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Knowage vs SQL Server comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Knowage
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (32nd), Reporting (23rd)
SQL Server
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
274
Ranking in other categories
Relational Databases Tools (1st), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

Knowage and SQL Server aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Knowage is designed for Reporting and holds a mindshare of 2.0%, up 0.8% compared to last year.
SQL Server, on the other hand, focuses on Relational Databases Tools, holds 10.6% mindshare, down 17.0% since last year.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Knowage2.0%
Tableau Enterprise14.1%
Microsoft Power BI13.2%
Other70.7%
Reporting
Relational Databases Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SQL Server10.6%
Oracle Database10.5%
IBM Db2 Database6.6%
Other72.3%
Relational Databases Tools
 

Featured Reviews

AM
Margin Assurance Analyst at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
A stable open source suite for modern business analytics with a useful replication feature
It would be better if more resources were available to help us learn how to use it. I wanted to use Knowage for a more extended period, but learning materials around the product were not really available and were not really straightforward. I've also seen inconsistencies between versions. For example, under the tools, especially in the cockpit, the way you create reports is now different. You will also find some configurations within a particular state, like a line chart, which differs from version to version. I think consistency is an essential feature in a product, especially for business intelligence products.
Peter Larsson - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Warehouse Lead at Resurs Bank AB (publ.)
Ledger and seamless integrations have strengthened trusted analytics and unified workloads
SQL Server's high availability and disaster recovery features work for supporting mission-critical applications, but there is much more to wish for. These features are not quite ready yet, although they do function. However, they could be significantly better. High availability and disaster recovery features should be improved in the next releases. I have noticed that everything could be improved or enhanced in the future, particularly temporal tables and window functions. Sometimes, I believe Microsoft releases features to stay ahead of competitors, but they do not make them feature-rich or feature-complete. They release something to be ahead of leaders and then seem to forget to maintain and upgrade them. I want Microsoft to pay more attention and be more mindful about the things they implement. It is fine to do a first release that works, but you cannot simply abandon it in the following years without service packs and improvements. You must continue to build on features rather than forgetting about them.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable features to us are application implementation, development, and analysis."
"Our customers really appreciate the self-service BI functionalities."
"The concept of engines is quite powerful allowing the user to work with report authoring/provisioning tools of their choice."
"The embedding feature is great."
"It's a great product. It has a lot more features than many other BI tools. You can get the most out of machine learning, the best connectivity to Python, and it cuts across enterprise sections."
"I am satisfied with the product in general given what the company invested in it, which was just our time."
"I can't name the features the way the Knowage community calls them because I still don't know the lingo. However, I can describe them. I like the ability to join more than one report, set all fields on one end, and replicate that on the other reports. I like that a lot. I think it's one of the features that got me using Knowage. They have tables, and I like that too. They took SQL scripts and many other scripts and enabled them to even correlate with Python. That's also one of the best things about Knowage. You could also decide to get information per user role, and this is also a feature that I like in Knowage."
"Unified interface, a lot of tools for BI, easy configuration, standalone SDK."
"One of the big advantages of this product is its performance, where it works well when the data is not complex."
"Easy to implement and user-friendly relational database management system. This product is stable and scalable."
"SQL Server Profiler makes finding and debugging easy."
"It is secure, and it is fast. For our present database size, we are using the Always-On feature on SQL Server so that our transactions are replicated among three servers. If one server goes down, we can find the data from other servers. We have benefited from this feature."
"In summary, this is a good product and I recommend it."
"Backups hardly get corrupt."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is that it's integrated with the Visual Studio and also with Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. It's a tool they have and it's quite easy to use and understand. It's the interface for programming for SQL Services."
"For the most part, we have been satisfied with its capabilities."
 

Cons

"Many things need to be improved, most of all robustness."
"I faced difficulties when using the email feature and documentation was scant."
"I encountered a lot of issues when I tried to integrate the map in order to realize Intelligent Location Dashboards."
"There are additional features such as Data Integration, Data Visualization, MobileBI, Cloud BI, Data enrichment and massaging should be implemented in the next release."
"Tomcat configuration was tricky in earlier versions."
"The demands of some jobs would slow Spago and lock the site, preventing any other job from processing."
"It would be better if more resources were available to help us learn how to use it. I wanted to use Knowage for a more extended period, but learning materials around the product were not really available and were not really straightforward. I've also seen inconsistencies between versions. For example, under the tools, especially in the cockpit, the way you create reports is now different. You will also find some configurations within a particular state, like a line chart, which differs from version to version. I think consistency is an essential feature in a product, especially for business intelligence products."
"The dashboard components could be better. They could do a lot more."
"There is room for improvement in terms of pricing for SQL Server."
"I would like Microsoft to evolve SQL Server because stateful databases dying are in a way. We would like to find out if it can absorb Hadoop and other similar things. They should make it useful for data mining. Data is evolving forever, and how we store it is also changing constantly. So, SQL Server also needs to change."
"SQL Server could improve by being more user-friendly, it is still geared towards specialists. Additionally, the monitoring system is difficult to use, not everyone can use it well. The configuration should be able to be done through the GUI."
"The way SQL Server pivots data could be improved. For example, I would like built-in comma-separated pivot and unpivot functions."
"Performance could be improved."
"The tool's support needs to be improved."
"In terms of what could be improved, everything on-premise is now moving to the cloud. Obviously SQL Server has also moved, because Microsoft Excel has its own cloud called Azure Finance. Every solution comes with its own advantages and disadvantages."
"It can be better if it enables the use of AI functions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Knowage is open-source, and an enterprise edition is also available."
"It allows the implementation of an effective reporting system using internal skills at a limited upfront cost."
"We have an enterprise license, which we consider to be fine."
"Currently, almost all of my machines are in Azure and I think it is the best way of licensing now (VM+software)."
"Synapse is a bit costly. If I compare it with different databases, I think it's a reasonable price"
"My advice is quite straightforward. If you know the number of users who really and truly need access to the Server then it is a no-brainer. If you do not know, then get the basic package and minimum licenses and start from there. Needless to say, users can develop/use data structures outside and then deploy onto the Server."
"The price of the solution is very expensive. If I went with the cloud version of SQL a license would cost me approximately 11,000 Riyals per month."
"Depending upon your usage, you can use the pay-as-you-go model for a short period of time. For longer projects, we can opt for one-year or a three-year license."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."
"I don't need a license for it as I will be migrating to Office 365."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
23%
University
9%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
38%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
6%
Comms Service Provider
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business119
Midsize Enterprise60
Large Enterprise118
 

Questions from the Community

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Would you say the price of SQL Server is high compared to that of similar products?
SQL Server is fairly priced because it has various editions, depending on the number of users, servers, or core packs you are using. If you compare the product to others in this category, the price...
Has using SQL Server helped your organization in any way?
SQL Server has helped my organization through partitioning to distribute the workload, as it splits them up into smaller pieces so the machines can easily deal with it. However, this comes with a h...
Which authentication mode is best for SQL Server?
My company connects through SQL Server authentication. We have company Windows accounts, but we do not want to connect the two, out of security concerns and to keep things separated for our own pur...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

SpagoBI
Microsoft SQL Server, MSSQL, MS SQL
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

FIAT Group, Italian air navigation service provider, Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, Telecom Italia, ASL Genovese, San Giovanni Battista University Hospital
Microsoft SQL Server is used by businesses in every industry, including Great Western Bank, Aviva, the Volvo Car Corporation, BMW, Samsung, Principality Building Society, Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield, and the Catholic District School Board of Eastern Ontario.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, Plotly and others in Reporting. Updated: May 2026.
902,588 professionals have used our research since 2012.