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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 (33rd), 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 (17th)
 

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 0.8% compared to last year.
Qlik Sense, on the other hand, focuses on Data Visualization, holds 4.9% mindshare, down 8.0% since last year.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Knowage2.0%
Tableau Enterprise14.6%
Microsoft Power BI13.5%
Other69.9%
Reporting
Data Visualization Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Qlik Sense4.9%
Tableau Enterprise10.1%
Domo4.1%
Other80.9%
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

"The most valuable feature of SpagoBI is that it is open source and 100% free without limits."
"Our customers really appreciate the self-service BI functionalities."
"SpagoBI makes delivering reports to our clients very easy."
"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."
"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 most valuable features to us are application implementation, development, and analysis."
"Qlik Sense is essentially a web-based tool even though it's on-prem – you're working off an HTML page – so it's pretty quick. Your processing speed does not matter because you're using a lot of stuff through the web. That's great because it brings down the cost in regards to hardware."
"Qlik Sense provides better visualization."
"You can build a very nice dashboard and/or report very quickly."
"Qlik Sense helped us with extracting insight from our data more quickly than before."
"Reporting is a valuable feature of the solution."
"Lots of end-users are now familiar enough with this solution to create quick dashboards based on their own data sources, like Excel files, CSV, TXT files, and databases."
"QlikSense is really intuitive, easy to use and implement with very rich graphics."
"It allows you to create a new column using split on a current column, which we find very useful."
 

Cons

"Tomcat configuration was tricky in earlier versions."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Many things need to be improved, most of all robustness."
"There are additional features such as Data Integration, Data Visualization, MobileBI, Cloud BI, Data enrichment and massaging should be implemented in the next release."
"The only challenge here is that it's a Java-based platform. It requires very high technical skills."
"There is a direction currently with feature releases within QLik Sense which are focused towards the SaaS or Cloud offerings of Qlik Sense. This leaves those who have invested heavily in on-premise enterprise deployments in a difficult position to gain the benefits of some powerful new features they have to look to reinvest further towards these SaaS or Cloud deployments or bring in a hybrid model. Qlik provides no real split between what features are available in each of the deployment options."
"It needs continued improvement on its visualizations and content customization."
"The current visualization features feel incomplete compared to what's available with scripting tools."
"The support aspect could be improved, particularly in terms of response time for high-priority issues, especially when dealing with production environment client issues that require immediate attention."
"It would be great if decentralized teams would have more features to manage the metadata on the dashboards, setup the specific user access rights and rules to govern incoming and outgoing data sets from/to other teams, and more features to separate the different data process layers (e.g. extraction, transformation [data quality, business rules])."
"I would like to have the ability to better customize the visuals including changing fonts, sizing, colors, axes, and titles."
"The product could be less expensive."
"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."
 

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."
"Licensing: Review the named model and move towards a usage model (e.g., cores, memory, computers, API calls, etc.)."
"The new licensing model is much better."
"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."
"Ultimately, the cost is low, and it implements fast. The limiting factor is how quickly your staff can keep up."
"Currently, our ROI is clear and concise decision-making. This timely addition will easily add $15 million to our bottom line in 2017."
"Understand the break over price point for switching to the Enterprise license."
"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."
"Qlik Sense is pretty good in terms of price."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
23%
Manufacturing Company
8%
University
8%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction 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: July 2026.
903,147 professionals have used our research since 2012.