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Knowage vs MicroStrategy comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

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 BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
34th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (22nd)
MicroStrategy
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
14th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
164
Ranking in other categories
Embedded BI (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Knowage is 1.1%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of MicroStrategy is 1.2%, down from 2.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
MicroStrategy1.2%
Knowage1.1%
Other97.7%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

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.
Prabu Thanikchalam - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Architect & Software Engineering Department Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Reporting has improved with strong administration tools but performance and memory still need work
Compared to the new tools, MicroStrategy is still on the old mechanism, the attributes and metric creations that are still a bit vague compared to other tools. They can actually improve on the go, having derived metrics or derived attributes in MicroStrategy. If they have something like that for the attributes as well, it will be good. A pain point is MicroStrategy memory fluctuations that we couldn't actually read that much. If they can improve that performance, that would be great. MicroStrategy struggles a bit with large data volumes, but they are coming up with new ideas. They have moved to Intelligent Cubes, which can actually handle better data handling. They are coming up with good measures to handle big data.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of SpagoBI is that it is open source and 100% free without limits."
"Being able to schedule necessary jobs needed for production jobs and programming run times"
"Instead of just relying on emails to disperse our reports, having a central server to do this for us has helped our organization and has pushed us into a better place."
"Customer Service: Excellent."
"It's very easy to get the historical reports you need based on the business requirements and this helps our executives for taking decisions."
"It improves sales and products, which motivates employees."
"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."
"I am satisfied with the product in general given what the company invested in it, which was just our time."
"Tech support has been great, very responsive. We usually hear back within a day.​ We usually email them and that works out perfect. The right person always gets back to us."
"They have one of the best mobile BI apps available."
"MicroStrategy has what they call the Semantic Graph — an enterprise-grade semantic graph — and I think the technology is fantastic."
"Saves time and empowers business users."
"It has allowed us to standardize the reporting so that everybody is looking at the same view of the data."
"Quick time to market of analytical solutions in-depth, user-friendly business analysis."
"MicroStrategy has positively impacted our organization right from the beginning by getting the feedback and bringing up the updates regularly."
"The import of excel files into Microstrategy and the ease of data manipulation is outstanding."
 

Cons

"The demands of some jobs would slow Spago and lock the site, preventing any other job from processing."
"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."
"There are additional features such as Data Integration, Data Visualization, MobileBI, Cloud BI, Data enrichment and massaging should be implemented in the next release."
"We had stability issues."
"The only challenge here is that it's a Java-based platform. It requires very high technical skills."
"The support is very meager: We had to break our heads to figure out everything"
"Yes, using Mobile and Desktop Editions, we would sometimes need to restart the service."
"We expected the community to be bigger than what it currently is."
"One of the things that I want to see MicroStrategy do is become more cloud native. Right now, the deployment on cloud is very easy to ruin, it is very much like spinning up separate VMs."
"Data preparation-wise, it was not so straightforward with respect to getting different sources. Preparing or transforming the data inside and then bringing it onto the dashboard was a bit difficult, and the experience could have been better."
"Consolidate the functional offering to be more concise in the front-end for web reports, dashboards, and self-service."
"However, this tool needs to improve to add more analytical functions, and an easy solution to use third-party graphs and maps."
"Our users tend to say the interface is a pain, which I can go either way."
"The default color pallets could be improved, and they are improving with each version."
"Visual Insight is still not mature and does not have as much flexibility as its competitors."
"The product could be improved by adding additional visualization."
 

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."
"We are waiting to switch to Microsoft Power BI because MicroStrategy is too costly."
"Pricing, in general, is high. With Power BI, you get mobile with the license, whereas with MicroStrategy, you have to purchase mobile for extra."
"For larger businesses, the pricing is logical."
"They need to work on their license structure. They are not competitive against somebody like SAP BusinessObjects. We had a quote that was almost a third the price, coming from SAP BusinessObjects, and it's not a better platform. It's not cheaper. They do concurrent user licensing, while MicroStrategy does named user licensing, and that was literally the only difference. But it made a $500,000 difference. They've got to do something to make themselves more competitive. Maybe it's assessing your business users and what you really expect them to use, and maybe giving a reduced price on that. But they are already giving us a 60% discount and they were still a million or so above, over a three-year time period. That doesn't account for synergies as we get from on-site resources that are already available, but I thought that that was a big, big deficit for them."
"We have one of the best pricing available, but we can't disclose that information."
"While initial cost of MicroStrategy is still on the higher side, the long-term benefits brings down overall cost of ownership significantly as compared to other tools like Tableau/Cognos."
"There is no subscription, I am using the free version."
"They made a change in the licensing module some time ago and we can now use all the enterprise tools for free."
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Comparison Review

it_user6330 - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
May 2, 2013
MicroStrategy vs. Tableau
After a recent presentation, several attendees asked me about the applications of Visual Insights and Tableau. Many companies are investing in both tools and are trying to figure out the right tool for specific applications Tableau has found its sweet-spot as an agile discovery tool that analysts…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
22%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Marketing Services Firm
6%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Construction Company
10%
Marketing Services Firm
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 Business37
Midsize Enterprise26
Large Enterprise102
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for MicroStrategy?
I would say on a scale of 1 to 10, I have only a four when it comes to pricing and setup cost because in my earlier companies, everything was done by another team. Here, we actually handle some of ...
What needs improvement with MicroStrategy?
Compared to the new tools, MicroStrategy is still on the old mechanism, the attributes and metric creations that are still a bit vague compared to other tools. They can actually improve on the go, ...
What is your primary use case for MicroStrategy?
MicroStrategy is basically a reporting tool, and I take care of the administration side, so I handle complete maintenance and administration of MicroStrategy servers across all environments. Day-to...
 

Also Known As

SpagoBI
No data available
 

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
Allstate Insurance, Barneys New York, Boston Children's Hospital, Buenos Aires Department of the Treasury, Campbell Soup Company, DHL, eBay, eHarmony, Facebook, Four Seasons Hotels Inc., Godiva, Hard Rock International, LinkedIn, Netflix, Pfizer, SECO (Swiss Government Unemployment Agency), Starbucks, Texas A&M University, Thomson Reuters Markets, US House of Representatives, and the US Postal Service.
Find out what your peers are saying about Knowage vs. MicroStrategy and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.