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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

"The most valuable features to us are application implementation, development, and analysis."
"Our customers really appreciate the self-service BI functionalities."
"Being able to schedule necessary jobs needed for production jobs and programming run times"
"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's very easy to get the historical reports you need based on the business requirements and this helps our executives for taking decisions."
"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."
"I would use SpagoBI if a company wants to use a free tool that has enough features."
"We can easily do our own customizations."
"Very good security features."
"This is an excellent solution when it comes to databases."
"SQL Server is stable."
"SQL Server is easy to manage because all our DevOps team are familiar with it and simple to access because it is cloud-based."
"We have been using SQL Server from the start, so it's a stable product."
"Overall, it is generally a good product, and if you're interested in using this solution, my advice is to do your research because it's a good product, but there are other products available."
"SQL Server has scaled as per our requirements."
"The solution is very easy to use; it's intuitive and easy to navigate, and overall it's a straightforward product."
 

Cons

"Tomcat configuration was tricky in earlier versions."
"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."
"I faced difficulties when using the email feature and documentation was scant."
"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."
"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."
"We are not happy with the poor graphic user interface. It looks a bit old and sometimes it is not properly user friendly."
"Unfortunately, many interesting features do not work when you are using a custom database for storing the metadata."
"The solution is rather expensive."
"In the next release, I would like to see a better user interface and a familiar syntax."
"The product needs improvement in its UX design."
"I would like to see native plugins built for other platforms versus having to buy third-party plugins to tap into S3 buckets and AWS Cloud. Right now, it does not have those built-in plugins."
"SQL Server could be improved with cheaper licensing because it's very expensive."
"Performance could be improved."
"Maintenance of the solution is an area of concern, and improvements can be helpful."
"They can build more performance-tuning tools in it. They can also make the stuff a little more user-friendly and provide the ability to schedule jobs. They can perhaps also streamline it a little bit so that it is not so resource-intensive, which would be helpful. SQL Server has a tendency to consume all the memory you allow it to. If you are not careful, you can basically break your server. I would like to see it having a smaller footprint in terms of system resource consumption. They might want to consider re-evaluating their pricing. It is 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."
"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."
"The licenses are purchased annually."
"Synapse is a bit costly. If I compare it with different databases, I think it's a reasonable price"
"There is no licensing cost for SQL Server."
"This solution is available at a much lower price point than Oracle."
"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."
"I rate the product’s pricing a six out of ten."
"SQL Server has the best licensing price."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
24%
Manufacturing Company
7%
University
7%
Retailer
7%
Financial Services Firm
36%
Construction Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Manufacturing 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.
910,350 professionals have used our research since 2012.