Knowage vs SQL Server comparison

Why PeerSpot?

The compared Knowage and Microsoft solutions aren't in the same category. Knowage is ranked #22 in RT , and holds a 2.0% mindshare in the category. Microsoft is ranked #1 in SQL , with an average rating of 8.2, and holds a 10.3% mindshare. Additionally, 85% of Knowage users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Knowage

Read 18 Knowage reviews

3,821 Views
1,911 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

SQL Server

Read 276 SQL Server reviews

24,716 Views
22,244 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Knowage

SQL Server

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Knowage and SQL Server based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, Plotly and others in Reporting.

To learn more, read our detailed Reporting Report (Updated: September 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Reporting

September 2026

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Helped 916,771 peers since 2012

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

Ranking in other categories

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (32nd), Reporting (22nd)

SQL Server

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

276

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 1.1% compared to last year.
SQL Server, on the other hand, focuses on Relational Databases Tools, holds 10.3% mindshare, down 15.1% since last year.

Reporting Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Knowage	2.0%
Tableau Enterprise	13.5%
Microsoft Power BI	12.6%
Other	71.9%

Reporting

Relational Databases Tools Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
SQL Server	10.3%
Oracle Database	10.3%
IBM Db2 Database	6.6%
Other	72.8%

Relational Databases Tools

Featured Reviews

Albert Masanja

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.

Read full review

Shakti Gupta

SQL server database administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Hybrid data platform has strengthened performance, security, and incident response for production

SQL Server is very mature, but I see areas for improvement, especially in performance tuning, troubleshooting, and automation. Although tools such as Query Store and dynamic management views are powerful, some troubleshooting tasks still require senior SQL Server database administrator expertise. It would be valuable to have more intelligent, built-in recommendations for root cause analysis, indexing, blocking, and query optimization. I would also like to see simplified and consistent management across on-premises SQL Server and Azure SQL services, as managing hybrid environments sometimes requires different tools and approaches. Finally, improved patching, updates, monitoring, and cost and license transparency could make SQL Server easier to manage at the enterprise scale. One area I would improve in SQL Server is its documentation and troubleshooting guidance. SQL Server documentation is comprehensive, but for complex production issues, I would like to see more real-world troubleshooting examples, especially for scenarios such as Always On synchronization issues, blocking and deadlocks, performance degradation, and upgrade features.

Read full review

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 feature of SpagoBI is that it is open source and 100% free without limits."

"It improves sales and products, which motivates employees."

"Nice features available in SpagoBI compared with other open-source BI are Auditing, Collaborative BI, Query By Example, and User Profiling."

"Customer Service: Excellent."

"Unified interface, a lot of tools for BI, easy configuration, standalone SDK."

"We can easily do our own customizations."

"Our customers really appreciate the self-service BI functionalities."

"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."

More Knowage pros

"I find query optimization to be highly valuable for data management. Additionally, drag-and-drop query creation greatly facilitates data management tasks."

"The product has very good online documentation that can be used for troubleshooting."

"It is a very user-friendly solution. It is easy to manage the databases and troubleshoot any issue. It is a perfect solution for the volume or transactions that we need to manage."

"Their integration, SSRS and SSIS tools are really good."

"As a data warehouse and storage solution, it's quite good."

"I love the developer version. Microsoft tells you about all the cool things they provided for everybody. You can develop and do anything with it. It's really good to learn. Oracle will not give you that much freedom, and Microsoft really kills it. You don't do anything with it but develop, learn, break, and push it to its limits. If there are problems, you show Microsoft or ask them, "what's going on here?" There is good community support for the developer edition, and that's what I really appreciate. You can teach people about it without limitations. You can have small databases created. You can keep it for a year and then work on it. It's a good thing for learners and developers."

"Microsoft makes life easy to expand your environment through clustering tools and after-hours operational scheduling features."

"The backup capabilities are extremely good."

More SQL Server pros

Cons

"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 only challenge here is that it's a Java-based platform. It requires very high technical skills."

"Unfortunately, many interesting features do not work when you are using a custom database for storing the metadata."

"We expected the community to be bigger than what it currently is."

"As all software and especially the open-source ones have always something that can work better, in this case, SpagoBI is slightly difficult to implement."

"Many things need to be improved, most of all robustness."

"Yes, using Mobile and Desktop Editions, we would sometimes need to restart the service."

More Knowage cons

"While we have many options in Enterprise, it's expensive for most companies."

"On the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) side, I have noticed more bugs in terms of being able to connect to our SQL servers."

"They have too many licensing options. They may want to simplify its licensing and bring it down to two, three, or four categories from ten to fifteen categories. Having so many different licensing options makes it difficult to decide which one to choose from. They can club things together. This is an area where they can make things easier for customers."

"The interface of the tool has certain shortcomings, making it an area where improvements are required."

"We are on an annual enterprise license for the solution and the cost of the license could be reduced."

"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."

"The upgrades are unstable."

"There are a lot of improvements in the cloud space about which we open a case with Microsoft every now and then. These improvements are not in terms of features or functionality. They are more related to their own compatibility or connectivity on which they keep on working to improve the product."

More SQL Server cons

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 cheaper."

"It costs a lot."

"Synapse is a bit costly. If I compare it with different databases, I think it's a reasonable price"

"It comes with the bundle package that we have. We have Microsoft Volume Licensing, so we don't have to pay for it separately. It is a part of the package."

"It is expensive in terms of licensing costs and pricing. If you want to scale SQL Server, it is very expensive. We probably have to pay extra for technical support. We also have to pay for the license of Windows on which the SQL Server resides, which is an extra cost."

"The cost associated with SQL Servers is on the higher side."

"There is a license required for the use of SQL Server and we are on an annual subscription."

"It's a bit expensive."

More SQL Server pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

20%

Outsourcing Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

35%

Outsourcing Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	119
Midsize Enterprise	60
Large Enterprise	122

Questions from the Community

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

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Comparisons

Tableau Enterprise vs Knowage

Compared 7% of the time

Pentaho Business Analytics vs Knowage

Compared 7% of the time

Procurify vs Knowage

Compared 6% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs Knowage

Compared 5% of the time

Oracle OBIEE vs Knowage

Compared 4% of the time

More Knowage Competitors

IBM Db2 Database vs SQL Server

Compared 27% of the time

Oracle Database vs SQL Server

Compared 7% of the time

SAP HANA vs SQL Server

Compared 5% of the time

MySQL vs SQL Server

Compared 5% of the time

Teradata vs SQL Server

Compared 5% of the time

More SQL Server Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Knowage

October 2026

Download Knowage product report

Buyer's Guide

SQL Server

September 2026

Download SQL Server product report

Also Known As

SpagoBI

Microsoft SQL Server, MSSQL, MS SQL

Overview

Knowage is an open-source business intelligence suite offering features like engine concepts and report customization. It's favored for its integration capabilities and self-service BI functionality, allowing users to leverage cross-platform access and conduct comprehensive data analysis.

Knowage stands out in the BI landscape by providing tools that facilitate autonomous data exploration, with an emphasis on flexibility and extensive integration options. With capabilities for embedding reports and dynamic dashboards, it supports various analysis needs through integration with databases and tools like Jasper and BIRT. Despite its technical complexity and interface limitations, Knowage's features such as GIS integration and big data visualization enhance operational efficiency and profitability analysis.

What are the key features of Knowage?

Powerful engines: Facilitate complex data processing with high efficiency.
Report customization: Tailor reports to meet specific business requirements.
Cross-platform access: Enable data accessibility across different devices.
Open-source: Leverage the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of open-source solutions.
Embedding capabilities: Integrate seamlessly with tools like Jasper for enhanced functionality.
Python support: Use Python for advanced data correlation and analyses.
GIS integration: Incorporate geographical data for enriched insights.

What benefits should you consider in reviews?

Increased efficiency: Streamlined report deployment and big data visualization.
Comprehensive analysis: Tools for evaluating activities and profitability.
Data export options: Support for exporting data in preferred formats simplifies reporting tasks.
Operational cost savings: Eliminates the need for third-party BI solutions.

In the healthcare and financial sectors, Knowage is used for deriving insights from health data warehouses and performing financial analyses. Companies use it to create dashboards and reports from MySQL databases, embedding them for wider distribution, and enabling effective resource evaluation and decision-making.

Knowage

SQL Server is a comprehensive database management system known for ease of use, robust performance, and seamless Microsoft integration, making it a preferred choice for data management and analysis needs.

SQL Server offers high availability with Always On availability groups and dynamic memory configuration. It integrates effortlessly with Microsoft products via tools like SSMS and Visual Studio. Supporting advanced features such as replication, clustering, and in-memory OLTP, it provides a versatile platform for managing and analyzing significant data volumes securely and efficiently. While it shines in integration with .NET applications and business intelligence, there are opportunities to improve its scalability and integration with open-source platforms. Its licensing costs can be a barrier, and enhancements to management tools for non-technical users, along with better setup processes, would increase its appeal.

What are SQL Server's most important features?

User-Friendly GUI: Simplifies interaction with a visually intuitive interface.
High Availability: Always On availability groups ensure data redundancy.
Dynamic Memory Configuration: Efficient resource allocation for optimal performance.
Strong Transaction Management: Reliable processing of concurrent transactions.
Advanced Features: Includes replication, clustering, and in-memory OLTP.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Efficiency: Streamlined processes for faster data management and analysis.
Compatibility: Smooth integration with Microsoft products enhances productivity.
Security: Robust features protect against data breaches.
Adaptability: Supports various enterprise needs, from small to large scale.

SQL Server is implemented across industries for database management, data warehousing, and business intelligence. Companies in finance, ERP, and cloud deployments leverage its capabilities for transactional processing, .NET program integration, and reporting. Enterprises particularly benefit from its scalability and cost-efficiency when integrated with Azure for small and medium-sized operations.

Microsoft

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: September 2026.

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