Knowage vs SQL Server comparison

The compared Knowage and Microsoft solutions aren't in the same category. Knowage is ranked #23 in RT , and holds a 1.9% mindshare in the category. Microsoft is ranked #1 in SQL , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 11.2% mindshare. Additionally, 85% of Knowage users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Knowage

Read 18 Knowage reviews

1,775 Views
870 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

SQL Server

Read 274 SQL Server reviews

16,569 Views
14,581 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Knowage

SQL Server

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Knowage and SQL Server based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, IBM and others in Reporting.

To learn more, read our detailed Reporting Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Reporting

March 2026

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Helped 889,955 peers since 2012

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

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
Product	Mindshare (%)
Knowage	1.9%
Microsoft Power BI	15.3%
Tableau Enterprise	15.1%
Other	67.7%

Reporting

Relational Databases Tools Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
SQL Server	11.2%
Oracle Database	11.2%
IBM Db2 Database	6.5%
Other	71.1%

Relational Databases Tools

Featured Reviews

BlessingSithole

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.

Read full review

Peter Larsson

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"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."

"The most valuable feature of SpagoBI is that it is open source and 100% free without limits."

"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."

"It's very easy to get the historical reports you need based on the business requirements and this helps our executives for taking decisions."

"The most valuable features to us are application implementation, development, and analysis."

"We can easily do our own customizations."

"The embedding feature is great."

"Nice features available in SpagoBI compared with other open-source BI are Auditing, Collaborative BI, Query By Example, and User Profiling."

More Knowage pros

"The most valuable feature is easy installation. It was very easy to install."

"The solution is highly scalable; you are able to implement a SQL cluster mechanism for replicating the data between two nodes of the SQL Server so if one of the nodes is down the second node becomes active."

"SQL Server is a good mainstream application that has been around for quite some time, and I like when things are around for a while."

"One of the best features of SQL Server is the efficient retrieval of information."

"Its usability is very good. Its performance is satisfactory."

"It is a simple query language. It is consistent across all versions. If you start with an older version, move to the newer version. The same code will still work."

"The Always On tool improves the SQL server availability."

"It will do clustering, so you can have two database servers looking at the same data simultaneously."

More SQL Server pros

Cons

"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."

"Unfortunately, many interesting features do not work when you are using a custom database for storing the metadata."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The dashboard components could be better."

More Knowage cons

"The solution could offer better integration with other solutions - specifically Microsoft."

"The web interface and the command line interface could be better so we could manage and build some things around an API. If we could build our own solution, our own interface, and then manage the solution through that open API, that would be better."

"Sometimes we experience issues with its stability."

"Its support for JSON should be improved. It does support JSON, but the support is not good enough currently. They should also improve the way indexes work. Its performance can also be improved because sometimes it becomes very slow for certain table designs. It cannot have more than a certain amount of data. As compared to other databases, its capability to handle large volumes of data is not very good."

"The solution could use better governance on the management side, especially around data governance."

"SQL Server has good performance, but it could be better."

"One stability issue I encountered was the deadlocking between calls to the same resources (tables, etc.)."

"While this is a reliable product, it has room for improvement."

More SQL Server cons

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 price of the solution could be cheaper."

"We have an enterprise license, which we consider to be fine."

"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."

"Synapse is a bit costly. If I compare it with different databases, I think it's a reasonable price"

"Pricing is reasonable for small organizations, but the scaling increases the price."

"It is expensive in terms of licensing costs and pricing. If you want to scale SQL Server, it is very expensive. We probably have to pay extra for technical support. We also have to pay for the license of Windows on which the SQL Server resides, which is an extra cost."

"The pricing from Microsoft is quite expensive compared to Oracle."

"We are on an annual enterprise license for the solution and the cost of the license could be reduced."

More SQL Server pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

19%

University

10%

Marketing Services Firm

10%

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

40%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	119
Midsize Enterprise	60
Large Enterprise	118

Questions from the Community

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Comparisons

Tableau Enterprise vs Knowage

Compared 8% of the time

Pentaho Business Analytics vs Knowage

Compared 7% of the time

Procurify vs Knowage

Compared 7% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs Knowage

Compared 6% of the time

Plotly Dash Enterprise vs Knowage

Compared 5% of the time

More Knowage Competitors

IBM Db2 Database vs SQL Server

Compared 19% of the time

Oracle Database vs SQL Server

Compared 10% of the time

SAP HANA vs SQL Server

Compared 7% of the time

MariaDB vs SQL Server

Compared 5% of the time

Teradata vs SQL Server

Compared 5% of the time

More SQL Server Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Knowage

April 2026

Download Knowage product report

Buyer's Guide

SQL Server

March 2026

Download SQL Server product report

Also Known As

SpagoBI

Microsoft SQL Server, MSSQL, MS SQL

Overview

Knowage (formerly SpagoBI) has a 14-years history. The actual release is the 6.3.

Knowage offers FULL ANALYTICAL CAPABILITIES, with a special focus on big data analytics and comprehensive support to rich and multi-source data analysis. Knowage provides different modules, each one focused on a specific domain but mutually combinable (Big Data, Smart Intelligence, Enterprise Reporting, Location Intelligence, Performance Management, Predictive Analysis). Moreover, Knowage is an OPEN SOURCE solution: the source code is freely accessible, everyone is allowed to join the community and build the own business solution to ensure strategic decision-making and improved productivity.

Knowage suite is supported by Engineering Group, the leading Italian software and services company, with about 10,000 people and more than 50 offices worldwide. Maintenance and support services (such as trainings, migration support, proof-of-concepts, etc) are provided by Engineering Group (KNOWAGE Labs) under subscription.

Knowage

SQL Server is a relational database management system (RDBMS) by Microsoft. The product's main purposes are to store data and retrieve it as requested by other software applications - on the same computer or on another computer across a shared network. The solution is built on top of Structured Query Language (SQL), which is a standardized programming language used for relational database management.

The product is tied to Transact-SQL (T-SQL), which is an implementation of SQL from Microsoft that adds several proprietary programming extensions to the standard language. SQL Server is built similarly to other RDBMS products, as its structure is a row-based table that connects related data elements in different tables to one another. One of its most important components is the SQL Server Database Engine, as it controls data processing, storage, and security. Beneath the Database Engine is the SQL Server Operating System, which is used for memory and I/O management, locking data to avoid unneeded upgrades, and job scheduling.

The solution has four editions with different sets of services and tools. They include:

SQL Server Developer
SQL Server Expression
SQL Server Standard
SQL Server Enterprise

The first two are available for free and are typically utilized by smaller companies, as they work with fewer functions and storage. The second two editions are generally used by bigger organizations and enterprises and offer more features.

The solution has several functions through which users can facilitate different data-related processes. These include:

Aggregate functions: These functions are used to calculate one or more values and return a single value.
Window functions: Window functions calculate an aggregate value based on a group of rows and return multiple rows for each involved group.
Date functions: These functions allow clients to handle data and time data efficiently.
String functions: Through the string functions, SQL Server processes an input string and returns a string or numeric value.
System functions: The system functions of the product return objects, values, and settings.

SQL Server Services

SQL Server has a wide range of add-on services that provide additional benefits beyond database management. These services include:

Machine learning: SQL Server machine learning services allow users to do machine learning and data analytics within the product.
Service broker: This feature is a part of the database engine and offers messaging and message queuing for applications on the platform.
Replication: This feature consists of transaction replication, merge replication, and snapshot replication.
Analysis: SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) adds online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining capabilities to SQL Server databases.
Reporting: This feature supports the development of custom reporting applications.
Notifications: This feature generates data-driven notifications which are sent to subscribers of Notification Services.
Integration: This SQL Server feature provides capabilities for data integration, data import, and data warehousing.
Full-text search: Through this feature, users can utilize specialized indexing and query for unstructured text stored in the solution.
Visual studio: This feature supports data programming with SQL Server.
Azure Data Studio: This is a cross-platform query editor that can be downloaded and used alongside SQL Server.

SQL Server Benefits

The solution has many benefits for users. These include the following:

The platform ensures a consistent experience across other platforms while being fast and agile.
Through the built-in intelligence features, users can understand their data better.
The solution has enterprise-level security, which ensures the smooth and safe performance of users' data.
SQL Server offers the ability to retrieve large amounts of data quickly and efficiently.
The product installation process is fairly easy, and it offers a user-friendly interface.
SQL Server offers improved data storage and retrieval functions through frequent upgrades.
The solution reduces the risk of database server attacks, since it is not an open-source database.

Reviews from Real Users

A president at a consultancy evaluates SQL Server as a veteran solution with critical log shipping feature.

Harkamal S., a user at a manufacturing company, rates SQL Server with a high mark because it is a stable, scalable, and easy-to-deploy solution that pretty much covers everything.

Microsoft

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: March 2026.

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