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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 (34th), Reporting (21st)
SQL Server
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
275
Ranking in other categories
Relational Databases Tools (1st), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (2nd)
 

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 0.9% compared to last year.
SQL Server, on the other hand, focuses on Relational Databases Tools, holds 10.4% mindshare, down 16.2% since last year.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Knowage2.0%
Tableau Enterprise13.9%
Microsoft Power BI12.9%
Other71.2%
Reporting
Relational Databases Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SQL Server10.4%
Oracle Database10.4%
IBM Db2 Database6.6%
Other72.6%
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

"SpagoBI makes delivering reports to our clients very easy."
"The concept of engines is quite powerful allowing the user to work with report authoring/provisioning tools of their choice."
"It's very easy to get the historical reports you need based on the business requirements and this helps our executives for taking decisions."
"Our customers really appreciate the self-service BI functionalities."
"The most valuable features to us are application implementation, development, and analysis."
"We can easily do our own customizations."
"Being able to schedule necessary jobs needed for production jobs and programming run times"
"The most valuable feature of SpagoBI is that it is open source and 100% free without limits."
"We have found the solution to be scalable."
"The solution doesn't have too many surprises and is easy to understand."
"SSAS is the most interesting feature to organize the data and let the users play with it."
"It has High Availability, therefore provides failover if a node becomes unavailable."
"SQL Server is an inexpensive solution. I recommend it if the project isn't sensitive. SQL is similar to Oracle and integrates well with tools in the cloud environment. The difference is that Oracle is for data solutions where there is replication and moderation."
"My advice for people looking into using SQL Server is that it's the best choice, especially for those who are beginners with databases."
"SQL Server, generally speaking, is stable also in high transaction environments."
"The AlwaysOn feature has ensured 100% database availability, even when one of the servers is down without any performance issues for the end user."
 

Cons

"The support is very meager: We had to break our heads to figure out everything"
"The only challenge here is that it's a Java-based platform. It requires very high technical skills."
"Many things need to be improved, most of all robustness."
"There are additional features such as Data Integration, Data Visualization, MobileBI, Cloud BI, Data enrichment and massaging should be implemented in the next release."
"The dashboard components could be better. They could do a lot more."
"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."
"I encountered a lot of issues when I tried to integrate the map in order to realize Intelligent Location Dashboards."
"We are not happy with the poor graphic user interface. It looks a bit old and sometimes it is not properly user friendly."
"The solution could be better when it comes to security."
"The solution could be more secure."
"There is always some place for improvements. Statistics could be better (2 table statistic), or dynamic partition function, but that is probably true with every other product."
"There should be more security updates for the product."
"Other than Synapse and the other version of SQL Server, they face some problems while processing the data."
"There is room for improvement in terms of pricing for SQL Server."
"The solution could improve by having better integration."
"From a DB administrator perspective, I would like to see more space requirements and space capacity history, so that we are able to see which DBs are growing, and by how much per day or week."
 

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."
"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."
"For medium-sized customers who don't need some enterprise features, the tool would be available for 200 USD per month. For the enterprise segment, the tool's cost can go up to 6,000 USD."
"Some of the licensing are very expensive, such as the Enterprise license."
"There is a license required for this solution and we pay monthly. The price is reasonable compared to other solutions."
"​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.​"
"You need to pay for the license. It most probably has per-core licensing."
"This is a downside of enterprise Microsoft products."
"The product’s price depends on the specific server requirements."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
24%
Manufacturing Company
7%
University
7%
Retailer
7%
Financial Services Firm
37%
Construction Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Outsourcing Company
6%
 

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

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, Plotly and others in Reporting. Updated: August 2026.
909,679 professionals have used our research since 2012.