Knowage Reviews

I created some tunnel processes and tunnel scripts in an Oracle database that helped me collect all aspects of profitability. We have around 14 million customers, and they generate a lot of records—for example, many activities like millions of records per day. I created a script that condensed that information and then aggregated that further to an activity level. I do it to determine if the company was profitable each month and understand if we have a positive or negative margin or a zero margin.

From there, I drill down to those customers that sort of caused that negative margin and try to analyze what caused that negative margin. For example, I look at what products or activities caused that negative margin. That's the analysis I do, and it gives me that access to tools. I could join two to three reports that help me analyze and drill down and export that information in whatever form I need.

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 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.

I have been using Knowage for about two or three years.

Knowage is a stable solution.

The initial setup is straightforward. Setting up isn't that hard. You install Knowage and choose which reporting engine you want to use. The deployment time depends on how many times you have used it because my first installation took a long time to figure out. But after you've got the gist of it, it's more or less straightforward.

I implemented this solution by myself. 

Knowage is open-source, and an enterprise edition is also available.

I would tell potential users that it's a great solution if you can push through that initial learning curve. If you can get the license, that will give you access to knowledge and access support. This will make your user experience is a lot better. 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. For example, from data input to actual reporting and decision making. It's a great tool.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Knowage an eight.

The advantage of the solution is we don't need to have any third-party tools to connect to the different databases. It has in-built features such as data mass and data warehousing. The big data concept is also included. It's very easy to implement graphical reports. We don't need to have a data warehouse for maintaining the historical data and things like that. We can achieve most of the goals without using third-party tools.

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

It is cross-platform. We can use it on desktops and on mobile versions and we don't need to have a separate mobile version for this.

We can easily do our own customizations. 

If you have a great technical team, it's a great option.

The solution can scale.

The product is 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.

I've been using the solution for seven years. It's been a while. 

The solution is stable. At the same time, it requires high levels of configuration. If we are implementing on-prem, it requires hardware requirements with high configurations for better performance.

On the executive level, we have five users. On a daily basis, the normal user count is around 10.

The potential to scale is moderate. 

We do have technical support, and we pay for it. It's based on the agreement we have, we are subscribed to get a quick response, and we have to pay high costs.

The technical support is pretty good and we are satisfied with it. 

I have experience with Power BI. Whether one or the other is better depends on the organization. If the organization is using the Microsoft cloud, then they should proceed with Power BI, which is easy for them to maintain and offers one platform for all the solutions. 

However, if the organization has multiple platforms like Oracle and Microsoft, then it is better to go with a third-party solution for BI. Otherwise, it will be very expensive to integrate. That's why we use Knowage and Spago.

The initial setup is moderately difficult. It's not too hard or too complex. It's somewhere in the middle.

Since I was using Spago as the initial version, I did not face many challenges in implementing it and integrating it. 

The solution does require maintenance and it's a bit expensive in terms of cost as it's a bit expensive for hiring and having a long-term relationship with the vendor.

They have different licensing models. I'm about 50% happy with the options available and the pricing. 

We are just a customer and an end-user.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

While we work with the on-premises deployment model, it is possible to use it via the cloud.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution to embed reports. We are using it as a server to share our embedded reports.

In terms of reporting, it gives us a central place to store all our reports. We can also do version control. 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 simplified our reporting.

We can test. There's room for testing reports before you deploy to other users and so forth. Just that functionality as well as their dashboards and the statistics you can collect on the usage of Knowage also helps our organization function effectively.

The solution is open-source and free to use. 

The embedding feature is great. That's the most useful tool that we are getting out of Knowage. We also use a lot of Jasper reports in our ERP system. The fact that you can also deploy Jasper reports using Knowage is helpful. 

We can also embed Knowage into our own applications. We've embedded it into our own ERP system.

The integration could be better. We've been struggling a bit with embedding it without the need to log on. 

The dashboard components could be better. They could do a lot more. If you compare it with Power BI, for example, then you can see that they can do a lot more and have more components on the other side. If they could increase their components and then just reduce the bugs that come with the components as well it would be so much better.

I've used the solution for three years now. It's been a while. 

For the most part, it's very stable. We've been growing as an organization, up to now, and it doesn't stress us out a lot. In terms of resource usage, like most Java systems, they tend to take up a lot of resources.

The solution does have some bugs that need to be dealt with.

We have had to move to better cloud environments to have it running for a larger organization, however, in terms of its scalability, it has been impressive.

We have 100 to 120 users on the solution currently. They are mostly in sales and finance.

I wouldn't be privy to information about if the company will increase usage. We've been using it for the last few years. However, we definitely intend to keep going with probably only the Community Edition. We've got a lot out of it. Maybe somewhere down the line, we might go into the enterprise edition. 

In terms of technical support, it's available. Since it's an open-source solution, we do have communities we can consult in terms of getting help. Since we don't use the enterprise edition, we're not entitled to too much. However, the community out there as well as the stack overflow offers enough support. 

Before Knowage we were using SpagoBI. Aside from that, we're also using Power BI, however, with the costs related to Power BI and the flexibility, Knowage is way more affordable. With Power BI you are looking at $10 a user. With Knowage, if you can get the dashboards right, if you can implement reports properly, then it doesn't cost you a thing.

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. 

We handled the implementation in-house ourselves. We didn't need any assistance from integrators or consultants.

It's an open-source product; we use the open-source edition for Knowage.

We are just customers and end-users. 

We're using the latest version of the solution. 

I'd advise new users to give it a go. They need to be patient with the whole open-source package, however. It takes time to get up and going the way you want it to. It's not out of the box. Once you have it going, it's a sure way to save money and allow you to be innovative with your reporting. You can do a lot of things with Knowage that you wouldn't be able to do with other traditional reporting sites.

It being open-source and very easy to configure, I'd give it a rating of seven out of 10. It's very usable. For us, we've managed to find the proper use case for it, as our system is also Java-based. 

The health data warehouse is a centralized repository for data that allows organizations to store, integrate, recall, and analyze information.  Healthcare organizations may wish to use their warehouses perform clinical analytics using patient data stored in the EHR, or they may try to improve their financial forecasting by diving into business intelligence and revenue cycle analytics using claims and billing codes.

Making better decision using KPI, Peforming predictive analytics about each department/functional units

QbE(QueryByExample) using Hibernate Support for both Liferay and ExoPortal Data Mining using Weka

There are additional features such as Data Integration, Data Visualization, MobileBI, Cloud BI, Data enrichment and massaging should be implemented in the next release.

4 years.

No

Very rarely

Customer Service:

3 (out of 5 scale)

Technical Support:

3(out of 5 scale)

No

Yes, it is implemented in-house.

Still we are using community edition as the base. On top of this we have our own feature implementations.

Yes

Study, Analyze and Compare the features with your specific requirement. Nice features available in SpagoBI compared with other Open-source BI are * Auditing * ColloborativeBI * QueryByExample * User Profiling Few of the missing features/support are * Ad-hoc reporting * Google Maps

Building reports and user cockpits/dashboards from data and a MySQL database. Later, it will implement the ad hoc reporting tools to improve the user experience.

It allows the implementation of an effective reporting system using internal skills at a limited upfront cost.

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

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

The Mobile Edition, which now they have stopped in the Community Edition.

It improves sales and products, which motivates employees.

Bring back the Mobile Edition in new releases.

Three years using SpagoBI v4.2, v5, v5.2 and Knowage.

Yes, using Mobile and Desktop Editions, we would sometimes need to restart the service.

Yes, using Mobile and Desktop Editions, we would sometimes need to restart the service.

• Our customers really appreciate the self-service BI functionalities. For us, this is the most valuable feature. It allows them to work more autonomously without the need to engage us.
• For example, loading a spreadsheet and being able to make analysis inputs along with the data stored in a DWH without any external support in an easy and guided way.

SpagoBI helped us to move a lot of analysis activities from our company to the customer side. Moreover, we avoided extending other products we used in order to add BI functionalities.

Because it is an open source product, we were also able to adopt it in our project from the early stages for very simple tasks.

Speaking of a very complete suite, I think there is no area that can be considered fully mature. I think there is chance to improve the product in every direction.

• We are not happy with the poor graphic user interface. It looks a bit old and sometimes it is not properly user friendly. I think a global re-styling is a must.
• Speaking of a BI suite, I think this is an important point. The SpagoBI Studio, which is used by developers to create traditional reports and dashboards, is not fully mature. It is still missing a lot of functionalities.
• For example, the UI for building charts is not complete and does not allow you to do everything that you need to edit configuration files with a text editor.

I have been using SpagoBI suite since Version 3.6. Right now, I'm using Version 5.1.

I never had stability issues. The product has been designed using quite consolidated technologies.

I never had the chance to use it in very challenging contexts from a performance point of view. But I know it is designed to scale quite well in very demanding scenarios.

SpagoBI Labs, who provide consulting services and actively work to improve the product, can support customers in almost every kind of project.

People working there are very skilled and professional, so I would give the technical support a rating of 8/10.

We didn't use a previous solution. Since SpagoBI was originally created by my company, and we still support it, the choice was easy.

The initial setup can be quite straightforward, especially in a complex context where stability aspects are the key factors.

To start using SpagoBI in a productive way, I suggest that you ask for support.

SpagoBI suite is free/open source software and can't be identified with a specific vendor.

We created it and we actively support it. At the beginning of this year, we presented its successor http://www.knowage-suite.com.

The main advantages of adopting SpagoBI are:

• The possibility to have lots of features in one product
• A chance to save money using an open source solution.

• SpagoBI Server offers the core and analytical functionalities. It provides the Analytical Model (reports, ETL, OLAP analysis, real-time dashboards, KPI, cockpits, GIS information, etc.), administration tools and cross-platform services.
• SpagoBI Studio has high productivity in the development phase; it easily permits the developer to design analytical documents such as reports, charts, geo, cockpits.
• SpagoBI SDK for integration and to use SpagoBI with external applications.

In other words, the main goal of my project was to create detailed reporting and a dashboard for managing various local departments (ASL) of the ministry to analyze the various performance and geographical distribution (through the use of maps and geo-referenced data) of expenditures, with the purpose of providing support to strategic choices of the senior management. One of the features that attracted us with the choice of SpagoBI was that it offers a simplified query functionality for business users, requiring no technical knowledge.

In my project, I used the 2.0 version of product. It had some room for improvement and features that the latest version now has. For example: the new users interface, improved performance of the analytical engines, etc.

Nonetheless, there is room for further improvement. 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. However, in my opinion, it is much better than other open-source solutions and otherwise is in line with what the open-­source market has offered over the years. For this reason, one of the rooms for improvement is certainly the user friendliness of product.

Another point of improvement is the robustness, but open-source software has a major advantage over closed-source software, and that is the source code can be reviewed by a large number of highly diverse programmers and developers of the community. Thus, it is easier to find and correct errors than when the code is reviewed only by in-house programmers who are often under pressure to meet deadlines and who might not have strong incentives to find and eliminate all the bugs.

I have used it for six months, in a project for the Italian Department of Health and Human Services ("Ministero della Salute").

With some alpha versions, I did encounter stability issues, but this is normal in the software release process. There was improvement in the versions up to the release candidate of product.

In my case, I have not encountered any scalability issues. It supports scalability, clustering and high availability architectures.

Excellent.

Technical support is very good, both the commercial channels, and the help and support that is offered by the large open-source community spread throughout the world. Moreover, I had the good fortune to have direct access to the excellent technical analysts who develop the product, since they participated in our project because I was working at that time for a company in the Engineering Group, which founded and supported the product.

I did not previously use a different solution; this was the my first BI project.

Well, initial setup was a bit delicate because of some manual customization that you have to do, but it was easy to resolve, or rather this gave us the opportunity to understand it very well and study the architecture and operation of the product. Nonetheless, I think that these issues have been resolved in newer versions.

Yes, I did.

As I have already said before, I had the good fortune to have direct access to the excellent technical analysts who develop the product with excellent results for my project.

SpaboBI is 100% open source and is released under the Mozilla Public License allowing its commercial use.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated MicroStrategy and SAP BusinessObjects. In this case, we chose SpagoBI because of the costs and the opportunity, scalability and customizations that an open source product offers.

I recommend using it or at least evaluate how it effectively works; there are demo versions that are very well made, and easy to download and to install.

Dynamic Dashboards & KPI was the most valuable because these provide great insights about the business and sales with a very simple mechanism.

It has helped us to automate the report generation. Dynamic Dashboards & KPI provides data for stakeholders in real time.

Because it is an open source BI tool, there are many areas of improvement:

• The UI is not very profound.
• The Widgets are not ample enough to showcase data in different formats
• The support is very meager: We had to break our heads to figure out everything

We have been using this solution for nine months

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

There were some scalability issues. To scale, we needed to build proper ETL models. Due to the lack of support, it was very laborious to find the correct method.

I would give technical support a rating of 2/10.

We used SAS Analytics.

The initial setup is quite easy. However, the process to implement complex reports is not described. You have to struggle to find the steps.

If you are exploring open source tools and you don't want to invest in any BI tool, then this is a good option.

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

It provides implementation of reports for SpagoBI dynamic and static applications.

Allows development according to client needs. We can implement admin/user-level auto-refresh for reports by pulling data from a database according to a specific format. We can also add code for end-to-end SpagoBI applications.

We can perform database analysis at the client level.

We can get live application status. E.g., machine status on/off at the front end. Also, quarter/half/yearly status of company marketing campaigns. E.g., forecasting and earlier income remedies.

SpagoBI could benefit from some improvements in development and analysis.
At the analysis level, we provide forecasting for clients/customers to compare with what was previously seen at the reporting level.

In development, we could do the same as analysis in coding level.

We had stability issues.

We had scalability issues related to team work.

I rate the level of technical support 10/10.

Initial setup was more complex due to team complexity.

I had input in the selection of this solution as I’m in a team leading position.

Should be usable in licensing because helps genuine output.

Before choosing, we did not evaluate other options. However, after choosing this product, I have seen other similar applications.

It is great. The application can provide more flexibility.