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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
275
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

"I am satisfied with the product in general given what the company invested in it, which was just our time."
"It's very easy to get the historical reports you need based on the business requirements and this helps our executives for taking decisions."
"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."
"Unified interface, a lot of tools for BI, easy configuration, standalone SDK."
"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."
"The concept of engines is quite powerful allowing the user to work with report authoring/provisioning tools of their choice."
"Customer Service: Excellent."
"SpagoBI makes delivering reports to our clients very easy."
"The scalability is very good."
"The ability to organize and structure our data in order to extract and provide it to various products and systems within our organization."
"From my point of view, using SQL Server 2017 and 2019 is very good."
"The ease of administration, in general, is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"Most valuable features include: high availability, clustering, save backup and recovery."
"I believe Always On is the most valuable feature. It's also easy to use and not very tricky."
"It will do clustering, so you can have two database servers looking at the same data simultaneously."
"SQL Server is stable."
 

Cons

"I encountered a lot of issues when I tried to integrate the map in order to realize Intelligent Location Dashboards."
"The only challenge here is that it's a Java-based platform. It requires very high technical skills."
"Development of SpagoBI has now been moved to Knowage. Users interested in further developments of the platform will have to look there."
"Tomcat configuration was tricky in earlier versions."
"We expected the community to be bigger than what it currently is."
"Unfortunately, many interesting features do not work when you are using a custom database for storing the metadata."
"Yes, using Mobile and Desktop Editions, we would sometimes need to restart the service."
"I faced difficulties when using the email feature and documentation was scant."
"Running multiple instances on the same box would be beneficial."
"Other than Synapse and the other version of SQL Server, they face some problems while processing the data."
"It needs to be improved to handle big data for large volumes of transactions for big industries. As compared to Oracle Database, SQL Server is not suitable for big data or large organizations where the database size could be more than 100 GB or more. In our country, for a large database and a large volume of transactions, we normally use Oracle Database. Most of the large banks are shifting from SQL Server to Oracle Database because of its slowness."
"In SQL 2008, data encryption is not a fully mature feature. Encryption works fine for individual rows, but for handling a batch a for loop has to be written, which is not straightforward."
"It's like pulling teeth, especially if you have had experience using a tool, like Oracle, that is just not that painful."
"Additional interfaces would be an improvement."
"It is costly to implement high throughput systems, beyond millions of transactions per second."
"The time series database could be improved."
 

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."
"SQL Server is an expensive solution."
"There is no licensing cost for SQL Server."
"It is something we have been using for a lot of years. If we're paying, it should be reasonable."
"The product is expensive."
"We are on an annual enterprise license for the solution and the cost of the license could be reduced."
"Some of the licensing are very expensive, such as the Enterprise license."
"The price of the solution could be reduced, it is expensive."
"The areas that need improvement are with regards to the commercial aspect of the solution, the licensing cost could be reduced in order to help customers to adopt it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
24%
Manufacturing Company
7%
University
7%
Retailer
7%
Financial Services Firm
36%
Construction Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Manufacturing 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 Enterprise119
 

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: August 2026.
910,454 professionals have used our research since 2012.