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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 (32nd), 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 (4th), 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 1.1% compared to last year.
Qlik Sense, on the other hand, focuses on Data Visualization, holds 4.7% mindshare, down 8.2% since last year.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Knowage2.0%
Tableau Enterprise13.5%
Microsoft Power BI12.6%
Other71.9%
Reporting
Data Visualization Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Qlik Sense4.7%
Tableau Enterprise9.5%
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence4.0%
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

"Nice features available in SpagoBI compared with other open-source BI are Auditing, Collaborative BI, Query By Example, and User Profiling."
"We can easily do our own customizations."
"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."
"Unified interface, a lot of tools for BI, easy configuration, standalone SDK."
"Customer Service: Excellent."
"The most valuable feature of SpagoBI is that it is open source and 100% free without limits."
"The embedding feature is great."
"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."
"Qlik Sense brings in the concept of shared libraries where one user can create custom dimensions (even with drill-down functionality), measures, and even visualizations and save it to the "Master Items," from which the other users can simply drag and drop to use it for their analysis."
"Qlik Sense is highly used in my organization as it helps our users to derive insights from the data accurately."
"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."
"Placing buttons on my sheets creates a unique user experience and clears up clutter at the same time."
"It doesn't retrieve the data from data sources when I need it on the dashboard; instead, it quickly provides the desired data, making it very fast compared to other BI tools."
"It's an easy-to-use solution that gives business users incredible insight into your business."
"I would recommend it to anyone who is looking for an online reporting and analysis BI product."
"Qlik Sense is much more user-friendly and easier to read then QlikView."
 

Cons

"The support is very meager: We had to break our heads to figure out everything"
"Tomcat configuration was tricky in earlier versions."
"Development of SpagoBI has now been moved to Knowage. Users interested in further developments of the platform will have to look there."
"We are not happy with the poor graphic user interface. It looks a bit old and sometimes it is not properly user friendly."
"We expected the community to be bigger than what it currently is."
"The demands of some jobs would slow Spago and lock the site, preventing any other job from processing."
"I encountered a lot of issues when I tried to integrate the map in order to realize Intelligent Location Dashboards."
"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."
"There is not much information available. It is not a mainstream tool that many companies use, so if you are doing something that has not been done before, you can find it challenging to get an answer."
"One area where Qlik Analytics Platform could be improved is in providing better support for batch processing and traditional ETL workflows."
"I am starting to work with Qlik Sense SaaS these days. This environment has its own reporting service, however, one of the things that could be better for the people that are already using Nprinting, is to have a Nprinting in SaaS."
"I would like to have the ability to better customize the visuals including changing fonts, sizing, colors, axes, and titles."
"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 were stability issues. The former synchronized persistence failed and caused database corruption."
"It needs a more robust way to connect and share the big-data origin."
"Mostly when it comes to the loading of the data and reload times of the reports, it could be better."
 

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."
"Qlik Sense and its pricing model can follow any scalability."
"It is the most expensive tool."
"I'm not able to reveal the licensing cost for Qlik Sense, but because it was a huge deal, the cost was less than the usual cost. The license wasn't that costly. It was the infrastructure that was very costly."
"Costs are a little high on the license/token side. However, if you look at the TCO, it is not too bad, particularly against Power BI."
"You need to pay 5,000 Norwegian kroner per user. Microsoft Power BI is slightly more expensive than Qlik Sense."
"Ultimately, the cost is low, and it implements fast. The limiting factor is how quickly your staff can keep up."
"The cost is not bad considering the flexibility and support you receive from Qlik. I believe it is worth the cost."
"Currently, our ROI is clear and concise decision-making. This timely addition will easily add $15 million to our bottom line in 2017."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
21%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
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: September 2026.
915,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.