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Knowage vs Looker Studio 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

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 (32nd)
Looker Studio
Ranking in Reporting
11th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.4
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Knowage is 1.9%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Looker Studio is 2.5%, up from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Looker Studio2.5%
Knowage1.9%
Other95.6%
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Heron Ziegel - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Engineer at Quartz Consulting Group
Has supported quick dashboard creation and data sharing but lacks tools for managing multiple reports efficiently
We integrated Looker Studio with other platforms in our data ecosystem; we tried integrating with Sheets, and that went okay, but it could have been better. It could have been better because it needed a very specific format to read the data, so we had to reformat the sheet file. Looker Studio was mostly just helpful in that it provided live updating charts for tracking performance indicators in the organization. Integrating with a database was very difficult because there wasn't a lot of feedback for what was going wrong with the connection. I don't remember if we reached out to support. I didn't personally reach out, but my boss may have. I didn't reach out to support, so I do not have experience with it to rate it. We worked with the free version of Looker Studio initially, and we upgraded at some point to the pro version; I don't remember if we actually paid for it or if it was just a free trial. The pricing was reasonable. I remember doing a price comparison, and it was pretty reasonable, but it did have fewer features than a lot of other software, which was okay for a comparable price but a little cheaper.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Being able to schedule necessary jobs needed for production jobs and programming run times"
"Unified interface, a lot of tools for BI, easy configuration, standalone SDK."
"It's very easy to get the historical reports you need based on the business requirements and this helps our executives for taking decisions."
"I am satisfied with the product in general given what the company invested in it, which was just our time."
"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."
"SpagoBI makes delivering reports to our clients very easy."
"The embedding feature is great."
"Looker's ability to perform aggregation before visualization allows for effective data slicing and dicing."
"This solution is a powerful way to have several tools integrated at one location and convert data into beautiful reports that can be easily edited and viewed."
"I would rate this solution eight or nine out of ten."
"I find it favorable regarding speed of development, ease of building, and flexibility."
"Valuable features include advanced integrated analysis and easy implementation."
"The fact that Looker Studio is free and has a free tier was probably the biggest benefit; it is very accessible and not too difficult to use."
"The ability to integrate with a great variety of data sources."
"The integration with Excel and Google Sheets is a valuable feature, making it easy to access and visualize data."
 

Cons

"I faced difficulties when using the email feature and documentation was scant."
"The dashboard components could be better."
"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."
"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 dashboard components could be better. They could do a lot more."
"Many things need to be improved, most of all robustness."
"We expected the community to be bigger than what it currently is."
"Insisting on forums, blogs and community outreach in communications, and posting videos on an established calendar would be useful."
"Panels are not as easy to use as other data extraction UIs."
"The tool should improve on live data integration for quicker data reflection."
"The tool should improve on live data integration for quicker data reflection."
"There is a significant degree of sophistication required to compete with Tableau or Cognos."
"Stability and scalability an be improved for a full ten."
"Insisting on forums, blogs and community outreach in communications, and posting videos on an established calendar would be useful."
"The tool has a lot of room for improvement. It's not very professional and allows for only simple tasks like indicating KPIs or quick calculations. It lacks a good calculation-based language like Power BI's DAX, making it less suitable for professional use. Additionally, the variety of visualization tools is limited, and customization options are restricted."
 

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."
"The product is available for free."
"I think the tool is cheap because you don't need to pay anything for using the tool. However, when connecting and analyzing other data sources, you should consider where to analyze this information because Google Data Studio doesn't handle much data well. You must also consider how you will connect this data to it. In this case, you might need to hire DevOps or a data team to help with these issues."
"The solution is free but the Google Looker is expensive."
"The cost is quite affordable based on feature analysis."
"The tool is free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
19%
University
10%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
Retailer
8%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about Google Data Studio?
The company dashboard is useful because we could share it via a link as a reminder for everyone to check it weekly. We observed the progress of our portfolio from last week to the current week, all...
What needs improvement with Google Data Studio?
I would appreciate improvements in the data modeling features, as it's not straightforward, and it's not what people in analytics are used to. Specifically, most people using this visualization too...
What is your primary use case for Google Data Studio?
I used Looker Studio mainly for reporting, where I created multiple dashboards on it. I wouldn't say I made the most of the usage of the connections because all the connections were based on flat f...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

SpagoBI
Data Studio
 

Overview

 

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
Genesys, Shueisha
Find out what your peers are saying about Knowage vs. Looker Studio and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
890,124 professionals have used our research since 2012.