Board vs Knowage comparison

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85% willing to recommend

Board

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Knowage and Board are competitors in the business intelligence market. Data comparisons show a preference for Board due to its advanced features and perceived value.

Features: Knowage offers open-source versatility, integration capabilities, and customization, making it cost-efficient. Board provides comprehensive analytics, planning, and simulation tools with a robust unified platform.

Room for Improvement: Knowage needs improvement in simplifying its setup process and user interface. Its reporting capabilities could be enhanced. Board requires better data integration flexibility, more customization options, and a simpler interface for non-technical users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Board supports both cloud and on-premise deployments with extensive support ensuring a smooth onboarding process. Knowage, while flexible, demands more initial setup and technical expertise, potentially slowing down deployment.

Pricing and ROI: Knowage attracts price-sensitive businesses with lower setup costs. Board's higher initial costs can be offset by greater ROI from its enhanced features and integrations.

To learn more, read our detailed Board vs. Knowage Report (Updated: March 2026).

Board vs. Knowage

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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

Board

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

21st

Ranking in Reporting

18th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Business Performance Management (6th)

Knowage

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

33rd

Ranking in Reporting

23rd

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Board is 1.6%, up from 0.5% 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
Product	Mindshare (%)
Board	1.6%
Knowage	1.7%
Other	96.7%

Reporting

Featured Reviews

reviewer2645016

Manager, Software Delivery at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Offers flexibility in design and saves time in budgeting and forecasting processes

I find Board to be simple and easy to use. It offers significant flexibility in designing solutions. The system overall is very useful, with many capabilities that provide flexibility. Our budgeting and forecasting processes support around three hundred twenty users who would otherwise rely on Excel, making Board invaluable for saving time.

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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.

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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

"we are able to easily export data. When directors need financial information, we can go in the system and export the data, then send it out so they have it ready and available. If they are not in the office, we can email it to them. In addition, all the managers are now more on top of their expenses and their budget."

"The most valuable features are the reporting and the charts. The reporting functionality is handy for aggregation, when it comes to planning. That ability is fascinating and our users are very happy with it. The charts and the reporting allow our users to see all the data and to see how things are going this year or in the COVID situation. They're seeing everything. Instead of having to check data line by line, they're seeing it in a graph and they're seeing it in charts."

"The ease of being able to get the data into BOARD is what makes it nice for people with a semi-IT background."

"It is very easy to use. It has got what they call a toolkit, which is a no-code development environment. You can develop a whole solution with it because it is a complete platform. There is a lot of online material that can be used as a reference. You can help yourself while developing a solution. There are some prebuilt applications in the platform environment. You can very easily customize and integrate these applications. It also has flexible scaling of machine resources, which is really great."

"It has definitely saved us time, especially in our budget and planning processes."

"The ability to create a data model and have it in testing within a week is fantastic."

"Now, we have only one version of the truth."

"By using Board we can do a lot of free analysis. We can change the layout of a table and even the end-user can change the layout of a table. And in Board 11.2 you can save the layout. That's very useful for the customer, it's a very good function."

More Board pros

"Customer Service: Excellent."

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

"In terms of ROI, much better than any other solution when it offer full fledged features in open source, planned to have direct contact with SpagoBI for better support."

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

"Our customers really appreciate the self-service BI functionalities."

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

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

"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."

More Knowage pros

Cons

"I would like an eLearning platform for BOARD."

"It can have more functionality for narrative reporting. They should also improve their training courses, which are currently very lightweight. When you get into more complex things, it is quite difficult to figure out what you're supposed to do, and you have to look at a lot of videos before you actually understand, which is a bit frustrating. Their training can be more comprehensive."

"It needs more export to Excel functionality. Right now, we're having to build within the cloud-based platform, as well as build within the Excel add-in, because the export to Excel is somewhat ugly."

"Board's integration could be a bit more robust, but what we have works. If the design isn't right, the flexibility of Board can negatively impact performance."

"Initial setup was complex because my company has its own fiscal calendar that was difficult to set up."

"It needs improvement in the areas of sales, credit, and supply chain."

"One thing that I personally would like to see is additional visualization tools for visuals."

"One of the things that I would like to see is the ability to have a rule directly referenced on the cubes."

More Board cons

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

"The support is very meager: We had to break our heads to figure out everything"

"The demands of some jobs would slow Spago and lock the site, preventing any other job from processing."

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

"We expected the community to be bigger than what it currently is."

"Many things need to be improved, most of all robustness."

"Tomcat configuration was tricky in earlier versions."

"We had stability issues."

More Knowage cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is quite expensive, if it is made cheaper then we can have more clients. I rate it four out of ten."

"The tool's price is a bit high compared to other solutions."

"It is not the cheapest product on earth, but you get so much. It provides good value for money."

"In terms of the pricing, it was reasonable. BOARD is not the lowest in the market, but it was reasonable for us."

"Find a partner who will take responsibility for the implementation, and be available for support."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	13
Midsize Enterprise	12
Large Enterprise	8

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

Questions from the Community

Is Board better than Anaplan as a Business Intelligence (BI) solution?

We've had several FP&A departments include Anaplan in their analytics discussions, and while BI information IS generated, the focus is generally on compiling input from various sources and simu...

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What needs improvement with Board?

Board's integration could be a bit more robust, but what we have works. If the design isn't right, the flexibility of Board can negatively impact performance.

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What is your primary use case for Board?

Our organization primarily uses Board ( /products/board-reviews ) for budgeting and forecasting.

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Product Reports

Board

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Also Known As

No data available

SpagoBI

Overview

BOARD International - headquartered in Switzerland - is a leading global provider of software for improving business results through better decision making. By unifying Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management into a single product, BOARD enables companies to achieve a shared vision of their performance across the entire organization, and thus a single version of the truth.

BOARD provides seamless solutions for • Reporting & Analysis • Budgeting, Planning & Forecasting • Profitability Modelling & Optimization • Simulation & What-if-Analysis • Scorecarding & Strategy Management • Financial Consolidation. Based on visual modelling, BOARD has enabled global companies to deploy BI and CPM applications without a single line of code in a fraction of the time and cost associated with traditional solutions.

Board International

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.

Sample Customers

Coca-Cola, Puma, Desigual, Ricoh, KPMG, H&M, Groupe SEB

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

Board vs. Knowage