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Knowage vs Qlik Sense comparison

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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Knowage
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (34th), Reporting (22nd)
Qlik Sense
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
126
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (6th), Embedded BI (3rd), AI Data Analysis (15th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. Knowage is designed for Reporting and holds a mindshare of 2.0%, up 1.0% compared to last year.
Qlik Sense, on the other hand, focuses on Data Visualization, holds 4.7% mindshare, down 8.3% since last year.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Knowage2.0%
Tableau Enterprise13.7%
Microsoft Power BI12.7%
Other71.6%
Reporting
Data Visualization Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Qlik Sense4.7%
Tableau Enterprise9.3%
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence3.8%
Other82.2%
Data Visualization
 

Featured Reviews

AM
Margin Assurance Analyst at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
A stable open source suite for modern business analytics with a useful replication feature
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.
Saranya Deepthi - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Engineer at Wipro
Improved AI-driven dashboards have accelerated decisions but still need better visuals and faster refresh
Absolutely, nothing is entirely positive, and everything has both advantages and disadvantages. When I worked with Qlik Sense, circular charts were not available, which meant I had to look for alternative solutions that would be reliable or make the functionality work. There are some features that need to be added. Additionally, there is a limit to the number of fields that can be added in Qlik Sense, and I believe it would be beneficial if they increased the count for fields and columns. There might be requirements where an Excel file contains many columns that need to be displayed as visual representations to clients, and in those situations, it becomes very difficult and I have to use alternative approaches. When this problem arose, I used HTML code to write a solution and make it work. Qlik Sense should avoid these types of limitations in future updates. Another issue is page resolution. If a client wants to view the dashboard on a single page without scrolling, bar charts appear small and the values in KPIs, bar charts, scatter plots, and line graphs cannot be seen very clearly. Adding more extensions to make the job easier would also be beneficial. Improvements to reporting would be helpful as well, because working with large datasets makes reporting very difficult. Additionally, when data is refreshed, it cannot be completed in a short timeframe. Refreshing very large datasets can take one, two, or even three hours, so reducing the refresh time would be very useful for customers.

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"
"I would use SpagoBI if a company wants to use a free tool that has enough features."
"Unified interface, a lot of tools for BI, easy configuration, standalone SDK."
"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."
"It's very easy to get the historical reports you need based on the business requirements and this helps our executives for taking decisions."
"It improves sales and products, which motivates employees."
"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."
"The concept of engines is quite powerful allowing the user to work with report authoring/provisioning tools of their choice."
"Data collection, cleaning, transforming, and visualization become convenient, easy, and quick, consequently business users can make use of data by the fastest way and transform into better data-centric mindsets."
"The flexibility of Qlik Sense and the addition of 3rd party extensions allow us to extend the use of Qlik Sense beyond analytics and bring the platform to the core of our digital workplace, augmenting analytics with workflow, and team collaboration."
"This solution has helped us with faster decision-making and faster data access through the mobile platform."
"Data-driven decisions are now easier."
"Our employees no longer have to search for information in many systems and/or use a web search; they can just go to the BI platform and do a lot of analysis by just clicking."
"This solution allows us to use a simple drag-and-drop interface to create flexible, interactive data visualizations."
"The product is reasonably priced."
"The reason being that it is a product that offers real value to businesses and it offers it fast."
 

Cons

"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."
"Unfortunately, many interesting features do not work when you are using a custom database for storing the metadata."
"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."
"The dashboard components could be better. They could do a lot more."
"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."
"The demands of some jobs would slow Spago and lock the site, preventing any other job from processing."
"The support is very meager: We had to break our heads to figure out everything"
"Branding is not the product's strongest point. More control over the presentation colors would be great. A basic printing function would also be good. Easy connection to external tools like R Server would be nice."
"It needs a more robust way to connect and share the big-data origin."
"We have faced some issues with NPrinting, so I feel there is some improvement needed such that it would allow the use of variables and calculative fields from Qlik."
"My advice to others is to make sure they have a good technical team. We have found that a lot of the consultants go in and out of the business and sometimes you are left alone without assistance."
"From the initial setup of the product we had some struggles getting connections to some of our databases to function, this indicated that some of the data extract drivers can be improved and addition of some of the older database engines need to be added in Qlik Sense."
"Customer service has to improve and technical support is at a low level."
"Better searching capabilities would be a nice addition."
"Right now, it is complex and you have to understand the data model prior to analyzing it, so basically I would like to see an integration with Excel in the future."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The license mechanism of Qlik is quite complicated and not exchangeable. Such as 2016, they charge licenses by token, 1500$ for a token / 1 user. 2018: they change to 2 kinds of licenses: professional 1500$ / user, analyzer 800$ / user. 2019: they support subscription with 70$ Monthly for professional, 40$ monthly for analyzers, but for those you’re using perpetual licenses, they don't support acquiring more subscription licenses. The maintenance fee yearly are also high, 20% of the perpetual license."
"We have 20 licenses for Qlik Sense, and it is a special license that allows people in the whole company to use it over time. You buy this license and there are some minutes that can be used. For example, for the users that used only a few minutes in a month, we use this license. All the people have the ability to work with Qlik Sense. However, the number of licenses is not the number of users. The number of users that uses Qlik Sense is approximately 35 people."
"For personal use, the desktop version of Qlik Sense is absolutely free, and you can share visualizations with others and to a personal cloud space, though limited with storage space."
"Licensing: Review the named model and move towards a usage model (e.g., cores, memory, computers, API calls, etc.)."
"I would rate Qlik's pricing four out of five."
"I believe pricing is similar to other products in the same category, if you have it on-premise."
"Licensing could be cheaper."
"The costs can initially become quite high. Make sure you have a clear understanding of who will truly use the product as opposed to someone that will simply receive the end report."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
21%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
 

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 Business34
Midsize Enterprise40
Large Enterprise89
 

Questions from the Community

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Seeking lightweight open source BI software
It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement. Some great tools in the market are Qlik Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos Enter...
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 would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Qlik Sense?
It is not about performance. It is just about how expensive it is to implement.
 

Also Known As

SpagoBI
QlikSense, Qlik Analytics Platform
 

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
Abbvie, Airbus, Barclays, BT Openreach, BMW, Daimler AG, HSBC, IKEA, Nationwide Building Society, Royal Mail Group, Sanofi, Siemens, Wendy'', Vodafone, Volvo
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, Plotly and others in Reporting. Updated: August 2026.
912,006 professionals have used our research since 2012.