Knowage vs Windward Core comparison

Knowage and Windward Studios are both solutions in the Reporting category. Knowage is ranked #25, while Windward Studios is ranked #23. Knowage holds a 1.0% mindshare in RT, compared to Windward Studios’s 0.9% mindshare. Additionally, 85% of Knowage users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Windward Studios users who would recommend it.

Knowage

Read 18 Knowage reviews

766 Views
414 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

Windward Core

Read 36 Windward Core reviews

845 Views
575 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Knowage

Windward Core

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

Knowage and Windward Core are competing solutions in the business intelligence and reporting domain. Knowage appears to have the upper hand due to its scalability, integration capabilities, and attractive pricing, while Windward Core's advanced feature set might justify its higher cost.

Features: Knowage offers an open-source structure, comprehensive integration options, and seamless data analysis across diverse systems. Windward Core provides powerful document generation, rich formatting capabilities, and superior data presentation options.

Room for Improvement: Knowage could enhance its user interface, expand documentation, and improve compatibility with third-party tools. Windward Core might benefit from simplifying its configuration process, expanding data source support, and enhancing its integration capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Knowage is known for its simple deployment and strong customer support. Windward Core, although more complex to deploy, offers pre-configuration services and responsive support to alleviate this complexity.

Pricing and ROI: Knowage is recognized for a competitive pricing model with lower initial costs, offering a positive return on investment. Windward Core, despite its higher upfront costs, promises significant ROI over time due to its robust features and streamlined processes.

To learn more, read our detailed Knowage vs. Windward Core Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Knowage vs. Windward Core

September 2025

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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

Ranking in Reporting

25th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (34th)

Windward Core

Ranking in Reporting

23rd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Document Generation Tools (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Knowage is 1.0%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Windward Core is 0.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Reporting Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Windward Core	0.9%
Knowage	1.0%
Other	98.1%

Reporting

Featured Reviews

AbdulshukoorMohammed

General Manager Information Technology & Enterprise Applications Manager at OXFORD HOLDING

Easy to customize, cross-platform capable, and very stable

The only challenge here is that it's a Java-based platform. It requires very high technical skills. When we come to the integration with the single sign-on facilities, that part is very challenging. In Power BI and other tools, it's very easy to integrate with active directory and single sign-on, and identity management is very easy in other business intelligence tools. However, 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. The solution could be cheaper.

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Christopher Heinz

Sr. Systems Analyst at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Strong layout and design capabilities; leverages every aspect available in Word-native formatting

The licensing key is a little bit twitchy. I'd like to see more HTML formatting support in templates. It has a basic stock of HTML formatting capability, but it doesn't have a rich vocabulary. I have to work around that sometimes. The help documentation and blog posts are extensive, but not always up to date. The error reports also need improvement. If you don't key it in right, it's a little hard to find the root cause. It gives you information as much as it can, but it doesn't really hone in and tell you explicitly what you should do to correct the problem.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"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."

"The embedding feature is great."

"The concept of engines is quite powerful allowing the user to work with report authoring/provisioning tools of their choice."

"We can easily do our own customizations."

"Managing templates through MS Word, as non technical users can manage output."

"The most valuable feature is that it provides good, dynamic document-generation performance and the documents are being generated reliably."

"Technical support is very good. They reply immediately and follow-up with any questions."

"The ultimate feature is the product it produces. The ROI around that saves hours and hours. It's probably about a hundred days per year. The time savings and the ability to turn it around quickly pleases our customers."

"Some of our clients are looking at the nested filtering which is coming out. That's going to be a huge benefit for them because they're going to be able to nest and loop while they're also looking at filtering out certain data elements."

"The Windward solution was very fast to rollout, and it is proven."

"From an integration perspective, they provide the code for you to easily integrate with existing applications."

"Creating dynamic table of contents (TOC) based on dynamic data in different reports."

More Windward Core pros

Cons

"Development of SpagoBI has now been moved to Knowage. Users interested in further developments of the platform will have to look there."

"The only challenge here is that it's a Java-based platform. It requires very high technical skills."

"The dashboard components could be better."

"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."

"The reason it took us so long to get the system up and running is that the APIs could be improved a bit. It could be a little bit more interoperable with software, without having to do a lot of the heavy lifting that we had do to get it in."

"I have to deal with VERY long lists of properties contained in our XMLs and it would be nice if Windward offered a way to alphabetize this property list."

"Regarding AutoTag, we do notice that when you want to refactor a little bit of your template design or when you want to implement changes, sometimes you need a lot of clicks to get the change done. For instance... it would be helpful to be able to find all the identifiers with the old name and replace them with the new name. We haven't found a way to do that with the find-replace tool. Throughout the user-interface of Windward, you need a lot of clicks to get that done."

"Is there any way to avoid AutoTag loading in Word/Excel each time? I need to use it from time to time - quite rarely. AutoTag affects performance of Word/Excel. I do not want to install/uninstall AutoTag each time I need it."

"The only thing I can think of, that we'd like it to do, would be the ability to "burst out" reports, meaning one section of a report could be sent out as an email to a manager of a department, say, without having to run multiple reports to do it. As it sits now, we have to do multiple reports to do it."

"They could make the document creation performance faster. I'm not saying it's slow but it takes time to create the PDFs. If they could make it faster, that would be one area for improvement."

"The tool does not support macOS documents."

"A lot of clients who want to use this don't have the technical background for the SQL portion of gathering the data. If Windward were to make a more user-friendly SQL extract front-end, that would help a lot of clients to leverage the application a lot more."

More Windward Core cons

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."

"It is absolutely worth the value. They have flexibility, depending on what you're looking for from a buying standpoint. The current pricing models are quite flexible, with the ability to use it on an as-needed basis, or to get a perpetual license that covers a customer that might have extensive needs. I think it's pretty good."

"The only problem with the pricing of Windward is the limitation on the number of reports generated. It is costly in that sense. If you want to increase, you have to pay more, based on the number of reports generated per day. It is not the same with Crystal Reports. With the latter, you buy a license at one point in time and that's it."

"I'm starting to hear clients squeal about the price of their software. The cost of the software has gone up."

"The pricing is fair. The way that they have it priced is the Windward Designer has a price that's associated with it. Then, depending on the number of cores that you're looking for, that is the price that you pay. The more cores that you want, the more expensive it is."

"For what you're getting, it's an extremely good value."

"Pricing is something I complain about. Production pricing is okay, but for a testing environment the pricing looks a bit high to me."

"From my experience in this field, the product is reasonably priced, at least with the RESTful engine implementation. It's definitely not a cheap option. People say, "That's a fair amount of money to pay for a document generation tool." At the same time, you do get good functionality and the support is good."

"Windward is very expensive when the volume of documents being generated is low and it is cheap when the volume is high."

More Windward Core pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Government

13%

Hospitality Company

13%

Insurance Company

Marketing Services Firm

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

Performing Arts

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	19
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	8

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OpenText Intelligence vs Knowage

Compared 14% of the time

Pentaho Business Analytics vs Knowage

Compared 13% of the time

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SAP Crystal Reports vs Windward Core

Compared 24% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs Windward Core

Compared 23% of the time

OpenText Intelligence vs Windward Core

Compared 16% of the time

Longview Analytics vs Windward Core

Compared 14% of the time

Domo vs Windward Core

Compared 13% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Knowage

September 2025

Download Knowage product report

Buyer's Guide

Windward Core

August 2025

Download Windward Core product report

Also Known As

SpagoBI

Windward, Windward Studios

Overview

Knowage (formerly SpagoBI) has a 14-years history. The actual release is the 6.3.

Knowage offers FULL ANALYTICAL CAPABILITIES, with a special focus on big data analytics and comprehensive support to rich and multi-source data analysis. Knowage provides different modules, each one focused on a specific domain but mutually combinable (Big Data, Smart Intelligence, Enterprise Reporting, Location Intelligence, Performance Management, Predictive Analysis). Moreover, Knowage is an OPEN SOURCE solution: the source code is freely accessible, everyone is allowed to join the community and build the own business solution to ensure strategic decision-making and improved productivity.

Knowage suite is supported by Engineering Group, the leading Italian software and services company, with about 10,000 people and more than 50 offices worldwide. Maintenance and support services (such as trainings, migration support, proof-of-concepts, etc) are provided by Engineering Group (KNOWAGE Labs) under subscription.

Knowage

What is Windward Studios?

For over a decade, Windward has been a leader in the software development industry by creating the most innovative and advanced document automation and reporting software on the planet.

Data-Driven Document Automation

Generate stunning documents that incorporate relevant data easily and seamlessly.

Visually Striking Designs

Our software provides innovative tools and features to build beautiful designs and stunning layouts, all within the familiar Microsoft Office Suite. Your imagination is the only limitation.

Agile Document Logic

We offer the best document automation software for the new millennium. With our conditional logic functionality, you can swiftly personalize the document content to gratify your end users.

Huge Time Saver

Looking for faster template creation that enables you to keep pace with your business? With our software, template creation takes minutes and you do not need any programming experience to get it done.

Exceptionally Intuitive Interface

Our program's design offers documents that can be edited, customized and designed using MS Office. Enjoy a stress-free document automation experience in programs you already know.

Efficient Savings

Significantly reduce the resources and time required for template development by using our streamlined template design and document automation tools.

Windward Studios

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

HAL, Inc., Axe Group, White Clark Group, Blueprint Software, Aspect Security, Nucleus Software, LeBlanc’s Food Stores, South Sound 911, Aegon, Barclays, Fidelity Investments, ArisGlobal LLC, USDA, RepLink, AON Hewitt

Buyer's Guide

Knowage vs. Windward Core

September 2025

Free Report: Knowage vs. Windward Core

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