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Board vs Knowage comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 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

Board
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
20th
Ranking in Reporting
18th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
Business Performance Management (7th)
Knowage
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
33rd
Ranking in Reporting
23rd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Board is 1.7%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Knowage is 2.0%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Board1.7%
Knowage2.0%
Other96.3%
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2645016 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
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

"It has helped us manage our workflow."
"The ability to do write back and visualization, with minimal IT development orientation."
"The flexibility and the user-experience are the most valuable features of the solution."
"It is very easy to use, has a no-code toolkit so you can develop a whole solution on a complete platform, offers plenty of online material to help yourself while developing, includes prebuilt applications that are easy to customize and integrate, and has flexible scaling of machine resources, which is really great."
"All staff can now see their relevant scorecards online."
"I think it's flexible. I chose this solution because, even though it wasn't out-of-the-box, you can customize it, and the long-term growth potential of the software is where I see the value."
"BOARD continues to grow and develop, and understands the needs of dynamic organizations, and seems to adopt their product to that."
"It has a good set of visual elements that you can use and can explain quite well."
"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 concept of engines is quite powerful allowing the user to work with report authoring/provisioning tools of their choice."
"It's very easy to get the historical reports you need based on the business requirements and this helps our executives for taking decisions."
"Customer Service: Excellent."
"Unified interface, a lot of tools for BI, easy configuration, standalone SDK."
"The embedding feature is great."
"It improves sales and products, which motivates employees."
"Nice features available in SpagoBI compared with other open-source BI are Auditing, Collaborative BI, Query By Example, and User Profiling."
 

Cons

"It would be nice to have more connectors for other data sources."
"​One of the things that I would like to see is the ability to have a rule directly referenced on the cubes.​"
"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 would be nice to be able to host your site and actually have BOARD be the driver of your site. So you could have anybody in your organization go to www.myorg.com, for example, and then go through what you allow them to go through. So rather than having to go through the application, to be able to go to actually host it to a website."
"Some of our users are still using an MS Office add-in for Excel for certain calculations, and when they export from Board, some of the values, some of the totals and column names, are not coming through into Excel."
"Building similar models entirely from scratch could be made quicker with transfer abilities between databases and capsules."
"Initially we did have issues with the BOARD crashing, but at that time I was fairly new."
"If we could upload other data, e.g., pivot tables which can be done in BOARD already, that we have pre-existing and have that data distribute to more complex spreadsheets​, I would like that going forward."
"The only challenge here is that it's a Java-based platform. It requires very high technical skills."
"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."
"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."
"We expected the community to be bigger than what it currently is."
"Yes, using Mobile and Desktop Editions, we would sometimes need to restart the service."
"The dashboard components could be better. They could do a lot more."
"Tomcat configuration was tricky in earlier versions."
"We had stability issues."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"​In terms of the pricing, it was reasonable. BOARD is not the lowest in the market, but it was reasonable for us."
"The solution is quite expensive, if it is made cheaper then we can have more clients. I rate it four out of ten."
"Find a partner who will take responsibility for the implementation, and be available for support."
"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."
"It allows the implementation of an effective reporting system using internal skills at a limited upfront cost."
"Knowage is open-source, and an enterprise edition is also available."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
8%
Insurance Company
8%
Construction Company
19%
University
11%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
 

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...
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.
What is your primary use case for Board?
Our organization primarily uses Board ( /products/board-reviews ) for budgeting and forecasting.
Ask a question
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Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
SpagoBI
 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Board vs. Knowage and other solutions. Updated: May 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.