build low code | 55.0 | 61.4 | 67.6 |
| Vendor A | 35.0 | 35.7 | 41.2 |
| Vendor B | 20.0 | 27.1 | 14.7 |
| Vendor X | na | na | 11.8 |
| ‘na' – not part that year's survey |
SAP Build low code continues to dominate our SAP ecosystem.
Learning and Help Resources
We were interested in preferences in the format or media type of learning resources by respondents.
Preferred Learning Resources
“When learning new skills or technical subjects over the past 12 months, what resources did you tend use the most? Please select up to three resources.”
These results seem relatively unchanged year-to-year. One point of interest continuing from last year is the large difference in popularity between tutorials and MOOCs (34% versus 8% for 2026). Tutorials tend to be hands-on. They are also broken into substantially smaller time chunks. This reinforces our hypothesis that different content types and required time investment have an impact in some learning scenarios.
On the topic of Help, we shifted in this next question from formats to specific web sites.
Top SAP Help Resource Sites
“What is your preferred resource if you need help, or have a challenge with the SAP technology / tool you are working with? “
We added “Consulting an LLM …” this year and — interestingly — it comes in third place. Although we consider “Help” different than “Learning”, this is still an interesting point when it comes to describing LLM's roles in assisting Developers.
SAP Discovery Center Awareness and Use
SAP Discovery Center is a rich resource for helping teams understand how common business use cases map to technical architectures. Other important aspects of SAP BTP use are available there as well. How well know is it outside of SAP and, for folks that do know about it, how often do they use it?
BTP Discovery Center
“SAP Discovery Center helps you discover, evaluate, and adopt SAP BTP services and AI features through missions, a detailed service catalog, reference architectures and more. Which of the following statements best describes your level of familiarity with SAP Discovery Center?”
Technical Certifications
Technical Certifications
“How many technology-related certification programs have you completed within the past four years?”
This question is composed to apply to all technology certifications, not just SAP's. But we can see that well over a third (36%) of respondents took no certifications in the past four years. We chose “four years” on purpose. It's designed to be a long period – one that would allow most technical skills to become stale. If the respondent valued these as a means to truly stay current, we reason they'd be likely to re/certify.
For roughly a third of folks, that's not the case.
SAP Technical Certifications
“Of these certifications, how many were from SAP?”
This was a follow-up question for those that did take at least one certification. It does appear to indicated that — for those taking certifications — that SAP's are among those acquired.
Survey Methodology
This report is based on a Qualtrics web-based survey of 589 respondents from 44 countries. The survey ran for six calendar weeks. Ninety percent of the respondents invested ten minutes or less with the survey.
The survey was promoted via the SAP Community website and the SAP Developer Center, sap.com pop-up intercepts, social media posts.
This Report
This is the fourth year that this report is published as a Docusaurus web application. Docusaurus is a Node-based documentation publishing system. Recharts and venn.js were used to generate custom charts from survey data exported from Qualtrics and anonymized.
Survey results are presented by topic area and are filtered based on question relevance and survey logic. While the survey received 589 total responses, not every respondent saw or answered every question. Some questions were shown only to relevant audiences based on earlier responses, and some allowed multiple selections. As a result, totals and percentages may vary across sections and should be interpreted within the context of each chart. For example, a section focused on AI adoption may reflect only respondents who answered AI-related questions, while Developer Experience and Learning may include broader audiences. This structure helps ensure that each section reflects the most relevant responses, but it also means that sample sizes and percentages can vary throughout the report.
The sections in this report provide a directional view of the SAP developer community in 2026, highlighting key patterns in developer roles, tools, learning habits, and technology adoption. In sections such as Developer Experience, the report focuses on workflows, environments, and friction points in day-to-day development. In Learning, it highlights how developers build skills, with strong reliance on tutorials, documentation, forums, and community resources. For example, the learning section shows that developers most often relied on developer community websites and forums (60%), online tutorials, how-to videos, or webinars (47%), and self-directed learning using documentation and sample code (41%).
Other References
The annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey is an excellent (and no-cost) reference for industry-wide habits of developers.
SlashData's Developer Nation Survey is also a good non-SAP resource.
