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Looker Studio vs Microsoft Power BI vs Qlik Sense 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:
 

Mindshare comparison

Reporting
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
Data Visualization
 

Featured Reviews

Srini-Dhanaraj - PeerSpot reviewer
Available for free and can help businesses resolve their data migration problems
It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten. Google Data Studio is a cloud-based tool. With cloud-based tools, there can be two challenges, the first one being associated with the bandwidth of your data strength. If I run a report from my home because of the wi-fi connection, it may give an excellent response. When I run the reports, Google Data Studio develops reports from my home, and because of wi-fi, it works in an excellent manner. When I am on the road or at the wheel, if I use the internet data from my mobile to browse my reports, the performance may not be good, and this issue is not because of the product but because of the bandwidth. The second issue arises when you connect Google Data Studio to a source system to extract the data to do the visualization. If the source system is not responding as quickly as expected, it could be the reason why the report may be printed slowly. Considering the aforementioned aspects, the problem may not be because of Google Data Studio but because of the source system.
James Balbach - PeerSpot reviewer
Robust system consistently elevates data visualization and seamlessly updates with user-driven advancements
Power BI is a general-use visualization system. I can express the performance of our network through high-level key performance indicators. It allows me to show detailed improvements in quality and safety and patient experience. I create improvement dashboards for task forces and work teams. I have built analytic dashboards that guide analytics, enabling research and dataset manipulation.
Vishal_Goyal - PeerSpot reviewer
In-memory data storage boosts performance
The advantages compared to other BI tools show architectural differences. The main feature is that it keeps all the data in memory. It doesn't retrieve the data from data sources when I need it on the dashboard; instead, it quickly provides the desired data, making it very fast compared to other BI tools. The ROI is very high using Qlik Sense. It offers many benefits of BI. It is flexible from a developer's point of view, allowing me to accomplish many tasks compared to other BI tools. From an end-user perspective, it's convenient and performance-oriented, providing something meaningful from all the organization's data.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Valuable features include advanced integrated analysis and easy implementation."
"The ability to integrate with a great variety of data sources."
"Data Studio integrates seamlessly with other Google products, and we can use it with other APIs if we like."
"Looker's ability to perform aggregation before visualization allows for effective data slicing and dicing."
"I am impressed with the tool's scheduling mechanism, refresh mechanism, and different types of charts."
"The solution is free so that is a good feature."
"The company dashboard is useful because we could share it via a link as a reminder for everyone to check it weekly. We observed the progress of our portfolio from last week to the current week, allowing us to compare revenues."
"The ability to design complex data models and equations."
"The user interface is easy to work with."
"ou can pull reports, visualize them in real-time, and connect them to a variety of other data sources."
"It is very well integrated with other Microsoft products, including PowerApps and Excel, as well as Access, so it fits well into our workflow."
"The various different ETL tools within it and the ability to have different data refreshes and scheduled refreshes [real-time data refresh capabilities] have most significantly improved the data analysis processes."
"It provides easy integration with Office tools."
"It is quite easy to use and it helps me to achieve the projects that I've been assigned."
"Many of my customers already use Microsoft products like Office 365, so I often propose Microsoft Power BI because it integrates well with all the standard Microsoft business tools. And it's the quickest tool to implement and start using daily."
"The solution's most valuable feature is the graphic representation."
"The changes in a dashboard are very easy."
"What I found most valuable in Qlik Sense is its flexibility. It's a very flexible tool, and it has a lot of capabilities compared to Tableau and Power BI. In Qlik Sense, you can take data from any of the systems, and you can do data transformation, prepare the data, then present your KPIs. Data transformation isn't present in Tableau, Power BI, and other tools. In Qlik Sense, you're able to get the data and directly present that data. The presentation layer is also very good in Qlik Sense. My company is very happy with this tool."
"The GeoAnalytics paints such a clear picture. It provides a visual of our patient volume, giving us opportunities to see how we are trending in the surrounding cities, and making us more aware of locations that we need to focus more on."
"Self-service use of the desktop version with the ability to port applications into the server environment."
"The associative searching and filtering capability is a unique feature among other BI tools, and one does not need to deeply understand the underlying data."
"I would rate it more than nine out of ten."
"The product is very stable."
"The product has many great features like easy and fast implementation, flexible data loading, and in-memory processing, but the Set Analysis is what I think is the most valuable. It makes the product very powerful."
 

Cons

"The tool should come up with data modeling layer features that are present in other products like Power BI."
"Stability and scalability an be improved for a full ten."
"The tool has a lot of room for improvement. It's not very professional and allows for only simple tasks like indicating KPIs or quick calculations. It lacks a good calculation-based language like Power BI's DAX, making it less suitable for professional use. Additionally, the variety of visualization tools is limited, and customization options are restricted."
"Panels are not as easy to use as other data extraction UIs."
"The performance of Looker needs improvement, particularly the report loading time, which is critical for business users."
"The tool should improve on live data integration for quicker data reflection."
"There is a significant degree of sophistication required to compete with Tableau or Cognos."
"There are issues with integration and I encountered limits and warnings, especially with my pivot table size."
"I think that there should be visuals for financial reporting videos. It should just be a plug and play because there is a lot of coding that goes into it with different clients."
"Creating dashboards could be easier."
"We would like to have better SQL support for queries."
"Maybe they can enhance the UI a bit. Right now, it's very basic, I would say, compared to the MicroStrategy or Qlik."
"They can provide a user-friendly and easy way to use this tool for people who don't know about programming or technical things. It will be quite good if they can improve the look and feel and make it simpler to operate. They can make it easier to create some of the reports. They can also include predefined templates that you can directly use."
"The graphic interface could be better."
"In an upcoming release, the solution could be simplified and have a more complete product package rather than a suite of products that we have to put together."
"It should have more integrations."
"The scripts available in the solution are not great."
"The security rules should be made easier to use."
"Qlik Sense should have a conversion tool which automatically converts QlikView to Qlik Sense, so customers can easily migrate between the products of Qlik."
"More focus needs to be on data streaming/real-time data reporting."
"Moving forward I would like to see more features that are currently available in QlikView, such as being able to better customize coloring within charts. I would also like to see the ability to add calculated dimensions to the selections tool in the page."
"I would like to see more native features from QlikView integrated into Qlik Sense."
"More options for the layout."
"There is room for improvement in the learning curve when getting started, but training resources have been growing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is available for free."
"The solution is free but the Google Looker is expensive."
"The cost is quite affordable based on feature analysis."
"I think the tool is cheap because you don't need to pay anything for using the tool. However, when connecting and analyzing other data sources, you should consider where to analyze this information because Google Data Studio doesn't handle much data well. You must also consider how you will connect this data to it. In this case, you might need to hire DevOps or a data team to help with these issues."
"The tool is free."
"We have premium licenses, but you can use it for free. You can share the content with anyone else, so you can use it for free."
"We have a professional license for Microsoft BI and the price is fair."
"My company needs to make monthly payments towards the licensing costs attached to the product."
"Pricing is a big advantage that Power BI has over Tableau. Power BI is three or four times cheaper than Tableau. For my personal use, I will definitely prefer a $20 monthly fee of Power BI rather than a $70 monthly fee of Tableau. If you pay altogether for Power BI, they give you a discount, whereas, with Tableau, there is no discount. There are three versions of Power BI: Free, Pro, and Premium. The Premium version comes with a lot of things. There is no extra or hidden fee. You pay every month, and the software is with you. If you upgrade, there will be some extra charges."
"The solution is less expensive than other PowerBI tools, which is why most people go with it, although it does cost more than MSBI tools."
"This product offers good value for the money."
"Power BI premium is really expensive for our market. A lot of small and medium companies would like to purchase it, but they can't afford it."
"All of the licenses are on an annual basis, but Microsoft will amortize it to an extent. If it's five years, they'll include the possible interest they might have the following year. Ideally, their licensing scheme is an annual license, but they make it easier for some of our clients to take a five-year license but package everything inside for them to buy the license for five years."
"The costs can initially become quite high. Make sure you have a clear understanding of who will truly use the product as opposed to someone that will simply receive the end report."
"QlikSense offers a Hybrid environment architecture, which is very cost effective based on where the enterprise data resides."
"Licensing: Review the named model and move towards a usage model (e.g., cores, memory, computers, API calls, etc.)."
"Licensing is quite good, easy, but slightly expensive."
"Qlik Sense and its pricing model can follow any scalability."
"The product is expensive compared to one of its competitors."
"Ultimately, the cost is low, and it implements fast. The limiting factor is how quickly your staff can keep up."
"Understand the break over price point for switching to the Enterprise license."
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 4, 2015
Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho
1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Educational Organization
8%
Educational Organization
43%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
Government
5%
Educational Organization
60%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Google Data Studio?
The company dashboard is useful because we could share it via a link as a reminder for everyone to check it weekly. W...
What needs improvement with Google Data Studio?
The tool should improve on live data integration for quicker data reflection. Currently, changes in Google Sheets tak...
What is your primary use case for Google Data Studio?
I use Looker Studio primarily for dashboard creation and data analytics. I have integrated it with Google Sheets, and...
Seeking lightweight open source BI software
There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I wou...
Is Power BI a complete platform or only a visualization tool?
Power BI is an advanced visualization tool oriented to big data with a very complete set of widgets to visualize info...
How does Oracle OBIEE compare with Microsoft BI?
Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are ...
Seeking lightweight open source BI software
It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement. Some great tools in the market are Qlik ...
What do you like most about Qlik Sense?
The most valuable features of Qlik Sense are its speed and seamless development of web technologies.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Qlik Sense?
Costs depend on the deal. They offer various licensing metrics based on our needs. For small or large organizations n...
 

Also Known As

Data Studio
SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI
QlikSense
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Genesys, Shueisha
Accenture Adidas Aetna AIG Airbus Alibaba Allstate Amazon American Express Aon AT&T Audi Bank of America BASF Bayer Berkshire Hathaway Boeing Coca-Cola Comcast Cisco Coca-Cola Dell Disney Emirates Equinix FedEx Ford GE Google H&M Home Depot Honda IBM Intel JPMorgan Chase Kellogg's Kroger L'Oréal McDonald's Merck MetLife Microsoft Nike Oracle P&G PepsiCo Procter & Gamble Prudential Financial SAP Siemens Snapchat Spotify Starbucks Target Toyota T-Mobile Unilever Visa Walmart WeWork World Bank Xerox
Abbvie, Airbus, Barclays, BT Openreach, BMW, Daimler AG, HSBC, IKEA, Nationwide Building Society, Royal Mail Group, Sanofi, Siemens, Wendy'', Vodafone, Volvo
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