No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

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 (33rd), Reporting (21st)
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 10.5% mindshare, down 16.4% since last year.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Knowage2.0%
Tableau Enterprise14.6%
Microsoft Power BI13.5%
Other69.9%
Reporting
Relational Databases Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SQL Server10.5%
Oracle Database10.4%
IBM Db2 Database6.6%
Other72.5%
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

"We can easily do our own customizations."
"Unified interface, a lot of tools for BI, easy configuration, standalone SDK."
"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'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."
"Being able to schedule necessary jobs needed for production jobs and programming run times"
"I would use SpagoBI if a company wants to use a free tool that has enough features."
"The most valuable feature of SpagoBI is that it is open source and 100% free without limits."
"The concept of engines is quite powerful allowing the user to work with report authoring/provisioning tools of their choice."
"One of the best features of SQL Server is the efficient retrieval of information."
"It allows me to obtain access to data that I would not otherwise obtain access to from different programs."
"For the most part, we have been satisfied with its capabilities."
"I like the availability group functionality. We are setting up more clusters using availability groups. The enterprise licensing or Software Assurance makes it a little bit cheaper as well. It is nice to have that read-only copy for reporting and everything else."
"When all of these are considered, our business is able to run faster, more securely, with SQL as the back-end."
"We use it as part of our product, so it is helpful for us."
"The documentation and manuals are very good."
"One of the things I most like about SQL Server is the log shipping piece. This is a great feature."
 

Cons

"I encountered a lot of issues when I tried to integrate the map in order to realize Intelligent Location Dashboards."
"The dashboard components could be better. They could do a lot more."
"The only challenge here is that it's a Java-based platform. It requires very high technical skills."
"We expected the community to be bigger than what it currently is."
"Unfortunately, many interesting features do not work when you are using a custom database for storing the metadata."
"Yes, using Mobile and Desktop Editions, we would sometimes need to restart the service."
"Development of SpagoBI has now been moved to Knowage. Users interested in further developments of the platform will have to look there."
"We had stability issues."
"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."
"Few in SSIS Realtime data refresh in SSRS More datasources in Power BI"
"We are on a monthly subscription and the price could improve."
"In terms of what could be improved, everything on-premise is now moving to the cloud. Obviously SQL Server has also moved, because Microsoft Excel has its own cloud called Azure Finance. Every solution comes with its own advantages and disadvantages."
"Right now we don't get much technical support from Microsoft"
"We occasionally face or encounter a problem with the database table itself. Some tables and their flyers, as well as the content's data, must be truncated."
"The free version of SQL Server is time-limited before updating to the paid version."
"The performance could improve."
 

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."
"We are on a monthly subscription and the price could improve. However, the price has worked out well in some deployments. The problem is you never know what kind of services been installed and you have to be in touch with many people, such as which servers are active or which are not. I did face a couple of issues in terms of subscriptions and the pricing model. They have improved over time."
"Its price is fine. You have to buy the license and support."
"If you are looking for a small setup and do not want an open-source solution or invest too much money in your database then SQL Server is a very good choice."
"The enterprise-level license agreement is very complicated."
"The cost associated with SQL Servers is on the higher side."
"The areas that need improvement are with regards to the commercial aspect of the solution, the licensing cost could be reduced in order to help customers to adopt it."
"For licensing, we pay yearly. The licensing is very expensive, and it should be cheaper."
"There is a license required for this solution. One of the problems is for smaller businesses to purchases a license because it is expensive for a lot of them to afford."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Reporting solutions are best for your needs.
904,973 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
23%
Manufacturing Company
8%
University
8%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
38%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Construction Company
6%
Outsourcing Company
5%
 

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: July 2026.
904,973 professionals have used our research since 2012.