Knowage Reviews

Building reports and user cockpits/dashboards from data and a MySQL database. Later, it will implement the ad hoc reporting tools to improve the user experience.

It allows the implementation of an effective reporting system using internal skills at a limited upfront cost.

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

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

The Mobile Edition, which now they have stopped in the Community Edition.

It improves sales and products, which motivates employees.

Bring back the Mobile Edition in new releases.

Three years using SpagoBI v4.2, v5, v5.2 and Knowage.

Yes, using Mobile and Desktop Editions, we would sometimes need to restart the service.

Yes, using Mobile and Desktop Editions, we would sometimes need to restart the service.

• Our customers really appreciate the self-service BI functionalities. For us, this is the most valuable feature. It allows them to work more autonomously without the need to engage us.
• For example, loading a spreadsheet and being able to make analysis inputs along with the data stored in a DWH without any external support in an easy and guided way.

SpagoBI helped us to move a lot of analysis activities from our company to the customer side. Moreover, we avoided extending other products we used in order to add BI functionalities.

Because it is an open source product, we were also able to adopt it in our project from the early stages for very simple tasks.

Speaking of a very complete suite, I think there is no area that can be considered fully mature. I think there is chance to improve the product in every direction.

• We are not happy with the poor graphic user interface. It looks a bit old and sometimes it is not properly user friendly. I think a global re-styling is a must.
• Speaking of a BI suite, I think this is an important point. The SpagoBI Studio, which is used by developers to create traditional reports and dashboards, is not fully mature. It is still missing a lot of functionalities.
• For example, the UI for building charts is not complete and does not allow you to do everything that you need to edit configuration files with a text editor.

I have been using SpagoBI suite since Version 3.6. Right now, I'm using Version 5.1.

I never had stability issues. The product has been designed using quite consolidated technologies.

I never had the chance to use it in very challenging contexts from a performance point of view. But I know it is designed to scale quite well in very demanding scenarios.

SpagoBI Labs, who provide consulting services and actively work to improve the product, can support customers in almost every kind of project.

People working there are very skilled and professional, so I would give the technical support a rating of 8/10.

We didn't use a previous solution. Since SpagoBI was originally created by my company, and we still support it, the choice was easy.

The initial setup can be quite straightforward, especially in a complex context where stability aspects are the key factors.

To start using SpagoBI in a productive way, I suggest that you ask for support.

SpagoBI suite is free/open source software and can't be identified with a specific vendor.

We created it and we actively support it. At the beginning of this year, we presented its successor http://www.knowage-suite.com.

The main advantages of adopting SpagoBI are:

• The possibility to have lots of features in one product
• A chance to save money using an open source solution.

• SpagoBI Server offers the core and analytical functionalities. It provides the Analytical Model (reports, ETL, OLAP analysis, real-time dashboards, KPI, cockpits, GIS information, etc.), administration tools and cross-platform services.
• SpagoBI Studio has high productivity in the development phase; it easily permits the developer to design analytical documents such as reports, charts, geo, cockpits.
• SpagoBI SDK for integration and to use SpagoBI with external applications.

In other words, the main goal of my project was to create detailed reporting and a dashboard for managing various local departments (ASL) of the ministry to analyze the various performance and geographical distribution (through the use of maps and geo-referenced data) of expenditures, with the purpose of providing support to strategic choices of the senior management. One of the features that attracted us with the choice of SpagoBI was that it offers a simplified query functionality for business users, requiring no technical knowledge.

In my project, I used the 2.0 version of product. It had some room for improvement and features that the latest version now has. For example: the new users interface, improved performance of the analytical engines, etc.

Nonetheless, there is room for further improvement. 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. However, in my opinion, it is much better than other open-source solutions and otherwise is in line with what the open-­source market has offered over the years. For this reason, one of the rooms for improvement is certainly the user friendliness of product.

Another point of improvement is the robustness, but open-source software has a major advantage over closed-source software, and that is the source code can be reviewed by a large number of highly diverse programmers and developers of the community. Thus, it is easier to find and correct errors than when the code is reviewed only by in-house programmers who are often under pressure to meet deadlines and who might not have strong incentives to find and eliminate all the bugs.

I have used it for six months, in a project for the Italian Department of Health and Human Services ("Ministero della Salute").

With some alpha versions, I did encounter stability issues, but this is normal in the software release process. There was improvement in the versions up to the release candidate of product.

In my case, I have not encountered any scalability issues. It supports scalability, clustering and high availability architectures.

Excellent.

Technical support is very good, both the commercial channels, and the help and support that is offered by the large open-source community spread throughout the world. Moreover, I had the good fortune to have direct access to the excellent technical analysts who develop the product, since they participated in our project because I was working at that time for a company in the Engineering Group, which founded and supported the product.

I did not previously use a different solution; this was the my first BI project.

Well, initial setup was a bit delicate because of some manual customization that you have to do, but it was easy to resolve, or rather this gave us the opportunity to understand it very well and study the architecture and operation of the product. Nonetheless, I think that these issues have been resolved in newer versions.

Yes, I did.

As I have already said before, I had the good fortune to have direct access to the excellent technical analysts who develop the product with excellent results for my project.

SpaboBI is 100% open source and is released under the Mozilla Public License allowing its commercial use.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated MicroStrategy and SAP BusinessObjects. In this case, we chose SpagoBI because of the costs and the opportunity, scalability and customizations that an open source product offers.

I recommend using it or at least evaluate how it effectively works; there are demo versions that are very well made, and easy to download and to install.

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.

Unified interface, a lot of tools for BI, easy configuration, standalone SDK.

Only useful if the tools is used by the senior managers and planning staff. We use OLAP, cockpits, geoanalytical tools and data mining.

3 years, from version 4.0 to version 5

Yes, Tomcat configuration was tricky in earlier versions. Version 5 improved a bit.

It requires a good combination of HW resources.

We've had no issues with scalability.