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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 (34th), Reporting (21st)
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) (2nd)
 

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 0.9% compared to last year.
SQL Server, on the other hand, focuses on Relational Databases Tools, holds 10.4% mindshare, down 16.2% since last year.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Knowage2.0%
Tableau Enterprise13.9%
Microsoft Power BI12.9%
Other71.2%
Reporting
Relational Databases Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SQL Server10.4%
Oracle Database10.4%
IBM Db2 Database6.6%
Other72.6%
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

"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."
"SpagoBI makes delivering reports to our clients very easy."
"The concept of engines is quite powerful allowing the user to work with report authoring/provisioning tools of their choice."
"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."
"Our customers really appreciate the self-service BI functionalities."
"Customer Service: Excellent."
"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."
"It improves sales and products, which motivates employees."
"The solution can be deployed in a few minutes."
"It is stable, and it works okay."
"The performance of the SQL Server is very good."
"We design and implement data warehouse solutions with SQL Server 2016 Developer Edition tools, which has given us high levels of productivity, allowed us to use an agile approach to the design and implementation of data warehouse solutions for our customers, and given us a competitive advantage in our market."
"It is a first-class enterprise RDBMS and will continue to enjoy favourable sentiment from developers and DBAs."
"The most valuable feature is replication because we had several replicas of the SQL Server database in different geographical locations."
"Overall, it is generally a good product, and if you're interested in using this solution, my advice is to do your research because it's a good product, but there are other products available."
"SQL is stable."
 

Cons

"Many things need to be improved, most of all robustness."
"I encountered a lot of issues when I tried to integrate the map in order to realize Intelligent Location Dashboards."
"Development of SpagoBI has now been moved to Knowage. Users interested in further developments of the platform will have to look there."
"There are additional features such as Data Integration, Data Visualization, MobileBI, Cloud BI, Data enrichment and massaging should be implemented in the next release."
"The support is very meager: We had to break our heads to figure out everything"
"The dashboard components could be better. They could do a lot more."
"The demands of some jobs would slow Spago and lock the site, preventing any other job from processing."
"We are not happy with the poor graphic user interface. It looks a bit old and sometimes it is not properly user friendly."
"I have no choice, our customer choose MS SQL."
"On the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) side, I have noticed more bugs in terms of being able to connect to our SQL servers. I can't tell how many times my recent server list got dropped or cleaned out. It is a pain, and it would be nice to have that recent connect list when you connect in. For whatever reason, once in a while, I get a hard error, and it'll close. When I go back in, everything is cleared out. It is annoying when you are working with more than a hundred database instances."
"They do not offer the SQL Server Management tool via the installation. It is a separate tool I use when I'm trying to configure the mirroring with SQL Server Mirroring. This is not supported and I'm getting some errors on the database mirroring."
"SQL Server is a stable solution, but it could be improved."
"The maintenance and tasks should be improved so as to reduce database files."
"SQL Server could be improved in terms of cost; the licensing cost is very high, although the return on investment is good because of the features it provides."
"Running multiple instances on the same box would be beneficial."
"The upgrades are unstable."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It allows the implementation of an effective reporting system using internal skills at a limited upfront cost."
"Knowage is open-source, and an enterprise edition is also available."
"The price of the solution could be reduced, it is expensive."
"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."
"There is no licensing cost for SQL Server."
"We purchased our license and the pricing is fine for us."
"The price of SQL Server is great. In my company, SQL Server is part of the Microsoft Suite, we don't have to pay for any additional license costs, it's quite cost-effective for us."
"The cost is high and because it's an expensive product, we are in the process of moving towards open-source solutions."
"It is annual."
"It is expensive, but you get what you pay for."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
25%
Manufacturing Company
7%
University
7%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
Financial Services Firm
37%
Construction Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Outsourcing Company
6%
 

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: August 2026.
908,858 professionals have used our research since 2012.