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Birst vs Knowage comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

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

Birst
Ranking in Reporting
31st
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Embedded BI (19th)
Knowage
Ranking in Reporting
23rd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (33rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Birst is 0.8%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Knowage is 1.7%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Knowage1.7%
Birst0.8%
Other97.5%
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

SK
Principal Engineering Manager I at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
Offers dashboards and self-service reports. The report performance is very slow.
Dashboards and self-service reports. These are widely used by customers in the EPM domain Most of our customers are interested in dashboards and self-service reports. We are able to offer them these features with this solution. Customer support takes lot of time to get a solution The report…
BS
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Dashboards and self-service reports are widely used by customers in the EPM domain."
"Birst uses several connection methods to take data in from your data sources and stages it into its own data mart, and this staging from several sources makes Birst a fairly robust data warehouse solution."
"This tool possesses valuable features such as its ability to perform ETL, extract data from various sources (flat files, relational DBs, application connectors) and dashboard scheduling."
"Users can jump to the Birst dashboard from SFDC without a repeat login."
"Birst is a great tool for: Creating a simple data warehouse Uploading data for quick analysis, visualizations, and dashboards"
"In general, Birst as a cloud VI solution is a user-friendly tool that looks really nice and engages users straight away."
"The fact that it is completely cloud based makes the maintenance easier since we don't have the onus of maintaining the server."
"Cloud based BI that can be accessed from anywhere, anytime from mobiles, iPods, tablets, and PCs."
"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 concept of engines is quite powerful allowing the user to work with report authoring/provisioning tools of their choice."
"I would use SpagoBI if a company wants to use a free tool that has enough features."
"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."
"Customer Service: Excellent."
"The concept of engines is quite powerful allowing the user to work with report authoring/provisioning tools of their choice."
"It improves sales and products, which motivates employees."
"I am satisfied with the product in general given what the company invested in it, which was just our time."
 

Cons

"I would like to see better connection functionality. It is not very intuitive and the UI is kind of neglected."
"The initial setup was extremely complex. The Birst consultants wasted a lot of time in configuring the system."
"The ability to filter out massive amounts of data and load it properly on screen needs to be improved."
"I would like to see stronger in-built permissions capabilities."
"The ETL, querying, and user interface did not accommodate our performance requirements."
"Visualization: This aspect of the product is not up to the same level as its competitors in the market."
"The administration module was built using flash. It is clunky and outdated."
"Customer support takes lot of time to get a solution."
"There are additional features such as Data Integration, Data Visualization, MobileBI, Cloud BI, Data enrichment and massaging should be implemented in the next release."
"Development of SpagoBI has now been moved to Knowage. Users interested in further developments of the platform will have to look there."
"We had stability issues."
"Many things need to be improved, most of all robustness."
"Unfortunately, many interesting features do not work when you are using a custom database for storing the metadata."
"The dashboard components could be better. They could do a lot more."
"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 demands of some jobs would slow Spago and lock the site, preventing any other job from processing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Please negotiate on the price and purchase the latest version."
"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."
report
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Marketing Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Construction Company
11%
Performing Arts
9%
Construction Company
15%
University
10%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
Retailer
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
SpagoBI
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Citrix Systems, Jive Software, SunnyD, Toshiba Medical Systems, Cisco OpenDNS, RB, Sunny D, Vertafore
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Birst vs. Knowage and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.