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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Power BI
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
318
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (1st), Reporting (1st)
Qlik Sense
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
115
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (2nd), Embedded BI (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. Microsoft Power BI is designed for BI (Business Intelligence) Tools and holds a mindshare of 22.6%, up 22.5% compared to last year.
Qlik Sense, on the other hand, focuses on Data Visualization, holds 7.4% mindshare, down 10.3% since last year.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
Data Visualization
 

Featured Reviews

Shoury Priyanshu - PeerSpot reviewer
Facilitates seamless data aggregation with some outdated visual elements hindering user appeal
Real-time data integration is an area for improvement. Although I've worked on several solutions involving real-time integration, it's not very user-friendly and often lags, especially with over a million data rows. This makes Power BI difficult to manage as loading times can reach one or two minutes, which is problematic today. There are challenges with scalability, requiring multiple pages in dashboards to manage these issues. Visualization could be improved as it appears outdated. Users, especially newcomers, find it unappealing and not user-friendly.
Yogesh_Pawar - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to use but needs to improve the user interface part
Qlik Sense is not meant for writing something from the user interface, which is a major challenge because our company wants users to interact with the reports and to input some comments or data that should get stored into some database. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement in the product. With Qlik Sense, there is a need for it to provide good performance because if there is a large volume of data, then its performance becomes slow. User interaction or user experience is not that great in that case if the data size or reports are huge. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement in the product. Right now, we are trying to follow up with some best practices recommended by Qlik Sense, but to be honest, it is not helping us much because we have very large data in a single application, and we are struggling with it. The product should have an interactive and friendly user interface. The use of APIs is not as friendly as it should be in the first place, especially when considering Python scripts and all other scripts, making it an area where improvements are required. There should be some easy way to integrate the product with the aforementioned areas.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The visuals are great and make everything look very professional. We can change the look and feel or manipulate the data according to our requirements. It's extremely flexible."
"My primary use is for view of the dashboard."
"Power BI stands out because it provides considerable flexibility in creating reports, dashboards, and various types of analytics to meet those dynamic requirements. It is lightweight and easy to use with good support."
"Most of the clients I am interacting with are looking towards Power BI because of the cost and simplicities. It provides an entire feature set and a complete solution. It has tight integration with Office 365, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Technology Stack, and datatypes like R and Python."
"We like the drag and drop interactability visualization. We really like that. It's user-friendly."
"The solution is quite scalable."
"The good part of it is that you can do whatever you want with it when it comes to building BI. In terms of languages, it supports Python, and it also natively supports R."
"The product is scalable."
"The most valuable feature is the user experience."
"Qlik Sense has a modern look and feel and a very intuitive UI, so non-technical users find it very user friendly."
"Qlik Sense makes it very easy to build interactive presentations for meetings."
"The changes in a dashboard are very easy."
"The most valuable feature of QlikSense is that you can capture the data without modifying it and then perform the ETL (extract, transform, and load) process."
"Qlik Sense has helped us in getting all inventory details in real-time ready for our sales reps to order and fulfill our inventory based on demand."
"Set analysis is great for its power user capabilities such as performing an IF on an aggregated column. The ability to create custom coloring expressions based on values is also a good idea although not as easy as I wished it was."
"The drag and drop UI has been the most useful to me."
 

Cons

"I think because I'm moving more into RPA, I'd definitely like to see integration across the RPA, Power BI, or Tableau platforms, because that integration could then make automation and mundane reporting much faster."
"It seems that the solution could use more analytics to help users draw more contextual business insights. Right now, you need other solutions for that."
"It would be better if they had some video tutorials. Most people from an Excel background may struggle with measures in Microsoft BI."
"It would be nice to use other connectors to link with the data."
"There are some limitations in Power BI; you have to work in the Power BI base. However, if you want something not out-of-the-box and you want something custom, you have to do a lot of work."
"The limitations within Microsoft Power BI include the volume of data it can handle, as there's a cap on the number of rows you can keep. When you pull your data and build your models, you're restricted by this row limit. Additionally, certain SSRS features are deprecated, which can be a drawback for users who rely on those capabilities."
"If you look at the new tool, even though they promised that you could do data modeling, that you could do everything from the Power BI side, if your data is really large in volume, sometimes it doesn't work on the Power BI. More feature testing from their side would certainly help users."
"I believe the price should be degressive, and we should have a lower, or better unit price if we have more users."
"Qlik application automation needs additional work and features."
"It would be nice to have more native features from QlikView built into Qlik Sense."
"Areas for improvement include user-friendliness, self-service, and some of the visualization options for generating reports."
"This solution would be improved by adding some Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning (DL) components that are easier to interpret and design."
"I would like to more easily themed environments."
"The augmented intelligence features don't work well for the analytical user."
"The only thing I would say that comes up is that sometimes it can be a bit buggy."
"They need to keep it as simple as possible but include as much advanced functionality as possible by positioning all the objects on the page, changing colors for all the objects, improving sheets actions, etc."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is very reasonable compared to any other tool."
"We pay on a monthly basis which is approximately $10 per user on the Microsoft Power BI Pro license. At the moment we are still down at 400 users, but once we reach 500 users, we will move to the premium edition. The premium is $5,000 for unlimited users. Currently, with the 40 users, the cost is roughly $500."
"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."
"Power BI is cost-effective compared to other reporting tools."
"Downloading Power BI Desktop is free."
"From a cost point of view, it's competitive in the enterprise space, although it's not as competitive when you add up all of the additional costs. Things like integrations cost extra and it's probably where Microsoft makes more of the money."
"Costs less than most competing solutions."
"They have a free Power BI Desktop version, but it has limitations."
"Licensing is quite good, easy, but slightly expensive."
"Know your needs when going into the purchasing decision."
"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."
"I'm not able to reveal the licensing cost for Qlik Sense, but because it was a huge deal, the cost was less than the usual cost. The license wasn't that costly. It was the infrastructure that was very costly."
"QlikSense offers a Hybrid environment architecture, which is very cost effective based on where the enterprise data resides."
"The cost is not bad considering the flexibility and support you receive from Qlik. I believe it is worth the cost."
"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."
"You will spend more time on educating your staff than licensing the product."
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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
Educational Organization
42%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Educational Organization
58%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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 information, control users accessing information, the configuration of governance po...
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 fully customizable and very user-friendly. This solution is very stable. Oracle ...
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...
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?
Considering the deal that we have acquired, Qlik Sense is pretty good in terms of price.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

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

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Power BI vs. Qlik Sense and other solutions. Updated: January 2023.
831,071 professionals have used our research since 2012.