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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."
"Unified interface, a lot of tools for BI, easy configuration, standalone SDK."
"Nice features available in SpagoBI compared with other open-source BI are Auditing, Collaborative BI, Query By Example, and User Profiling."
"It's very easy to get the historical reports you need based on the business requirements and this helps our executives for taking decisions."
"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."
"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."
"Being able to schedule necessary jobs needed for production jobs and programming run times"
"It improves sales and products, which motivates employees."
"I have found that SQL Server works very well in the Microsoft Dynamics environment."
"SQL Server is definitely easy to use, and with the volume that we have, it's also stable."
"It is easy to establish, and the license price is lower than that of Oracle."
"The basic features of the solution are excellent overall."
"I haven't really experienced any issues that required the assistance of technical support."
"Microsoft makes life easy to expand your environment through clustering tools and after-hours operational scheduling features."
"Very stable relational database management system that offers ease of management, querying, and scaling. It has well-designed databases."
"Technical support is very good."
 

Cons

"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."
"Yes, using Mobile and Desktop Editions, we would sometimes need to restart the service."
"We are not happy with the poor graphic user interface. It looks a bit old and sometimes it is not properly user friendly."
"Unfortunately, many interesting features do not work when you are using a custom database for storing the metadata."
"I encountered a lot of issues when I tried to integrate the map in order to realize Intelligent Location Dashboards."
"We had stability issues."
"I faced difficulties when using the email feature and documentation was scant."
"The demands of some jobs would slow Spago and lock the site, preventing any other job from processing."
"In the next releases, I would only like more enhanced backups and more restore points."
"The reporting services of the solution (SSRS and now Power BI) are the less valuable items of the SQL Server suite."
"The solution could be more secure."
"The Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition have certain limitations."
"SQL could be improved by making all features available on the on-premise version of the product as well as the cloud version. When you buy the on-premise version, it's sort of an inferior product compared to the cloud version, which seems to get most of the latest and greatest features."
"The performance for the platform wasn't as good as I would like. I'm not entirely satisfied."
"The pricing and quality of the product could be improved."
"Sometimes, when you have a lot of information running on the SQL databases, the system hangs."
 

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."
"Some of our clients purchase the license and others do not, they use Express SQL Server."
"SQL Server is a cost-effective solution for a small database."
"I would rate the tool's pricing a six out of ten. It is not extremely cheap but also it's not the most expensive product."
"As compared to Oracle Database, SQL Server is less expensive. For mid-sized organizations, SQL Server is completely all right, but people say it can't support large organizations with more than 2,000 users."
"SQL Server offers three versions. You can get a free trial for 30 days."
"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."
"The setup cost is high, but it will return every penny."
"The solution is on a pay-per-use pricing model."
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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
39%
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
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...
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.
902,270 professionals have used our research since 2012.