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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

"Customer Service: Excellent."
"The most valuable features to us are application implementation, development, and analysis."
"Nice features available in SpagoBI compared with other open-source BI are Auditing, Collaborative BI, Query By Example, and User Profiling."
"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."
"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."
"It improves sales and products, which motivates employees."
"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."
"The product is easy to use."
"Its speed and the ease of server management are valuable. If I compare Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL, what I like in Microsoft SQL Server is the speed. We are using Microsoft Management Studio for managing our Microsoft SQL Server, and the user interface that I get to work with is also better."
"I love SQL Server's Common Table Expression. In addition to that, I like its lead and lag functions. That helped us reduce a lot of code when comparing rows in SQL Server."
"Enables us to convert to bigger DBs and more easily move or upgrade between branches."
"The most valuable feature of SQL Server is the performance."
"It's a very good solution and I've been pretty happy with its capabilities."
"SQL Server, a widely adopted database management system, is utilized across numerous sectors. Initially competing with Oracle and Db2, SQL Server has gained popularity. It serves as the backend database for a variety of applications."
"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."
 

Cons

"Many things need to be improved, most of all robustness."
"We had stability issues."
"We are not happy with the poor graphic user interface. It looks a bit old and sometimes it is not properly user friendly."
"The support is very meager: We had to break our heads to figure out everything"
"Yes, using Mobile and Desktop Editions, we would sometimes need to restart the service."
"The demands of some jobs would slow Spago and lock the site, preventing any other job from processing."
"Unfortunately, many interesting features do not work when you are using a custom database for storing the metadata."
"There are additional features such as Data Integration, Data Visualization, MobileBI, Cloud BI, Data enrichment and massaging should be implemented in the next release."
"They could improve the solution by allowing more portability between on-premise and the cloud."
"They have too many licensing options. They may want to simplify its licensing and bring it down to two, three, or four categories from ten to fifteen categories. Having so many different licensing options makes it difficult to decide which one to choose from. They can club things together. This is an area where they can make things easier for customers."
"For example, while I was implementing two queries one time, the SQL Server gave me the wrong results."
"One thing I don't like about SQL Server is the way they've set up security with users and groups. It just doesn't seem that intuitive to me. Adding some more explanatory information might help some."
"We have no vision. We don't know when or how we have been hacked."
"Although I am satisfied with the solution, some clients have asked us to resolve technical issues, such as those involving silver solution and replication."
"I do not think SQL Server is suited for a typical database warehouse environment. However, people do use SQL Server for data warehouse environments but the best use case is for very small databases. If somebody wants to store more than 10 TB of data querying then the performance really degrades. The performance should be improved in the future to allow more scalability."
"Something that could be improved is the cost because it's very high. That's the only thing I'm concerned about but the technology is good."
 

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."
"The price of SQL Server is great. In my company, SQL Server is part of the Microsoft Suite, we don't have to pay for any additional license costs, it's quite cost-effective for us."
"The licenses are purchased annually."
"Its licensing is yearly. There are no additional costs. There is only the subscription license."
"Historically, SQL Server has been much more affordable than Oracle, which is overpriced."
"Some of the licensing are very expensive, such as the Enterprise license."
"Cost is a major derivative for any organization. It has a reasonable cost value, and its cloud support is also better than others. Comparatively, Oracle can do the same things or is even better in certain areas, but it is expensive. The cost along with the support are the plus factors for SQL Server."
"Synapse is a bit costly. If I compare it with different databases, I think it's a reasonable price"
"It is expensive, but you get what you pay for."
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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.
891,869 professionals have used our research since 2012.