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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 1.9%, up 0.8% compared to last year.
SQL Server, on the other hand, focuses on Relational Databases Tools, holds 11.2% mindshare, down 17.9% since last year.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Knowage1.9%
Microsoft Power BI15.3%
Tableau Enterprise15.1%
Other67.7%
Reporting
Relational Databases Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SQL Server11.2%
Oracle Database11.2%
IBM Db2 Database6.5%
Other71.1%
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

"I am satisfied with the product in general given what the company invested in it, which was just our time."
"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."
"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."
"SpagoBI makes delivering reports to our clients very easy."
"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."
"The concept of engines is quite powerful allowing the user to work with report authoring/provisioning tools of their choice."
"Being able to schedule necessary jobs needed for production jobs and programming run times"
"It is secure, and it is fast."
"The backup capabilities are extremely good."
"It provides the ability to create an end-to-end automated BI platform through data management and provisioning, transformation and publication."
"We use the solution both on the cloud and on-premises and we have been pleased with its capabilities overall."
"We like business integration, database, and analysis."
"I love SQL Server's Common Table Expression, and in addition to that, I like its lead and lag functions, which helped us reduce a lot of code when comparing rows in SQL Server."
"It's great that the database engine is always on."
"The most valuable feature of SQL Server is the performance."
 

Cons

"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."
"Many things need to be improved, most of all robustness."
"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."
"Tomcat configuration was tricky in earlier versions."
"I faced difficulties when using the email feature and documentation was scant."
"We expected the community to be bigger than what it currently is."
"The dashboard components could be better. They could do a lot more."
"We had stability issues."
"While we have many options in Enterprise, it's expensive for most companies."
"Indexing, as well as integration, are areas of this product that need improvement."
"Improvement in SQL Server should focus on lowering the high cost, especially for environments requiring extensive CPU and memory usage like data warehousing"
"As a software developer, it can be hard to do something in Oracle that is SQL Server specific, and vice-versa, sometimes."
"There are a lot of improvements in the cloud space about which we open a case with Microsoft every now and then."
"The solution could improve by being more user-friendly."
"Analysis services have a lot of room for improvement. Basically, manageability on the available tools; they are not very efficient and my main headache is with the analysis service."
"Improvements to the indexing, columnstore indexing, and high availability groups are good improvements for future versions."
 

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."
"The enterprise-level license agreement is very complicated."
"Our customers do pay license fees for the MS SQL Server but the Rabbit is free, as it is open-source software."
"The licenses are really expensive. Their licensing model should be more simplistic."
"The cost is high and because it's an expensive product, we are in the process of moving towards open-source solutions."
"We're looking at alternative solutions because we think Microsoft's licensing costs have been expensive."
"The price of the solution is fine."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."
"This is a very cheap product."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
19%
University
10%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
Retailer
8%
Financial Services Firm
40%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
5%
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, IBM and others in Reporting. Updated: April 2026.
892,287 professionals have used our research since 2012.