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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 (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 10.7% mindshare, down 17.3% since last year.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Knowage2.0%
Tableau Enterprise14.5%
Microsoft Power BI14.1%
Other69.4%
Reporting
Relational Databases Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SQL Server10.7%
Oracle Database10.9%
IBM Db2 Database6.3%
Other72.1%
Relational Databases Tools
 

Featured Reviews

BS
Software Engineer at syntegra
Open-source with great embedding capabilities but the dashboards could be better
I know the initial setup is pretty straightforward. It doesn't take a long time to deploy. Even on your own personal computer, when you want to try it out, it doesn't take too long to get it running. For the initial setup, I'd say it's maybe a four out of five in terms of how easy it is. You need to add these Java dependencies and so forth, which can be a bit boring, however, it's almost perfect. To deploy Knowage usually takes about a day. In terms of the implementation strategy, it's just following the instructions that they give us on the installation and then just knowing how to handle the process. Usually, there is a group of engineers who do that for us and manage the server itself. If a team is knowledgeable, then it doesn't take a long time. When you need a new instance, it's very quick. The implementation strategy is based on just following instructions on the installation process from Knowage. For deployment and maintenance, we need just maybe two people simply to monitor the traffic coming in. However, it's maintained by people who were doing other jobs like maintaining our other server. They just monitor the Knowage server and make sure that it's up and running and that there are no bugs. There are not too many bugs coming out from the debugger.
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

"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."
"I would use SpagoBI if a company wants to use a free tool that has enough features."
"Nice features available in SpagoBI compared with other open-source BI are Auditing, Collaborative BI, Query By Example, and User Profiling."
"We can easily do our own customizations."
"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."
"The embedding feature is great."
"The most valuable features to us are application implementation, development, and analysis."
"We have found there are many useful features such as the solution is continually being upgraded, ETL capabilities for extracting and transformation, and it is very easy to use."
"It is the latest technology and pretty powerful in terms of the high availability of the virtual server."
"We find the Microsoft SQL Server affordable compared to its real competitors, easy to manage, and it offers a very robust infrastructure for us."
"SQL Server is stable and is a high-performance database; we do hundreds of transactions per second, it's fairly robust, it does not struggle."
"Now we can supply a 16-core, 15TB, data warehouse loading hundreds of thousands of transactions per day for $100,000 purchase or cheaper via hosting partners."
"The solution is very easy to use. It's intuitive and easy to navigate. Overall, it's a straightforward product."
"The performance is great."
"I have found that SQL Server works very well in the Microsoft Dynamics environment."
 

Cons

"We expected the community to be bigger than what it currently is."
"The dashboard components could be better."
"Development of SpagoBI has now been moved to Knowage. Users interested in further developments of the platform will have to look there."
"I encountered a lot of issues when I tried to integrate the map in order to realize Intelligent Location Dashboards."
"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."
"There are additional features such as Data Integration, Data Visualization, MobileBI, Cloud BI, Data enrichment and massaging should be implemented in the next release."
"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."
"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."
"It cannot have more than a certain amount of data. As compared to other databases, its capability to handle large volumes of data is not very good."
"MS SQL need to improve the big data functions and also own market share."
"The stored procedure integration with our development could be better. Things are always changing very fast at Microsoft, and it takes a lot of resources to get on top of it. We're struggling with version control. In terms of new features, we don't have any feature requests. We are not focusing on the database."
"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."
"The performance needs some improvement and it needs more features integrated into it."
"The price of SQL Server could be reduced, the license is expensive."
"In my experience, I've found that scalability can be improved."
"The user interface to the web frontend of MDS could be more intuitive and the Analysis Services platform has not evolved much in recent times, these are the two things that come to mind."
 

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."
"​We are a Microsoft shop, so we use Active Directory. That integrates well with this product, but we did look at Oracle. We also looked at IBM. This was the best price point for us for what we were getting.​"
"I don't know the exact prices because my focus is essentially technical and not on the bills. A few years ago, they changed the billing policy for the Enterprise Edition, and it became less attractive. But I believe they are still cheaper than Oracle. SQL Server isn't cheap, but it's not expensive either."
"The price of the solution could be reduced, it is expensive."
"It is something we have been using for a lot of years. If we're paying, it should be reasonable."
"For a brief period, approximately one year before 2018, I had experience working with the open-source version of SQL Server. During that time, I found SQL Server to be the preferred choice, in my opinion."
"Synapse is a bit costly. If I compare it with different databases, I think it's a reasonable price"
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
19%
University
11%
Marketing Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
40%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
4%
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 Enterprise119
 

Questions from the Community

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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, Domo and others in Reporting. Updated: April 2026.
893,438 professionals have used our research since 2012.