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Looker vs Qlik Sense comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 29, 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

Looker
Ranking in Embedded BI
10th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Qlik Sense
Ranking in Embedded BI
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
125
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (4th), AI Data Analysis (15th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Embedded BI category, the mindshare of Looker is 6.4%, down from 9.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Qlik Sense is 8.6%, down from 10.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Embedded BI Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Qlik Sense8.6%
Looker6.4%
Other85.0%
Embedded BI
 

Featured Reviews

Hemanthreddy Vakiti - PeerSpot reviewer
Data engineer at Cognizant
Automated dashboards have transformed daily trend analysis and now drive faster business decisions
One of the best features that Looker offers is LookML, which allows us to develop dashboards directly rather than dragging and dropping. We can also customize some fields that are not available in the table by combining different tables using LookML. Compared to other reporting tools, Looker is somewhat more customizable and interactive. With the help of Views and Explore in Looker, we can combine different tables and create a unique column that is not available in the table, and then use that column in our reporting dashboard. Since we brought Looker into our project, it has improved data visibility and enabled faster interaction between us and our client. Rather than simply using free form or Essbase, seeing customizable and visualized data in Looker allows the business users to understand the trends in the data more easily rather than just seeing numbers. It has helped us save a lot of time. The automated dashboards that we develop allow us to run the dashboard for the coming years with only some modifications, which has reduced some manpower and working hours. When I joined this project, there were around eight to nine people for developing Looker dashboards. Once the development part is completed for almost all cases, the next part is just monitoring the dashboards and making some minor changes required to align with business goals. After development, the team was reduced to three or four people, so the manpower has significantly reduced, and time taken has decreased as well. For a business user to understand data from free form or Essbase, it usually takes thirty minutes to an hour to go through the previous day's trend. However, with the visualization tools in Looker, they can easily understand the data and compare it to the previous one or two years using a bar graph, pie chart, or other graphs. The return on investment has been very good. The number of employees has reduced to half, and time is saved by nearly two to three hours a day because of automated reports. We are just monitoring the reports to ensure they are released. This has saved nearly two hours per day, and the team has been reduced to half.
SW
Solution Architect at Predoole Analytics
Unlocks actionable insights through user-friendly analysis features
The self-service capabilities that Qlik Sense offers are significant. They offer natural language processing, allowing users to ask questions in layman language, and Qlik Sense will create charts and narratives automatically. Users can access any dashboard developed in Qlik Sense from familiar portals such as Okta or other company portals through embedding features. The integration with chatbots, particularly Microsoft Teams, allows users to access dashboards and ask questions directly within Teams. The collaboration feature enables users to share analysis by taking snapshots and tagging team members within the Qlik Sense interface, eliminating the need for lengthy emails or screenshots. The storytelling feature allows users to create presentations directly in Qlik Sense using dashboard analysis, making it easier to answer questions during meetings. The subscription feature enables users to receive charts and sheets via email instead of navigating to the dashboard, facilitating monitoring purposes. Qlik Sense offers alerting capabilities where users can set thresholds for KPIs and receive notifications when these thresholds are reached. The platform also includes AI/ML features for predictive modeling through a no-code component, allowing business users to create and deploy AutoML models without depending on data scientists. The Qlik Answers component, featuring generative AI capability, enables users to get answers from unstructured data including Excel, HTML documents, or Microsoft Word documents by creating a knowledge base. The user-friendly interface operates on a drag-and-drop approach, with Qlik Sense suggesting appropriate charts based on selected dimensions and measures. The associative engine capabilities allow data association between tables, implementing selections across related tables. The platform uses a color-coding system (white, gray, and dark gray) to show related, excluded, and unrelated data selections, providing insights beyond traditional BI tools.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Looker offers incredible business visualization and analytical tools: graphs, charts, tables, and single numbers."
"Technical support is the best ever."
"We LOVE Looker here at Snagajob."
"We can centralize all our data models."
"I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I didn't face any issues with stability."
"If one has to deal with large volumes of data, which I categorically could tell is big data and has to create visuals, Looker is the tool to go."
"The most valuable features are the ability to create visualizations for non-technical employees, as well as the ability to provide ways to dynamically slice the data."
"It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time."
"The self-service capabilities that Qlik Sense offers are significant."
"We can bring data from multiple sources and easily blend it in Qlik and create a data model (star schema)."
"Self-service use of the desktop version with the ability to port applications into the server environment."
"This solution has improved our organization by making our analysis results available to customers."
"Set analysis is great for its power user capabilities such as performing an IF on an aggregated column."
"Some of the valuable areas of this solution include producing individual reports and closing the gap."
"Qlik Sense has a modern look and feel and a very intuitive UI, so non-technical users find it very user friendly."
"Now, using Apps in Qlik as a navigation tool, we are using hidden opportunities to open new markets and also to reduce costs."
 

Cons

"The integration with different databases must be improved."
"There is a lot of customization that we needed/need to build ourselves. Other BI tools have more out of the box."
"They need to work more on interactivity in order to help users interact with the tool itself, and it needs to be more user-friendly."
"The visualization capability of the product is limited."
"The pricing model makes sense, but can be very expensive, potentially prohibitively so for smaller companies."
"There have a been a few minor bugs, including a security bug that did not affect us."
"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."
"The product does not have documented material."
"In my opinion, collaborative development of the Qlik Apps is a bit tricky and difficult in the Qlik Sense Cloud."
"Even though a huge set of learning material is available, anyone starting his/her journey on learning the software doesn't even know where to start it. The so-called Continous Classroom service is not cheap, but there are many free tutorials, they are not sorted or enlisted adequately though."
"Needs more bookmarking and a data load screen."
"We have some problems with sessions closing down before the timeout limit."
"More pivot table options, like the ability to have the totals row at the bottom of the table, would be helpful."
"There is a direction currently with feature releases within QLik Sense which are focused towards the SaaS or Cloud offerings of Qlik Sense. This leaves those who have invested heavily in on-premise enterprise deployments in a difficult position to gain the benefits of some powerful new features they have to look to reinvest further towards these SaaS or Cloud deployments or bring in a hybrid model. Qlik provides no real split between what features are available in each of the deployment options."
"The current visualization features feel incomplete compared to what's available with scripting tools."
"It is easy to scale and buy a license, however, the solution is very memory intensive. More users and more data can lead to degraded performance and longer processing times to run reports."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is cheap."
"Looker is expensive and could be made better by reducing it."
"It's not cheap, but it's not expensive for big companies."
"The price of Looker usually depends on the solution's provider, but it is usually cheaper than the other products in the market. Looker is offered at different prices for different companies."
"I do not have to make any payments to use the solution."
"Qlik Sense and its pricing model can follow any scalability."
"The new licensing model is much better."
"Costs are a little high on the license/token side. However, if you look at the TCO, it is not too bad, particularly against Power BI."
"We have 20 licenses for Qlik Sense, and it is a special license that allows people in the whole company to use it over time. You buy this license and there are some minutes that can be used. For example, for the users that used only a few minutes in a month, we use this license. All the people have the ability to work with Qlik Sense. However, the number of licenses is not the number of users. The number of users that uses Qlik Sense is approximately 35 people."
"Licensing is quite good, easy, but slightly expensive."
"Start small with tokens. You can always buy more."
"For personal use, the desktop version of Qlik Sense is absolutely free, and you can share visualizations with others and to a personal cloud space, though limited with storage space."
"Know your needs when going into the purchasing decision."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Retailer
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Media Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise40
Large Enterprise88
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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 Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos Enter...
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 would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Qlik Sense?
It is not about performance. It is just about how expensive it is to implement.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
QlikSense, Qlik Analytics Platform
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Yahoo!, Etsy, Kohler, Hipcamp, Hubspot, Kickstarter, Venmo, Dollar Shave Club, 600+ customer
Abbvie, Airbus, Barclays, BT Openreach, BMW, Daimler AG, HSBC, IKEA, Nationwide Building Society, Royal Mail Group, Sanofi, Siemens, Wendy'', Vodafone, Volvo
Find out what your peers are saying about Looker vs. Qlik Sense and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,728 professionals have used our research since 2012.