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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 (33rd), 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) (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 10.5% mindshare, down 16.4% since last year.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Knowage2.0%
Tableau Enterprise14.6%
Microsoft Power BI13.5%
Other69.9%
Reporting
Relational Databases Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SQL Server10.5%
Oracle Database10.4%
IBM Db2 Database6.6%
Other72.5%
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 feature of SpagoBI is that it is open source and 100% free without limits."
"Nice features available in SpagoBI compared with other open-source BI are Auditing, Collaborative BI, Query By Example, and User Profiling."
"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."
"I would use SpagoBI if a company wants to use a free tool that has enough features."
"Our customers really appreciate the self-service BI functionalities."
"The concept of engines is quite powerful allowing the user to work with report authoring/provisioning tools of their choice."
"I am satisfied with the product in general given what the company invested in it, which was just our time."
"It improves sales and products, which motivates employees."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is that it's integrated with the Visual Studio and also with Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. It's a tool they have and it's quite easy to use and understand. It's the interface for programming for SQL Services."
"Great range of admin tools (far outnumbers MYSQL) - I like the database tuning tools."
"It's great that the database engine is always on."
"The product can scale if a company needs it to."
"The stability of the product is very good; it is reliable, there are no bugs or glitches, it does not crash or freeze, and it does not give us any trouble."
"There is a return on investment because based on analytics, we are reducing the number of people who are doing the analytical part so that it's an automated process, and the data will be available to everyone, including business users."
"SQL is stable."
"The solution's most valuable part revolves around data management, which can be seen in its audit features and performance."
 

Cons

"Yes, using Mobile and Desktop Editions, we would sometimes need to restart the service."
"I encountered a lot of issues when I tried to integrate the map in order to realize Intelligent Location Dashboards."
"The support is very meager: We had to break our heads to figure out everything"
"We are not happy with the poor graphic user interface. It looks a bit old and sometimes it is not properly user friendly."
"The only challenge here is that it's a Java-based platform. It requires very high technical skills."
"I faced difficulties when using the email feature and documentation was scant."
"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 dashboard components could be better. They could do a lot more."
"Price could be cheaper, and access to reporting tools should be better."
"When reviewing SQL processes it would be great if all of the local processes on the SQL server were marshaled to a remote SSMS client."
"We do have some complaints regarding licensing."
"The web interface and the command line interface could be better so we could manage and build some things around an API. If we could build our own solution, our own interface, and then manage the solution through that open API, that would be better."
"We do not have much to complain about SS 2016 Dev Ed in itself, we do have some complaints regarding licensing for SQL Server 2016 Enterprise Ed."
"We had a stability issue with the SSRS component when we deployed it into the production environment."
"Improvement in SQL Server should focus on lowering the high cost, especially for environments requiring extensive CPU and memory usage like data warehousing"
"Their datatypes need improvement."
 

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."
"It is annual."
"The licensing involves a one time fee."
"There is a license required for servers and for the POS we use the free version. The free version allows you to have tables and a total database size of approximately 10 GB, which is enough for our requirements."
"Pricing for this product is very reasonable."
"The price could always be lower."
"We're looking at alternative solutions because we think Microsoft's licensing costs have been expensive."
"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."
"We have had to purchase the Enterprise version to the tune of a few hundred thousand dollars, which is just ridiculous."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
23%
Manufacturing Company
8%
University
8%
Marketing Services Firm
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
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: July 2026.
903,807 professionals have used our research since 2012.