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Kinetica vs SQL Server 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

Kinetica
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
41st
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SQL Server
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
274
Ranking in other categories
Database Management Systems (DBMS) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of Kinetica is 0.8%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SQL Server is 10.4%, down from 16.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Relational Databases Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SQL Server10.4%
Kinetica0.8%
Other88.8%
Relational Databases Tools
 

Featured Reviews

SunilAgarwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Executive Vice President and Global Head of Research and Development at Bqube Global
Easy to scale and good record to report capabilities but needs better training
It's not a very popular tool. There are very limited resources available in the market in terms of implementation. They need to offer training plans for graduates so that more resources are available in the market. The support needs to be faster. The solution needs to be lighter. It's a bit too heavy.
Peter Larsson - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Warehouse Lead at Resurs Bank AB (publ.)
Ledger and seamless integrations have strengthened trusted analytics and unified workloads
SQL Server's high availability and disaster recovery features work for supporting mission-critical applications, but there is much more to wish for. These features are not quite ready yet, although they do function. However, they could be significantly better. High availability and disaster recovery features should be improved in the next releases. I have noticed that everything could be improved or enhanced in the future, particularly temporal tables and window functions. Sometimes, I believe Microsoft releases features to stay ahead of competitors, but they do not make them feature-rich or feature-complete. They release something to be ahead of leaders and then seem to forget to maintain and upgrade them. I want Microsoft to pay more attention and be more mindful about the things they implement. It is fine to do a first release that works, but you cannot simply abandon it in the following years without service packs and improvements. You must continue to build on features rather than forgetting about them.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution scales easily."
"There are a lot of great features: I like T-SQL, which is wonderful, the backups are excellent, many things are much easier to manage, I really enjoy all of the features and functions within the SQL language itself, the stored procedures, the security has been excellent, the initial setup is very straightforward, the stability is very good, and we find it easy to scale if we need to."
"The performance is great."
"One of the things I most like about SQL Server is the log shipping piece. This is a great feature."
"I believe Always On is the most valuable feature. It's also easy to use and not very tricky."
"SQL Server is pretty much bulletproof; it just runs."
"There is a lot of information about the solution readily available online."
"Many developers like SQL Server."
"The solution is configurable."
 

Cons

"There are very limited resources available in the market in terms of implementation. They need to offer training plans for graduates so that more resources are available in the market."
"The tool is expensive."
"Indexing, execution plans, and the SQL Server Management Studio performance."
"When we run into problems, it's usually during installation, and finding answers to the problem has been a nightmare because the documentation is terrible."
"We want to move to Azure, and the solution could be made better to make the process easier for the migration from on-premise to the cloud."
"The performance degrades when the data is huge."
"You need to be careful if you have a very large amount of data, because the platform can be degraded if you're not on top of it."
"The configuration process can be a little complex."
"The pricing in general could be better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It is expensive, especially when you have open-source products that are just about as functional and they're free. They might want to consider re-evaluating their pricing. We purchased it in retail. It was somewhere in the neighborhood of 9,000. There is just the standard licensing fee. If they migrate this product the way they're trying to do everything else, eventually, it is going to be subscription-based, which is going to suck, but that's the way the industry is going, so it is what it is."
"It is something we have been using for a lot of years. If we're paying, it should be reasonable."
"There is a license to use this solution. However, the model is not easy to understand. There is a guide you have to read about all the information on how it works. If you read this documentation, you can understand how it works. We are paying for our SQL Servers by CPU cores with an enterprise license."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."
"The price could be cheaper."
"For our purpose, we are not required to have a license for what we are using it for."
"There is a license required for the use of SQL Server and we are on an annual subscription."
"We purchased our license and the pricing is fine for us."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
36%
Construction Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Outsourcing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business119
Midsize Enterprise60
Large Enterprise118
 

Questions from the Community

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Would you say the price of SQL Server is high compared to that of similar products?
SQL Server is fairly priced because it has various editions, depending on the number of users, servers, or core packs you are using. If you compare the product to others in this category, the price...
Has using SQL Server helped your organization in any way?
SQL Server has helped my organization through partitioning to distribute the workload, as it splits them up into smaller pieces so the machines can easily deal with it. However, this comes with a h...
Which authentication mode is best for SQL Server?
My company connects through SQL Server authentication. We have company Windows accounts, but we do not want to connect the two, out of security concerns and to keep things separated for our own pur...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Microsoft SQL Server, MSSQL, MS SQL
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Gsk, Defense Innovation Unit, Citibank, PubMatic,OVO
Microsoft SQL Server is used by businesses in every industry, including Great Western Bank, Aviva, the Volvo Car Corporation, BMW, Samsung, Principality Building Society, Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield, and the Catholic District School Board of Eastern Ontario.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and others in Relational Databases Tools. Updated: August 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.