Knowage Reviews

Dynamic Dashboards & KPI was the most valuable because these provide great insights about the business and sales with a very simple mechanism.

It has helped us to automate the report generation. Dynamic Dashboards & KPI provides data for stakeholders in real time.

Because it is an open source BI tool, there are many areas of improvement:

• The UI is not very profound.
• The Widgets are not ample enough to showcase data in different formats
• The support is very meager: We had to break our heads to figure out everything

We have been using this solution for nine months

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

There were some scalability issues. To scale, we needed to build proper ETL models. Due to the lack of support, it was very laborious to find the correct method.

I would give technical support a rating of 2/10.

We used SAS Analytics.

The initial setup is quite easy. However, the process to implement complex reports is not described. You have to struggle to find the steps.

If you are exploring open source tools and you don't want to invest in any BI tool, then this is a good option.

The most valuable features to us are application implementation, development, and analysis.

It provides implementation of reports for SpagoBI dynamic and static applications.

Allows development according to client needs. We can implement admin/user-level auto-refresh for reports by pulling data from a database according to a specific format. We can also add code for end-to-end SpagoBI applications.

We can perform database analysis at the client level.

We can get live application status. E.g., machine status on/off at the front end. Also, quarter/half/yearly status of company marketing campaigns. E.g., forecasting and earlier income remedies.

SpagoBI could benefit from some improvements in development and analysis.
At the analysis level, we provide forecasting for clients/customers to compare with what was previously seen at the reporting level.

In development, we could do the same as analysis in coding level.

We had stability issues.

We had scalability issues related to team work.

I rate the level of technical support 10/10.

Initial setup was more complex due to team complexity.

I had input in the selection of this solution as I’m in a team leading position.

Should be usable in licensing because helps genuine output.

Before choosing, we did not evaluate other options. However, after choosing this product, I have seen other similar applications.

It is great. The application can provide more flexibility.

We used the visualization part and web deployment part of the suite. It was handy to pump out visualizations needed for our project.

The project was a medical state government funded one. The stakeholders were both management and researchers. It helped us showcase our data in a meaningful way.

SpagoBI is an open-source tool which can be used freely. We expected the community to be bigger than what it currently is. There were geomaps, etc. included with the suite, but we felt they were lacking compared to JavaScript solutions.

We have used it for at least a year and will continue to do so.

There were issues in deploying it at first, and there were errors for which we had to reach out to the community. But in due time and investigation, we were able to smooth it out. Rarely did we have a problem after that.

There were no problems with the scalability of the platform. We did not have a massive deploy but whatever we had deployed worked pretty well.

The technical support was on our end. We did not approach SpagoBI. We tried posting in the SpagoBI community, but didn’t get too far.

This was the first time we were going to use a BI suite.

The initial setup was easy on our local systems. Being a developer for it, I rarely had problems on the local setup. Deploying and communicating between SpagoBI Server and SpagoBI was sometimes finicky after we went live. They were ironed out in due time. Most of the issues were related to security and permission setup, and interfacing with Java.

SpagoBI is an open-source tool, which is free to use and implement. We did not have any problems with using at our department.

Before choosing this product, there were other options we considered; the main one being Pentaho. The only reason we choose SpagoBI was it being open source and free. Pentaho did have more options/features albeit being paid.

The tool requires initial setup built around a couple of developers. It does not have any problems once it is deployed. I would use SpagoBI if a company wants to use a free tool that has enough features. For expert features, it might be prudent to go for a paid tool.

• Reporting
• Email delivery
• Dashboard

It is mainly for reporting a variety of telecom traffic and revenue-related metrics to executives. It is also used to generate invoices (billing).

The product runs against a datamart for a telecom international gateway, delivering daily, weekly, and monthly traffic; usage; revenue expenses and profitability reports for the business, with scheduled delivery to specified executives. They also perform online queries for the same metrics as and when required.

I faced difficulties when using the email feature and documentation was scant. Each recipient had to be added separately in the schedule. Turning the document into PDF, passing parameters (daily, weekly, monthly), etc. The issues could be sorted out mainly but required consulting a variety of resources and reading the logs.

Another issue was connection pooling, which I know is not specifically Spago’s domain. The system ran out of database connections after a few weeks, after our staff used it to generate 50 or so invoices one by one, delivered blank reports and needed a restart to release connections.

I have used it for two years.

I did not avail myself of any technical support; I just used Google for support on various issues.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was a learning curve because our executives collated multiple reports into a single report and needed email delivery.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated Microsoft SSRS.

As such, the product is available for free download and, based on open-source products, has the capability to be enhanced. However, it is not fair to expect to realise its potential merely utilizing in-house skills.

I would highly recommend organizations desiring to implement the product to invest in consultancy and training and support.

I am satisfied with the product in general given what the company invested in it, which was just our time.

The most valuable feature of SpagoBI is that it is open source and 100% free without limits.

The goal of the project that I was working in, is the realization of KPIs and a dashboard in order to understand the customers’ behavior and by using SpagoBI, this task was successfully done.

Improve the intelligence location and geo report, because it's very difficult to implement this part and there's not a lot of documentation.

I also suggest to provide help for the developer in writing his query in QBE; it would be very helpful.

I have used SpagoBI for three months.

I encountered a lot of issues when I tried to integrate the map in order to realize Intelligent Location Dashboards.

I have never tried to contact technical support.

I previously used Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI. SpagoBi was a choice imposed by the company (financial reasons).

For the initial setup, there were some difficulties; you need to configure the Java runtime and change the global variable location and name, configure the Apache server, establish a connection between the studio and the server, and so on...

My advice about the licence: It is 100% free.

For me, Tableau is the most powerful and the easiest reporting tool. It is created for all user categories; you don't need to be a business intelligence engineer or have a SQL background.

If you are looking for a free product, SpagoBI is the best choice, but you will have a lot of difficulties to find documents and tutorials related to this product.

For that, I invite you to subscribe to the Mr Ogutu Ochieng YouTube channel. He also has a web site that can be very helpful for you.

• Being able to schedule necessary jobs needed for production jobs and programming run times

It was a free alternative at the time, but it could not handle the demands of our organization.

At the time the organization I worked for scheduled over a thousand jobs at any given time, and some were very complex. The demands of some jobs (IT special formatted) would slow Spago and lock the site, preventing any other job from processing. On the backend, one of the technicians would have to go in and kill the job that stopped, to resume functioning. There was no active visibility into processing as the dashboard was often behind, and confirmation emails would overlap, or wouldn’t generate.

I used it for 2.5 years.

There was an issue with the capacity at which it could process our jobs, and volume. We had a saying that, “Spago was down for the count,” or “Who broke Spago?”

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

Technical support was handled internally.

We changed systems altogether due to the volume and ease of the new product.

• Deploying and running BIRT Eclipse reports: We only use BIRT reports, and we couldn't find any satisfying solution for deploying them, except SpagoBI. None of the other open-source report servers we have tested had this feature or it was difficult to implement. In SpagoBI, it is very easy to create a new report, define the report parameters and upload the report template file.
• Open source and free.
• Web application.
• Parameterized data source
• It can use Oracle database for storing metadata.
• Parameter GUI components with great features (tree, combo, correlations, etc.).

SpagoBI makes delivering reports to our clients very easy.

• User interface

It is also missing a global report parameters feature. A report user needs to specify report parameters separately for each report. The parameter values can't be shared across other reports, which can be a little frustrating for the end users.

Let's say you have 10 reports with the same two parameters: Start and End Date. If the client wants to execute all 10 reports for a specific period of time, he needs to go to each report, one by one, and enter those two parameters. If he wants to change the period of time and execute all reports, he needs to repeat all of that again, which can be time consuming and prone to errors. With a global parameters feature, you can have those two parameters in one place and the user can enter the start and end dates only once and execute all of the reports with the same parameter values. Unfortunately, SpagoBi doesn't have such a feature.

We have been using SpagoBI for one year.

We are very satisfied with stability of SpagoBI. No memory leaking and no crashing.

We haven’t encountered any issues with scalability.

We haven’t used technical support.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was very straightforward and easy.

We have evaluated two report servers. The first one was Tableau server, which was too expensive, and the second one was Pentaho, which didn’t have support for BIRT reports.

Unfortunately, many interesting features do not work when you are using a custom database for storing the metadata. My advice is to use SpagoBI’s internal database.

Integrated Data Visualization, GIS and Big Data Integration.

Since it was an full open source business model, it was easy to customized on general features

Many things need to be improved, most of all..robustness. the idea to combines many features in single point of view still became a stronger point. Keep improve in solution robustness and this solution could be one of the leaders

Six months

Yes, and most problematic when we deploy on manual deployment in Jboss or even Tomcat. Less documentation when more information needed.

Yes, when you deal with template creation in SpagoBI Studio, but it happened only when documentation was less and forum support was not so quick in response.

Yes, in terms of deployment in "real" application server when documentation was not so complete

Not so good, but since it was an open source and have no supporting deals, then it was a normal business case.

Not so good when relying much on forumsbut we have no supporting contract so, this is normal.

Yes I did, to try new and improved version of SpagoBI.

Yes in all-in-one deployment but tricky in application server for production

Individually implemented and self supported

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.

Still have no firm opinion for now but will be shared after real contact and dealt with SpagoBI

Yes, I did

It is a good solution we plan to develop more, could be better if more features improved for robustness and stability.