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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

"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."
"The most valuable feature of SpagoBI is that it is open source and 100% free without limits."
"Nice features available in SpagoBI compared with other open-source BI are Auditing, Collaborative BI, Query By Example, and User Profiling."
"It improves sales and products, which motivates employees."
"Customer Service: Excellent."
"It's very easy to get the historical reports you need based on the business requirements and this helps our executives for taking decisions."
"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."
"Being able to schedule necessary jobs needed for production jobs and programming run times"
"SQL Server is very good, it can be used as a transactional database and used to support the data warehouse. Additionally, the ANSI-compliant satisfies our database properties."
"The Azure SQL Server database requires almost zero maintenance and management."
"We used SQL Server to store all of our lab data on the database, with a front-end application that needed SQL in the background for archiving all the laboratory data."
"SQL's performance is good enough if you have a low amount of data."
"The solution is extremely stable; we haven't had issues, we don't really experience bugs or glitches, and we haven't had the system crash on us before."
"If backups and alerts are configured properly, I can also rely on my restoration plan."
"Its speed and the ease of server management are valuable."
"The solution is easy to use and provides similar features to other competitors."
 

Cons

"We expected the community to be bigger than what it currently is."
"There are additional features such as Data Integration, Data Visualization, MobileBI, Cloud BI, Data enrichment and massaging should be implemented in the next release."
"Yes, using Mobile and Desktop Editions, we would sometimes need to restart the service."
"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."
"The support is very meager: We had to break our heads to figure out everything"
"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."
"Development of SpagoBI has now been moved to Knowage. Users interested in further developments of the platform will have to look there."
"We are not happy with the poor graphic user interface. It looks a bit old and sometimes it is not properly user friendly."
"We are on an annual enterprise license for the solution and the cost of the license could be reduced."
"Technical support could be faster."
"There is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to limited compatibility across the platform and restricted performance with massive data sets."
"Performance could be improved. There could be more support toward PHP-based websites and toward providing direct plugins for connections, and the related services or application services could be improved."
"The SQL Server has a big issue when some systems use Java as a primary software interface."
"Since this is a relational order system, scalability has a limit."
"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 backups could be better."
 

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 setup cost is high, but it will return every penny."
"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."
"SQL Server is an expensive solution."
"SQL Server is an expensive solution."
"​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 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."
"The enterprise-level license agreement is very complicated."
"I know the SQL Server pricing model, I believe, is based on CPU cores that your database server has, but I don't know what the solution's prices are though."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
25%
Manufacturing Company
8%
University
8%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
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.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.