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

Knowage vs SQL Server comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

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 (22nd)
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 1.0% compared to last year.
SQL Server, on the other hand, focuses on Relational Databases Tools, holds 10.3% mindshare, down 15.3% since last year.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Knowage2.0%
Tableau Enterprise13.7%
Microsoft Power BI12.7%
Other71.6%
Reporting
Relational Databases Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SQL Server10.3%
Oracle Database10.2%
IBM Db2 Database6.6%
Other72.9%
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

"I would use SpagoBI if a company wants to use a free tool that has enough features."
"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."
"Nice features available in SpagoBI compared with other open-source BI are Auditing, Collaborative BI, Query By Example, and User Profiling."
"SpagoBI makes delivering reports to our clients very easy."
"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 features to us are application implementation, development, and analysis."
"The concept of engines is quite powerful allowing the user to work with report authoring/provisioning tools of their choice."
"We have found the solution to be scalable."
"They have improved the UI and ease of accessing the database and server which is good. You can load it up and start using it from the very minute it is implemented."
"There was an online system in which we had about 2500 requests to the DB per second. Every request had a completion window of one second to process and retrieve data. After switching to SQL Server, and AlwaysOn, and Snapshot, and tinkering, and configuring and tinkering, the handling capacity we measured increased to about 5000 requests per second, while the time decreased to 0.5 seconds per request."
"The solution is easy to set up."
"I feel that this product is the best fit on the market for your database needs."
"It's a normal DMS, so it can be used everywhere you want to use any RDBMS or relational database."
"SQL is our main data store for enterprise applications, all applications that we have in the organization."
"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."
 

Cons

"The dashboard components could be better. They could do a lot more."
"The support is very meager: We had to break our heads to figure out everything"
"There are additional features such as Data Integration, Data Visualization, MobileBI, Cloud BI, Data enrichment and massaging should be implemented in the next release."
"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 expected the community to be bigger than what it currently is."
"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 demands of some jobs would slow Spago and lock the site, preventing any other job from processing."
"The number of concurrent users is too limited and other databases are better than SQL in this regard."
"If you are a new user then this solution could be difficult, they could improve by making the overall usage easier."
"Yes, I encountered issues in the CPU intensive application, like web crawlers. It was difficult to reach the desired scalability through the fine tuning options available."
"SQL Server is doing well, but I wish the optimization aspects were better."
"SQL Server could improve by enhancing the integration abilities, adding more inbuilt data security features, and simplifying the maintenance."
"The solution’s pricing and integration could be improved."
"The performance could be better. When we pump in millions of records, we start struggling, and that's why we want improvement in those areas."
"From Microsoft -- poor/very expensive, but there are many other helpful resources out there."
 

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 licensing is on an annual basis."
"This is a very cheap product."
"The price of the solution is very expensive. If I went with the cloud version of SQL a license would cost me approximately 11,000 Riyals per month."
"With recent releases, the Standard Edition (cheaper) SKU has some of the earlier version Enterprise features. SQL Express has some limitations."
"The licenses are really expensive. Their licensing model should be more simplistic."
"The price could be better. Aside from the basic features, if you need any additional features that can be extended, for example, if you want to connect with the heterogeneous databases, they are being managed as separate services and not included in the package. If you manage a database in Azure, it's not providing SFS and reporting services. However, on-premises, if you purchase the SQL Server license, it includes SFIS and SFRS services. If you take Postgre SQL and MySQL, they provide almost all the same features even though they are both open source databases."
"To scale the solution there are additional costs."
"For licensing, we pay yearly. The licensing is very expensive, and it should be cheaper."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Reporting solutions are best for your needs.
914,805 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
21%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
35%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Construction 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
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: September 2026.
914,805 professionals have used our research since 2012.