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Knowage vs Microsoft Power BI vs Pentaho Business Analytics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Knowage is 0.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 9.3%, down from 21.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Business Analytics is 0.7%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Power BI9.3%
Pentaho Business Analytics0.7%
Knowage0.9%
Other89.1%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

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.
Antonio Flor - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Anaplanner at Chaucer Group
Data integration has improved reserving and expense control while collaboration drives fast dashboards
Regarding drawbacks or weak points in Microsoft Power BI, it may not be directly related to the tool itself, but with our architecture, as we couldn't get a service account, which is an email address that has no relationship with the employees, just to establish the connection with Anaplan. We couldn't get it to work on SSO, so we use an employee account which could be a point of weakness, meaning if the person leaves, that connection will break. If the person goes on holiday and we need to refresh, we have to change the connection as well, but we have to live with that since we're not using SSO on the service account. Regarding the natural language processing feature, we're trying to avoid using it too much because it can slow down the connection, so as much as possible, we try to build the logic and any transformation in Anaplan, and then deliver an end product to Microsoft Power BI.
JB
Founder at SJT Consult
Solution enables effective ETL processes and exhibits high satisfaction
From an integration perspective, Pentaho Business Analytics is not the best tool on the market. There are things done by Apache that are better, though I am not the one implementing them, so this is based on what I have heard about novelties in the market. I do not see the need to extend the coverage of Pentaho Business Analytics's domain. For things that it does not do, there are better solutions on the market, and it would be costly to implement them. Pentaho Business Analytics is a very great tool for very specific standardized scenarios. If you need more complex elastic solutions because the process is different, there are better tools available.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I would use SpagoBI if a company wants to use a free tool that has enough features."
"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."
"SpagoBI makes delivering reports to our clients very easy."
"The concept of engines is quite powerful allowing the user to work with report authoring/provisioning tools of their choice."
"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."
"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."
"Power BI is the best visualization tool I have ever worked with."
"I have found the quick reporting and the conductivity with all the data sources valuable."
"One of the most valuable features of Microsoft Power BI is its easy way of sharing data within the organization or outside."
"Allows business users with a mission to solve their own problems, without an IT person."
"The stability is good."
"Its visualizations and dashboards are most valuable; Power BI is great in terms of visualizations and dashboards, and it also provides the ability to play with the data."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"I like that implementation is very quick and that the solution is very user-friendly and easy to work with."
"Pentaho data integration, where most of the ETL work can be done with minimal coding, along with its reporting capabilities, helped us manage data from different sources into one unique target."
"Good for any size organization."
"Helped us form great visualizations at practically no cost since we built end to end open source architecture."
"We use both DataStage and Pentaho, but I don't see any special features in Pentaho that is not available in DataStage, except Big Data plugins and connectors."
"It covers most of our ETL requirements."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"It is robust, offers market intelligence, and utilizes modules effectively."
"We were able to configure our data warehouse and implement more than eight data cubes in a very short period of time."
 

Cons

"I faced difficulties when using the email feature and documentation was scant."
"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."
"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."
"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 only challenge here is that it's a Java-based platform. It requires very high technical skills."
"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."
"In an upcoming release, the solution could be simplified and have a more complete product package rather than a suite of products that we have to put together."
"We would like to have better SQL support for queries."
"The visual outlet or the visualization aspect can be improved because the settings piece is quite problematic. It requires a lot of time to set the visuals and check. It is quite fiddly to change all the settings and font sizes. It just needs better ability in terms of using templates or visualization templates to get the vision. Our users always benchmark based on the product, and they don't appreciate everything under the bonnet. The only rating is based on the actual reports in the settings for the dashboard. They should make it look a bit funky and a bit more aesthetically pleasing on the eye. It is quite a fiddly tool, but other than that, it is pretty slick. Because it is community-driven, the marketplace tends to be changing forever. You get the standard visualizations, and you've also got all other marketplace visualizations that require you to spend a bit more money and purchase things in the marketplace. With certain visualizations, there is no longevity. I had used certain visualizations, but they discontinued them, and I had to rebuild my reports, which is obviously very frustrating. There should be some sort of stabilization around how the marketplace visuals impact the users when they expire."
"The reporting needs to be improved."
"I would like to see more visualization options."
"We have used other solutions and the reporting functionality should be user-friendly and have a drag and drop feature should be available, but Microsoft BI doesn't have these features. When you are creating reports and you can't change as a user. Every time you need one developer or one technical person to make the changes."
"Dependency on data warehousing and pricing."
"Trend data and dashboards need improvement."
"The ad-hoc reporting needs to be improved."
"The presentation of data and reports. Pentaho have made a lot of improvements in the newer versions, but it's still an area of improvement when compared to other products in market."
"Pentaho has a solid foundation and decent user interfaces. They are lacking, however, in the tool space for data exploration/presentation."
"We are a big telecoms company and we deal with a lot of data, approximately two million per day; it is too slow in rendering it."
"For me, Pentaho is not growing in terms of functionality as fast as other companies in the same segment."
"Pentaho Business Analytics is not a good tool for visualization. Another concern is that Pentaho is not customizable or interactive."
"Another concern is that Pentaho is not customizable or interactive."
"Debugging and logging needs to improve. Not all the time debugging gives the accurate picture of what is going wrong with the jobs or transformations."
 

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."
"Globally, we evaluated a number of products, including Salesforce's product, Microsoft won on the ground of simple functionally and cost."
"Compared to others, I think it is reasonable."
"Its pricing is reasonable for the desktop stuff, but for enterprise-level, it is a little expensive."
"Power BI premium is really expensive for our market. A lot of small and medium companies would like to purchase it, but they can't afford it."
"Its licensing cost is very high. It is $20 per user, which is very high, but it is a good product, so you pay for it."
"Power BI comes with enterprise Microsoft licensing. So for the user, you don't have to pay, but you do have to pay a one-time cost."
"Pricing, that's where Microsoft beats Tableau. It is priced much cheaper."
"I rate the product price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price."
"We were lucky enough to find a Pentaho OEM partner who offered a data warehouse model and the ETL software for about 60K SGD per year."
"Pentaho is expensive ."
"Free and commercial versions are available."
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager - BI Head with 5,001-10,000 employees
Feb 4, 2015
Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho
1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
19%
University
9%
Marketing Services Firm
9%
Retailer
8%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
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 Business135
Midsize Enterprise58
Large Enterprise166
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
Seeking lightweight open source BI software
There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I wou...
Is Power BI a complete platform or only a visualization tool?
Power BI is an advanced visualization tool oriented to big data with a very complete set of widgets to visualize info...
How does Oracle OBIEE compare with Microsoft BI?
Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pentaho Business Analytics?
Pentaho Business Analytics offers the best value for money. While improvements can be made in some areas, particularl...
What needs improvement with Pentaho Business Analytics?
From an integration perspective, Pentaho Business Analytics is not the best tool on the market. There are things done...
What is your primary use case for Pentaho Business Analytics?
We use Pentaho Business Analytics primarily as an ETL process to extract data, transform them, and load them into our...
 

Also Known As

SpagoBI
SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI
Pentaho, Kettle, Hitachi Pentaho Business Analytics
 

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
Accenture Adidas Aetna AIG Airbus Alibaba Allstate Amazon American Express Aon AT&T Audi Bank of America BASF Bayer Berkshire Hathaway Boeing Coca-Cola Comcast Cisco Coca-Cola Dell Disney Emirates Equinix FedEx Ford GE Google H&M Home Depot Honda IBM Intel JPMorgan Chase Kellogg's Kroger L'Oréal McDonald's Merck MetLife Microsoft Nike Oracle P&G PepsiCo Procter & Gamble Prudential Financial SAP Siemens Snapchat Spotify Starbucks Target Toyota T-Mobile Unilever Visa Walmart WeWork World Bank Xerox
Cargo 2000 Lufthansa, Marketo, ModCloth, Cardiac Science, Telefonica, ExactTarget, Active Broadband Networks, and Brussels Airport.
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