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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

"Instead of just relying on emails to disperse our reports, having a central server to do this for us has helped our organization and has pushed us into a better place."
"In terms of ROI, much better than any other solution when it offer full fledged features in open source, planned to have direct contact with SpagoBI for better support."
"The embedding feature is great."
"I am satisfied with the product in general given what the company invested in it, which was just our time."
"The most valuable feature of SpagoBI is that it is open source and 100% free without limits."
"Unified interface, a lot of tools for BI, easy configuration, standalone SDK."
"The concept of engines is quite powerful allowing the user to work with report authoring/provisioning tools of their choice."
"The most valuable features to us are application implementation, development, and analysis."
"Security is obviously the most valuable feature because I can provide certain logins for a particular level of security and I can provide specific permissions for certain logins."
"When all of these are considered, our business is able to run faster, more securely, with SQL as the back-end."
"SQL Server is very scalable because we use it across a couple of different types of applications, such as micro-infrastructure setup and server farm."
"What I like best about this product is the environment."
"MS SQL is the easiest of the three I tried."
"We use it for our on-premises solutions, virtual servers and SSAS, SSRS packages. Also, our applications are .NET based, so it made to use it."
"The security and vulnerability management are well-managed through the vendor."
"We use SQL Server for various data management scenarios. It allows us to query data, some of which spans over twenty years. We generate reports and perform analyses using this tool. It also comes with backup and recovery tools, which are essential features of the database engine."
 

Cons

"The demands of some jobs would slow Spago and lock the site, preventing any other job from processing."
"When it comes to Knowage, it's a bit heavy, it's time-consuming sometimes, it's not very fast, and definitely not as fast as other business intelligence tools in terms of getting graphical reports."
"The support is very meager: We had to break our heads to figure out everything"
"Many things need to be improved, most of all robustness."
"I faced difficulties when using the email feature and documentation was scant."
"We had stability issues."
"Yes, using Mobile and Desktop Editions, we would sometimes need to restart the service."
"There are additional features such as Data Integration, Data Visualization, MobileBI, Cloud BI, Data enrichment and massaging should be implemented in the next release."
"It is very costly, and that's the reason people are moving away from SQL Server."
"There is room for improvement in terms of pricing for SQL Server."
"Regarding integration, the solution works well for different courses without any issues. However, if we want to add machine learning and AI capabilities for business analytics, that's an area where improvements could be made."
"SQL Server's scalability allows it to handle growth and increased workloads effectively, though it sometimes takes longer to load data when starting or can get stuck when multiple tabs are opened."
"Currently, I do not face any difficulties with SQL Server as all options and documentations are available."
"This is a downside of enterprise Microsoft products."
"The scalability is not very good because when you add processors to the machine, the price of the license goes up."
"Indexing, execution plans, and the SQL Server Management Studio performance."
 

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."
"Licensing fees increase depending on size and performance. If you want higher performance, you should go for a different course."
"Some of the licensing are very expensive, such as the Enterprise license."
"Currently, almost all of my machines are in Azure and I think it is the best way of licensing now (VM+software)."
"For a brief period, approximately one year before 2018, I had experience working with the open-source version of SQL Server. During that time, I found SQL Server to be the preferred choice, in my opinion."
"The enterprise-level license agreement is very complicated."
"​We are a Microsoft shop, so we use Active Directory. That integrates well with this product, but we did look at Oracle. We also looked at IBM. This was the best price point for us for what we were getting.​"
"There is a license to use this solution. However, the model is not easy to understand. There is a guide you have to read about all the information on how it works. If you read this documentation, you can understand how it works. We are paying for our SQL Servers by CPU cores with an enterprise license."
"It requires the purchase of a license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
20%
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

Ask a question
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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.
899,324 professionals have used our research since 2012.