Knowage vs Windward Core comparison

Knowage and Windward Studios are both solutions in the Reporting category. Knowage is ranked #24, while Windward Studios is ranked #25. Knowage holds a 0.8% mindshare in RT, compared to Windward Studios’s 0.5% mindshare. Additionally, 85% of Knowage users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Windward Studios users who would recommend it.

Knowage

Read 18 Knowage reviews

468 Views
360 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

Windward Core

Read 36 Windward Core reviews

501 Views
160 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Knowage

Windward Core

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

Knowage and Windward Core are competing solutions in the business intelligence and reporting domain. Knowage appears to have the upper hand due to its scalability, integration capabilities, and attractive pricing, while Windward Core's advanced feature set might justify its higher cost.

Features: Knowage offers an open-source structure, comprehensive integration options, and seamless data analysis across diverse systems. Windward Core provides powerful document generation, rich formatting capabilities, and superior data presentation options.

Room for Improvement: Knowage could enhance its user interface, expand documentation, and improve compatibility with third-party tools. Windward Core might benefit from simplifying its configuration process, expanding data source support, and enhancing its integration capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Knowage is known for its simple deployment and strong customer support. Windward Core, although more complex to deploy, offers pre-configuration services and responsive support to alleviate this complexity.

Pricing and ROI: Knowage is recognized for a competitive pricing model with lower initial costs, offering a positive return on investment. Windward Core, despite its higher upfront costs, promises significant ROI over time due to its robust features and streamlined processes.

To learn more, read our detailed Knowage vs. Windward Core Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Knowage vs. Windward Core

April 2025

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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

Ranking in Reporting

24th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (32nd)

Windward Core

Ranking in Reporting

25th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Document Generation Tools (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Knowage is 0.8%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Windward Core is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Reporting

Featured Reviews

AbdulshukoorMohammed

General Manager Information Technology & Enterprise Applications Manager at OXFORD HOLDING

Easy to customize, cross-platform capable, and very stable

The only challenge here is that it's a Java-based platform. It requires very high technical skills. When we come to the integration with the single sign-on facilities, that part is very challenging. In Power BI and other tools, it's very easy to integrate with active directory and single sign-on, and identity management is very easy in other business intelligence tools. However, 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 solution could be cheaper.

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Hit Mistry

Vice President at PSC Group, LLC

It has streamlined a lot of our reporting processes

Their PDF needs improvement. We've run into some issues when we tried to generate a Word document. If we try to generate the same document in PDF, sometimes it doesn't look exactly the same. We have gone back to Windward support a couple of times on a few issues, e.g., we had some issues with reports that had barcodes on them. The barcode wasn't displaying properly. It was displaying as a skewed image as opposed to an actual barcode. Therefore, we worked with Windward support, having some daily calls with them. Then, within the next release, they were able to resolve the issue. They even gave us a pre-release, so we could implement it into our code before the actual official release on the website. It would be nice to have some sort of workflow capability within the product. Anytime you generate a document, nine out of ten times there is something which precedes that document, whether it's entering parameters in, e.g., if I'm requesting the status report for a project. The first thing that I usually want from a status perspective is which project is the status report for and which week is it for, as those are some of the things that I have to supply before I can generate a document. From a workflow perspective, it would be nice to say, "This project belongs to this person, and this person is okay with me pulling information out of this document for whatever need I have." From a workflow perspective, I would like a wizard interface that goes step-by-step, like a questionnaire, where there are a bunch of things that you have to answer, "Yes or no," before it knows what to do or how to produce the document. Right now, we write our own custom UI for this.

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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 concept of engines is quite powerful allowing the user to work with report authoring/provisioning tools of their choice."

"The embedding feature is great."

"We can easily do our own customizations."

"Thanks to Windward, our documents need very few tweaks and are usually "customer-ready" right out of the box."

"The ability for users to have design and layout control is very important because it allows them control over the design and layout of their reports, without the help of IT."

"Some of our clients are looking at the nested filtering which is coming out. That's going to be a huge benefit for them because they're going to be able to nest and loop while they're also looking at filtering out certain data elements."

"Another thing our clients absolutely love is the ability to design templates within the Microsoft Office suite, because of how simple it is. They're building off of something that's familiar. When they can build off of that feature, on top of something that's very familiar, that's a plus for them."

"Managing templates through MS Word, as non technical users can manage output."

"It's very feature-rich. You can create tables, you can create graphs, you can import pictures, and those features are also easy to use."

"Windward helped automate reports which otherwise would have needed IT to create and maintain."

"We ended up going with Windward for the level of support we got from them during our proof of concept."

More Windward Core pros

Cons

"Development of SpagoBI has now been moved to Knowage. Users interested in further developments of the platform will have to look there."

"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 dashboard components could be better."

"The only challenge here is that it's a Java-based platform. It requires very high technical skills."

"Regarding AutoTag, we do notice that when you want to refactor a little bit of your template design or when you want to implement changes, sometimes you need a lot of clicks to get the change done. For instance... it would be helpful to be able to find all the identifiers with the old name and replace them with the new name. We haven't found a way to do that with the find-replace tool. Throughout the user-interface of Windward, you need a lot of clicks to get that done."

"I'm still working in Office 2016, and we have had some issues, but Windward is very quick to react when there is a problem. We are also going to switch over to Office 365 and that will solve a few of the problems."

"I have to deal with VERY long lists of properties contained in our XMLs and it would be nice if Windward offered a way to alphabetize this property list."

"It is software, so there are always times where things don't work. Most of the time issues happen when trying to move to a new version. There might be problems with reports that were created in an older version, so either we have to make a tweak to the templates or we report it to them and get them to make an adjustment to their software."

"A lot of clients who want to use this don't have the technical background for the SQL portion of gathering the data. If Windward were to make a more user-friendly SQL extract front-end, that would help a lot of clients to leverage the application a lot more."

"It would be nice to have a black-and-white, ideal setup for servers, to maximize capabilities. We went through a lot of scenarios to get something that is scalable. An ideal AWS-package server setup could have saved us a lot of time. But I understand this is very company specific."

"The only thing I can think of, that we'd like it to do, would be the ability to "burst out" reports, meaning one section of a report could be sent out as an email to a manager of a department, say, without having to run multiple reports to do it. As it sits now, we have to do multiple reports to do it."

"It needs the ability to drill down in a single report (i.e., interactive) into data."

More Windward Core 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."

"It is absolutely worth the value. They have flexibility, depending on what you're looking for from a buying standpoint. The current pricing models are quite flexible, with the ability to use it on an as-needed basis, or to get a perpetual license that covers a customer that might have extensive needs. I think it's pretty good."

"The pricing is very reasonable for what it provides. The report builder is about one grand per user... We are paying for a support contract, which is 20 percent of the price, but because the licenses are perpetual, I think the pricing is very reasonable."

"The only problem with the pricing of Windward is the limitation on the number of reports generated. It is costly in that sense. If you want to increase, you have to pay more, based on the number of reports generated per day. It is not the same with Crystal Reports. With the latter, you buy a license at one point in time and that's it."

"They are fair and flexible. They are willing to work with your current architecture to make sure you have the best deal."

"Windward is very expensive when the volume of documents being generated is low and it is cheap when the volume is high."

"From my experience in this field, the product is reasonably priced, at least with the RESTful engine implementation. It's definitely not a cheap option. People say, "That's a fair amount of money to pay for a document generation tool." At the same time, you do get good functionality and the support is good."

"For what you're getting, it's an extremely good value."

"I can't advise anybody about pricing and licensing, but it was competitive. A lot of things we did look at were all volume-based, so it was a case of you buy a license to generate this many reports a year, and that's not something that I'm particularly interested in because it doesn't give you any idea - if we have future growth, or if we have a lean year - for budgeting reasons it's more difficult. With Windward it's a straight out license fee, whether we generate one page or we generate a million, it makes no difference."

More Windward Core pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Government

14%

Real Estate/Law Firm

Hospitality Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

13%

Recreational Facilities/Services Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Comparisons

Microsoft Power BI vs Knowage

Compared 70% of the time

Procurify vs Knowage

Compared 30% of the time

More Knowage Competitors

SAP Crystal Reports vs Windward Core

Compared 39% of the time

Docmosis vs Windward Core

Compared 32% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs Windward Core

Compared 29% of the time

More Windward Core Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Knowage

April 2025

Download Knowage product report

Buyer's Guide

Windward Core

March 2025

Download Windward Core product report

Also Known As

SpagoBI

Windward, Windward Studios

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

What is Windward Studios?

For over a decade, Windward has been a leader in the software development industry by creating the most innovative and advanced document automation and reporting software on the planet.

Data-Driven Document Automation

Generate stunning documents that incorporate relevant data easily and seamlessly.

Visually Striking Designs

Our software provides innovative tools and features to build beautiful designs and stunning layouts, all within the familiar Microsoft Office Suite. Your imagination is the only limitation.

Agile Document Logic

We offer the best document automation software for the new millennium. With our conditional logic functionality, you can swiftly personalize the document content to gratify your end users.

Huge Time Saver

Looking for faster template creation that enables you to keep pace with your business? With our software, template creation takes minutes and you do not need any programming experience to get it done.

Exceptionally Intuitive Interface

Our program's design offers documents that can be edited, customized and designed using MS Office. Enjoy a stress-free document automation experience in programs you already know.

Efficient Savings

Significantly reduce the resources and time required for template development by using our streamlined template design and document automation tools.

Windward Studios

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

HAL, Inc., Axe Group, White Clark Group, Blueprint Software, Aspect Security, Nucleus Software, LeBlanc’s Food Stores, South Sound 911, Aegon, Barclays, Fidelity Investments, ArisGlobal LLC, USDA, RepLink, AON Hewitt

Buyer's Guide

Knowage vs. Windward Core

April 2025

Free Report: Knowage vs. Windward Core

Find out what your peers are saying about Knowage vs. Windward Core and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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