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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

"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."
"The embedding feature is great."
"The most valuable features to us are application implementation, development, and analysis."
"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'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."
"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."
"Nice features available in SpagoBI compared with other open-source BI are Auditing, Collaborative BI, Query By Example, and User Profiling."
"Qlik was the first company to implement an in-memory associative analytics engine. This basically means that all data is loaded into memory, but it also means that instead of joining data together, the data is associated together. From the front end, from the UI point of view, data can be joined or included or excluded on the fly. It can be drilled down and drilled through and users can slice and dice it and that type of thing can be done from anywhere in the data to any other place in the data. It doesn't have to be predefined. It doesn't have to have hierarchies or anything like that."
"The most valuable feature is the drag-and-drop reporting."
"The reports are better looking than in QlikView."
"The most valuable thing for us is the speed in obtaining data and statistics of our business because due to the complexity of our corporate structure, many times we lost too much time in collecting the data."
"Qlik has a powerful load script that uses an enhanced SQL language which is excellent for loading and transforming the data."
"Qlik Sense is very stable. I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. Even for rare issues, we receive good support from Qlik. It's a very stable solution."
"It has allowed us to manage our staff more effectively and frees up time for our analysts to analyze new problems and opportunities."
"Reporting is a valuable feature of the solution."
 

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."
"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."
"We expected the community to be bigger than what it currently is."
"I encountered a lot of issues when I tried to integrate the map in order to realize Intelligent Location Dashboards."
"The only challenge here is that it's a Java-based platform. It requires very high technical skills."
"We are not happy with the poor graphic user interface. It looks a bit old and sometimes it is not properly user friendly."
"We had stability issues."
"Many things need to be improved, most of all robustness."
"One area of improvement is that it doesn't offer an API for accessing processed data stored in the QED files."
"Performing data transformations required a lot of programming, which is something that should be made easier."
"Qlik Sense (as for ver 3.1) is still missing some key functionality that QlikView has."
"The QMC needs more work. Some of the features should be available directly from the hub. Too many duplicates/publish. Intelli-sense when loading a stored qvd would help so much with remembering column names. The pop-up windows are too small when working in the QMC."
"Qlik dashboards are not friendly with end-users, but they have been enhancing this shorted in some recent releases and next releases hopefully."
"The only thing I would like to see is the ability to create a master app that opens when a user creates a new app that has all the master items, colors, logos, etc., that my organization uses. This would help with keeping master items the same across the apps and would make development a little quicker."
"Ultra-customization: It needs no limits on which charts can have x amount of dimensions, y amount of measures, z amount of color expressions, etc."
"It needs continued improvement on its visualizations and content customization."
 

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."
"You need to pay 5,000 Norwegian kroner per user. Microsoft Power BI is slightly more expensive than Qlik Sense."
"Licensing can start to get expensive, but compared to other tools in this space it is about average."
"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 will spend more time on educating your staff than licensing the product."
"Licensing is quite good, easy, but slightly expensive."
"The cost is not bad considering the flexibility and support you receive from Qlik. I believe it is worth the cost."
"Understand the break over price point for switching to the Enterprise license."
"The new licensing model is much better."
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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%
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: August 2026.
912,022 professionals have used our research since 2012.