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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 (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

"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."
"The embedding feature is great."
"The most valuable feature of SpagoBI is that it is open source and 100% free without limits."
"We can easily do our own customizations."
"Our customers really appreciate the self-service BI functionalities."
"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 am satisfied with the product in general given what the company invested in it, which was just our time."
"The concept of engines is quite powerful allowing the user to work with report authoring/provisioning tools of their choice."
"I find SQL Server's ability to integrate with other Microsoft services, such as Azure, in supporting business intelligence and data analytics workflows to be excellent."
"We have been very satisfied with its capabilities over the last decade."
"The solution is easy to set up."
"The solution is extremely stable; we haven't had issues, we don't really experience bugs or glitches, and we haven't had the system crash on us before."
"The product has very good online documentation that can be used for troubleshooting."
"Agent service is a good feature of SQL Server, where you can schedule certain tasks."
"The interface is user friendly."
"Overall, it helps our organization a lot."
 

Cons

"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."
"The only challenge here is that it's a Java-based platform. It requires very high technical skills."
"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."
"I faced difficulties when using the email feature and documentation was scant."
"We are not happy with the poor graphic user interface. It looks a bit old and sometimes it is not properly user friendly."
"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."
"Yes, using Mobile and Desktop Editions, we would sometimes need to restart the service."
"The support is very meager: We had to break our heads to figure out everything"
"An area for improvement would be the SQL Server process monitoring, which is quite basic and could sustain more information."
"Reloading all the data in a database can cause potential data loss especially when the size of database is large."
"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 solution’s initial setup could be complex, requiring some design of how you want to lay everything out and what type of storage you want to put certain things on."
"It would be better if it had more integration with other systems."
"The licensing is pretty expensive."
"Sometimes, when you have a lot of information running on the SQL databases, the system hangs."
"I would like to see the database become fully automated."
 

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."
"This solution is available at a much lower price point than Oracle."
"As compared to Oracle Database, SQL Server is less expensive. For mid-sized organizations, SQL Server is completely all right, but people say it can't support large organizations with more than 2,000 users."
"There is an annual license and it is priced reasonably."
"We have had to purchase the Enterprise version to the tune of a few hundred thousand dollars, which is just ridiculous."
"There is a license required for this solution and we pay monthly. The price is reasonable compared to other solutions."
"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."
"I would rate the tool's pricing a six out of ten. It is not extremely cheap but also it's not the most expensive product."
"Their options for concurrency and locking are good, as well as their prices."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
23%
University
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
38%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
6%
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, Plotly and others in Reporting. Updated: May 2026.
902,894 professionals have used our research since 2012.