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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

"We can easily do our own customizations."
"SpagoBI makes delivering reports to our clients very easy."
"Our customers really appreciate the self-service BI functionalities."
"Unified interface, a lot of tools for BI, easy configuration, standalone SDK."
"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."
"Customer Service: Excellent."
"The concept of engines is quite powerful allowing the user to work with report authoring/provisioning tools of their choice."
"It improves sales and products, which motivates employees."
"There was an online system in which we had about 2500 requests to the DB per second. Every request had a completion window of one second to process and retrieve data. After switching to SQL Server, and AlwaysOn, and Snapshot, and tinkering, and configuring and tinkering, the handling capacity we measured increased to about 5000 requests per second, while the time decreased to 0.5 seconds per request."
"SQL Server and their offers are very good, you can switch over, export, and do other things, I got access from users and it is very flexible to use."
"The best features of SQL Server are availability and stability; we never have concerns about the database."
"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."
"Great product."
"The solution is great for creating backups."
"Microsoft has a very broad landscape of products that they provide—almost everything that you need."
"This solution is user-friendly and easy to understand."
 

Cons

"We expected the community to be bigger than what it currently is."
"The dashboard components could be better. They could do a lot more."
"Unfortunately, many interesting features do not work when you are using a custom database for storing the metadata."
"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 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."
"Many things need to be improved, most of all robustness."
"Development of SpagoBI has now been moved to Knowage. Users interested in further developments of the platform will have to look there."
"Development of SpagoBI has now been moved to Knowage. Users interested in further developments of the platform will have to look there."
"I would appreciate a dark theme for SQL Server Management Studio and ability to add databases with TDE enabled into availability groups."
"The performance could be better."
"It would be nice if there was a feature to search for a specific value across multiple tables. This would save a lot of time for its users."
"SQL Server could integrate better with other platforms."
"Database support could be improved."
"Improvements to the indexing, columnstore indexing, and high availability groups are good improvements for future versions."
"We would like to have a common storage option in the SQL Server. This option is available in Oracle Database. It would be great if Microsoft could create something like a columnstore that has not only indexing but also tables for common storage."
"SQL Server could be improved with cheaper licensing because it's very expensive."
 

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 the licensing are very expensive, such as the Enterprise license."
"The price could always be lower."
"There is a subscription that needs to be purchased to use the solution."
"The product is expensive."
"With recent releases, the Standard Edition (cheaper) SKU has some of the earlier version Enterprise features. SQL Express has some limitations."
"If you are looking for a small setup and do not want an open-source solution or invest too much money in your database then SQL Server is a very good choice."
"It is expensive, especially when you have open-source products that are just about as functional and they're free. They might want to consider re-evaluating their pricing. We purchased it in retail. It was somewhere in the neighborhood of 9,000. There is just the standard licensing fee. If they migrate this product the way they're trying to do everything else, eventually, it is going to be subscription-based, which is going to suck, but that's the way the industry is going, so it is what it is."
"We didn't have any licensing costs for SQL Server."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
20%
University
10%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
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 Enterprise118
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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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.
892,487 professionals have used our research since 2012.