Future Direction

As someone who is required to make strategic decisions about tooling for an organisation I have a number of questions around the future direction of Knime.

I appreciate that as a commercial entity Knime needs to generate funding. However, it is not currently possible to make any long term decisions with the tool or even compare it to other market offerings with the due changes to the HUB billing model.

Having experienced another ETL vendor blow-up their own user base with a poorly managed move from on-premises to PAYG cloud versions, I have concerns. The removal of built in batch functionality and the way this was communicated has not helped. (Node-Pit to the rescue!).

What I would like to see from Knime are clear statements around the following…

  1. Will the core product continue to be free to use (or give us a minimum time commitment…)

  2. What is the expected workflow with the Hub/Web versions of the tool?

  • i.e if every execution or action in development becomes a PAYG consumption charge this mounts up fast. Paying for production runs is fine , DEV , not so much


As a previous user of many of the commerically available tools (Matillion/Alteryx/Talend/SSIS etc) , Knime is my tool of choice. It is frankly brilliant.

However, investment in development time and effort is difficult to justify unless a clear roadmap and commitment to what is going to be chargeable and what is not is available.

I appreciate balancing open source/free and commercial interests is challenging, but clear communication on future direction is required.