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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 a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
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

"It is easier and quicker to find things in the database."
"With respect to buy solutions, cost is relevant. However, the Looker solution would have outmatched the ongoing multi-million budget spending with respect to cost-efficiency."
"From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great."
"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."
"Looker allows you to generate the most optimal SQL queries in a DC through UI actions. We had signed a contract with Google Cloud to use BigQuery. That was the primary reason we adopted Looker. It works better with BigQuery than any other BI platform. We also like how this tool was developed. It was designed with an eye toward microservices architecture."
"We can centralize all our data models."
"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."
"The product is easy to use."
"Qlik Sense is much more user-friendly and easier to read then QlikView."
"The solution is scalable."
"Self-service use of the desktop version with the ability to port applications into the server environment."
"The product responds fast for data analysis."
"It has allowed us to manage our staff more effectively and frees up time for our analysts to analyze new problems and opportunities."
"I am very happy with Qlik and the solutions they offer, as it allows for great flexibility and ease of use."
"It has improved the work of our team, thanks to the ability to manage complex models and thanks to the possibility of integration with different needs."
"Lots of end-users are now familiar enough with this solution to create quick dashboards based on their own data sources, like Excel files, CSV, TXT files, and databases."
 

Cons

"Their needs to be much more control of visualizations to become more on par with Tableau."
"Stability needs improvement."
"This product is useful for non-technical users, who are able to use the interface to easily slice data. But for the admin users who are responsible for maintaining the schemas and files behind the scenes, it can easily become a chore, as there is a lot of manual work involved in defining the schemas of the connected database(s), as well as any refactored tables; the restrictive syntax also makes maintenance difficult."
"There is a lot of customization that we needed/need to build ourselves. Other BI tools have more out of the box."
"The main area of concern in Looker is probably related to blending the data from the different sources, including the data present internally in the company and on the cloud."
"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."
"The product does not have documented material."
"Features related to visualization should continue to be improved."
"We have found that a lot of the consultants go in and out of the business and sometimes you are left alone without assistance."
"Needs more bookmarking and a data load screen."
"Even though the solution is a self-service solution, many non-technical users still struggle to create their reports."
"The product could be improved by implementing a user-feedback ranking system."
"Multi-server deployment: not just cloud, but on premise too, and hybrid. Needs lighter protocols to communicate between the different services and with the clients."
"The communication with the solution's sales managers in Europe is very bad, making it an area that requires improvement. My company usually gets no response from the tool's sales managers."
"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."
"The on-demand report generation button in Qlik Sense currently doesn't work if NPrinting requires Okta verification, which our company uses."
 

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."
"I do not have to make any payments to use the solution."
"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."
"Licensing is quite good, easy, but slightly expensive."
"I would rate Qlik's pricing four out of five."
"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."
"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."
"Currently, our ROI is clear and concise decision-making. This timely addition will easily add $15 million to our bottom line in 2017."
"It is a little expensive for the Italian market. Normally, Qlik Sense has two types and costs. The medium cost is around 700 euros per year."
"I believe pricing is similar to other products in the same category, if you have it on-premise."
"For on-premise enterprise users, a number of additional features come at a premium cost."
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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.
885,667 professionals have used our research since 2012.