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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 2.0%, up 0.8% compared to last year.
SQL Server, on the other hand, focuses on Relational Databases Tools, holds 10.6% mindshare, down 17.0% since last year.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Knowage2.0%
Tableau Enterprise14.1%
Microsoft Power BI13.2%
Other70.7%
Reporting
Relational Databases Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SQL Server10.6%
Oracle Database10.5%
IBM Db2 Database6.6%
Other72.3%
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 would use SpagoBI if a company wants to use a free tool that has enough features."
"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."
"It improves sales and products, which motivates employees."
"We can easily do our own customizations."
"Being able to schedule necessary jobs needed for production jobs and programming run times"
"I can't name the features the way the Knowage community calls them because I still don't know the lingo. However, I can describe them. I like the ability to join more than one report, set all fields on one end, and replicate that on the other reports. I like that a lot. I think it's one of the features that got me using Knowage. They have tables, and I like that too. They took SQL scripts and many other scripts and enabled them to even correlate with Python. That's also one of the best things about Knowage. You could also decide to get information per user role, and this is also a feature that I like in Knowage."
"SpagoBI makes delivering reports to our clients very easy."
"The most valuable features to us are application implementation, development, and analysis."
"The pricing of the product is very good."
"All our healthcare projects are using the SQL Server, and we're able to load millions of data without any issues."
"I have found that SQL Server works very well in the Microsoft Dynamics environment."
"It works fine in terms of performance and stability."
"It is easy to use and easy to perform a backup."
"I feel that this product is the best fit on the market for your database needs."
"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."
"Their integration, SSRS and SSIS tools are really good."
 

Cons

"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."
"Unfortunately, many interesting features do not work when you are using a custom database for storing the metadata."
"I faced difficulties when using the email feature and documentation was scant."
"Tomcat configuration was tricky in earlier versions."
"Yes, using Mobile and Desktop Editions, we would sometimes need to restart the service."
"The dashboard components could be better. They could do a lot more."
"We expected the community to be bigger than what it currently is."
"SQL could be improved by making all features available on the on-premise version of the product as well as the cloud version. When you buy the on-premise version, it's sort of an inferior product compared to the cloud version, which seems to get most of the latest and greatest features."
"Sometimes, when you have a lot of information running on the SQL databases, the system hangs."
"The free version is cumbersome to use and maintain. But $5000 for a licence is more expense than the benefit I would get from a licensed version."
"SQL Server's scalability allows it to handle growth and increased workloads effectively, though it sometimes takes longer to load data when starting or can get stuck when multiple tabs are opened."
"Debugging from the debugger tool functionality should be enhanced."
"If there is flapping of Always-On database node, SQL Server will break the replication to the child nodes, and it requires manual intervention to restart replication."
"SQL Server could improve the integration with nonrational database solutions, such as MongoDB."
"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."
"Synapse is a bit costly. If I compare it with different databases, I think it's a reasonable price"
"You need to pay for the license. It most probably has per-core licensing."
"The price has been going higher and higher. The market is quite price sensitive."
"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."
"SQL Server is an expensive solution."
"Some of our clients purchase the license and others do not, they use Express SQL Server."
"This is a very cheap product."
"The product is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
20%
University
9%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
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: May 2026.
900,125 professionals have used our research since 2012.