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Knowage vs Qlik Sense 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:
 

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 (21st)
Qlik Sense
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
126
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (6th), Embedded BI (2nd), AI Data Analysis (16th)
 

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 0.9% compared to last year.
Qlik Sense, on the other hand, focuses on Data Visualization, holds 4.9% mindshare, down 8.4% since last year.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Knowage2.0%
Tableau Enterprise13.9%
Microsoft Power BI12.9%
Other71.2%
Reporting
Data Visualization Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Qlik Sense4.9%
Tableau Enterprise9.5%
Domo3.8%
Other81.8%
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

"SpagoBI makes delivering reports to our clients very easy."
"It's very easy to get the historical reports you need based on the business requirements and this helps our executives for taking decisions."
"Being able to schedule necessary jobs needed for production jobs and programming run times"
"Customer Service: Excellent."
"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."
"Our customers really appreciate the self-service BI functionalities."
"We can easily do our own customizations."
"It's a great product. It has a lot more features than many other BI tools. You can get the most out of machine learning, the best connectivity to Python, and it cuts across enterprise sections."
"Automated a lot of manual reports to save business users' time and provides valuable info with business intelligence analytics."
"It has cut the production time of creating reports from hours to minutes."
"The drag and drop functionality provides an easy and fast development approach."
"The most valuable feature is flexibility."
"Qlik Sense has assisted my company in providing management information to users across all levels of the organization."
"Showing a miniature version of the chart if the case chart is bigger than the screen resolution allows us to have full context at all times."
"The changes in a dashboard are very easy."
"Qlik has made our business users empowered to build their own reports with minimal IT intervention."
 

Cons

"I faced difficulties when using the email feature and documentation was scant."
"Unfortunately, many interesting features do not work when you are using a custom database for storing the metadata."
"The support is very meager: We had to break our heads to figure out everything"
"There are additional features such as Data Integration, Data Visualization, MobileBI, Cloud BI, Data enrichment and massaging should be implemented in the next release."
"We are not happy with the poor graphic user interface. It looks a bit old and sometimes it is not properly user friendly."
"The dashboard components could be better. They could do a lot more."
"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."
"Tomcat configuration was tricky in earlier versions."
"There is an inability to effectively manage (pre)caching (scheduling, assigning for respective user groups, etc), especially without community extensions or uour own development."
"The product could be improved by implementing a user-feedback ranking system."
"The on-demand report generation button in Qlik Sense currently doesn't work if NPrinting requires Okta verification, which our company uses."
"I would like to have the ability to better customize the visuals including changing fonts, sizing, colors, axes, and titles."
"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."
"I would like for it to be more of a plug and play with all of the tools and sources. It would make it much easier to use."
"There is no downside."
"I think Qlik Sense has a better engine than all the three that I've mentioned, but in regards to sharing the analysis, it's clunky; it's not as good."
 

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."
"It is the most expensive tool."
"Licensing is quite good, easy, but slightly expensive."
"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."
"The cost is not bad considering the flexibility and support you receive from Qlik. I believe it is worth the cost."
"It is a little expensive for the Italian market. Normally, Qlik Sense has two types and costs. The medium cost is around 700 euros per year."
"Currently, our ROI is clear and concise decision-making. This timely addition will easily add $15 million to our bottom line in 2017."
"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."
"I believe pricing is similar to other products in the same category, if you have it on-premise."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
24%
Manufacturing Company
7%
University
7%
Retailer
7%
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.
910,005 professionals have used our research since 2012.