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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

"Our customers really appreciate the self-service BI functionalities."
"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 concept of engines is quite powerful allowing the user to work with report authoring/provisioning tools of their choice."
"SpagoBI makes delivering reports to our clients very easy."
"Being able to schedule necessary jobs needed for production jobs and programming run times"
"Customer Service: Excellent."
"The most valuable feature of SpagoBI is that it is open source and 100% free without limits."
"Nice features available in SpagoBI compared with other open-source BI are Auditing, Collaborative BI, Query By Example, and User Profiling."
"Qlik Sense has provided insight into specific areas that enabled us to shorten the supply cycle, give a better overview of the company's production, increase profitability, and improve the effectiveness of respective vaccines."
"You can appreciate major ROI within three months."
"This solution has improved our organization by making our analysis results available to customers."
"Qlik Sense makes it very easy to build interactive presentations for meetings."
"Placing buttons on my sheets creates a unique user experience and clears up clutter at the same time."
"The mapping capabilities within the GeoAnalytics extension have been a game changer."
"The number of visualizations that are present in Qlik is very useful for our developers to help our business partners tell stories with their data. Qlik continues to add to and enhance these visualizations with each release. We are also very excited to leverage the integration between Qlik Sense and Qlik Catalog as we roll that out soon."
"The product is very stable."
 

Cons

"Yes, using Mobile and Desktop Editions, we would sometimes need to restart the service."
"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."
"The demands of some jobs would slow Spago and lock the site, preventing any other job from processing."
"Many things need to be improved, most of all robustness."
"We expected the community to be bigger than what it currently is."
"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."
"I would like to more easily themed environments."
"The solution needs to make improvements to the licensing model. They need to make it more affordable at scale, and to make it more affordable for those companies at the low end of the market as well."
"The cost of the Qlik ecosystem is higher than other competitors."
"The "vanilla" Qlik Sense tool is limited in some areas."
"More options for the layout."
"The augmented intelligence features don't work well for the analytical user."
"The product could be improved by implementing a user-feedback ranking system."
"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."
"Licensing can start to get expensive, but compared to other tools in this space it is about average."
"Know your needs when going into the purchasing decision."
"Licensing could be cheaper."
"I believe pricing is similar to other products in the same category, if you have it on-premise."
"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."
"You will spend more time on educating your staff than licensing the product."
"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."
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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
9%
Construction Company
9%
Government
7%
 

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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Earn 20 points
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.
906,887 professionals have used our research since 2012.