Microsoft Power BI vs QlikView comparison

Microsoft and Qlik are both solutions in the Reporting category. Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 7.9, while Qlik is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.3. Microsoft holds a 26.5% mindshare in RT, compared to Qlik’s 3.2% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Qlik users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Microsoft Power BI and QlikView based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Reporting solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Power BI vs. QlikView Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI vs. QlikView

October 2024

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Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 4.4%, down from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 26.5%, up from 25.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of QlikView is 3.2%, up from 3.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Reporting

Featured Reviews

Carlos Larrad Salgado

Deputy Director Operations Management Control at Mapfre

Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department

I don't like that when we use Colab packages, we get less functionality. For example, you can make groups of data with Excel or with the data sets from the packages, but when you use the Colab packages directly, you can only group the data when you analyze it with Analysis Studio. I think Cognos needs to improve more on this functionality. The user experience is also very important. Cognos is not very easy to understand sometimes, especially when they change the layout but keep the functionality the same. The help is not very graphic and they have no examples. Cognos has to make a big effort to help with understanding the functionality by improving the documentation. There is a lot of documentation, but the examples are hard to find and they should make their help section easier to understand for non-technical users.

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Amol Rane

Solutions Architect M365 at Sogeti UK

Supports AI initiatives in terms of predictive analytics

The only issue is with permissions. Sometimes, despite granting granular permissions, dashboards are visible to people who shouldn't have access. It's difficult to understand why the permissions slip out. Sometimes dashboards are visible to stakeholders even though they should not have permission. It's a bit difficult to understand why the permissions slip out. The dashboards lack a user-friendly appearance, and the permissions should be easier to understand. At this point, we have to go through a lot of details. It takes a lot of time to understand the permissions, so if there were better options available within the Power BI setup, it would be quite beneficial, especially for admins. So, there should be a more user-friendly dashboard appearance and easier-to-understand permissions.

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Arjun Meda

Assistant Vice President at HSBC India

Useful for data visualization and business intelligence

Many of the features in Qlik Sense need to be available and reintroduced in QlikView. I believe many of the features have been added to QlikView after the layout containers were introduced. QlikView used to be a way more customizable tool than Qlik Sense is in the present time. Improvements are required in the hide and unhide functionality that falls under the layout container feature that has been used in my company in recent times. Hiding off the apps in the app overview tab based on the access was a really good feature that needs to be introduced back in the product since I see that, at the moment, there are multiple groups on the tool, owing to which multiple changes on the QMC part is required to handle the solution. Only the person with access to the dashboard in QlikView could have a link to the dashboard through QlikView's hub or access points. With Qlik Sense, one can see whatever is available in the stream. If a user wants to control everything in the product, then there is no need to make multiple changes in the QMC at the individual app level. The aforementioned area can be considered to improve Qlik Sense.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Even while a user is using a cube for reporting, there will not be a situation as ' Cube file locked; unable to build or deploy'."

"The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."

"In terms of stability, I think that Cognos is more stable than Tableau and Power Bi because of its framework manager concept that allows us to import metadata and store it in the framework manager."

"The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools."

"Using custom controls, it is possible to extend the application with even more functionality and make the application intuitive and attractive."

"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."

"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."

"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."

More IBM Cognos pros

"Power BI pricing is generally considered more affordable than Tableau."

"Good reporting and data analysis tool that's user-friendly, easy to deploy, stable, and scalable."

"What I like most is that I can do everything in Power BI that I can do in Excel."

"The interface is very easy to use."

"I like that I can use Power BI to upload data. That is very important for me. The visualization is also convenient and easy to use."

"It's a straightforward setup."

"Ease of development and maintenance."

"The amount of customization that you can do is good, and it's relatively straightforward to do."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

"You can do a lot of things on the back end which are not possible in the other solutions on the market."

"You can switch views easily."

"E-T-L, The Extract, Transform, and Loading capabilities of QlikView make it a highly sophisticated self-service business intelligence tool for developers and analysts."

"Scripting as per a customer's need, which is a pretty cool feature and not available in other tools."

"The language support is very good."

"QlikView is one of the strongest tools, I would say. Also, it has a very vast capability to process the data"

"This is a very cool application with endless options of creativity and visuals."

"The integration with Salesforce has helped us gain access to crucial sales data in real-time."

More QlikView pros

Cons

"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."

"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."

"The solution seems to slow down the servers."

"The data uploads that we do, such as Excel files, have a lot of restrictions. If we can make it a bit more user-friendly, allowing us to have more flexibility it would be a great help."

"They were lacking in the initial phases of development in the area of big data, and they still need to improve that aspect of the product."

"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."

"The solution's support could be better."

"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."

More IBM Cognos cons

"The dashboards lack a user-friendly appearance."

"We need more integration capabilities."

"Drill-down in dashboards needs to improved. The capability only works in Power BI Desktop today. We need to have an alternative approach today."

"I am taking a course to be able to use the solution better. Some aspects of the solution are not straightforward."

"The product doesn't support unstructured data. It doesn't support video, streaming, and strings of files."

"It is kept very current, and there is an update literally every month. However, the interface changes quite randomly with no documentation, which is difficult at the domain and architectural level where you're planning things and engaging the business. Things change frequently, and you wonder where has the button for the new report gone. They should provide better documentation on interface changes. It should be better optimized. It is supposed to be a data integration tool, but it is doing relatively simple queries. It has its limitations. For example, you can only pull a number of columns. So, there is room for optimization on its ability to integrate multiple data sources. The desktop tool is very memory-intensive, and again, this is not documented clearly. It requires a heavy CPU and memory use, and it causes your operating systems to become unstable. I would like to see the ability to create datasets within Power BI. Microsoft is promoting Azure as a cloud solution, but it is dependent upon a desktop component, which seems a little bit deceptive. Data set is the basic element that you report from, but it has to be created on the desktop and then published to the cloud. So, you're in the cloud, and you create a data structure or the data flow, but you can't report from that. You have to leave the cloud, go to your desktop, create the data set on your desktop, and publish it to the cloud. You go back to the cloud and create your report by using that published data set, which is very non-intuitive. If you go to the Microsoft Power BI community, this is a common complaint across the entire community."

"The look and feel should be updated in terms of the types of dashboards and graphs that you can produce. They aren't as visual as some of its competitors."

"The admin view could be improved by making it more simplified to manage a users' activity and other things."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

"Enhancing user-friendliness would be highly beneficial."

"The pricing is high."

"It needs work with visualization."

"Error handling."

"If a user wanted to see something not included in the application the new object had to be created by a power user or developer because Qlik view's scripting has somewhat of a learning curve."

"They could improve the speed."

"The only thing I would improve about it is the fact that it refreshes all the time, and when it does that, it just deletes all the options you had, all the filters that you had selected, so you need to select them from the beginning."

"I really wish the application was easier to use in the development phase."

More QlikView cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing costs are a little bit higher for IBM Cognos. I don't think there is any additional cost apart from the licensing charges."

"Pricing should be improved."

"There is need to assess the purchase license accordingly so as to avoid audit penalties."

"It is quite pricy. I think Microsoft BI is cheaper. Tableau might also be cheaper, but it also depends on the usage. If you have very many users, Cognos can be a problem. It could be cheaper than Tableau but not for so many users. If you have a few thousand users, Tableau, which is generally quite expensive, can be cheaper than Cognos."

"It is pretty expensive."

"There is some additional licensing that we needed to purchase because we were touching data outside of our core data platform. The cost was approximately $25,000 for the additional licenses, which were approximate 45 licenses. For the application itself, updates, and the core platform it was approximately $50,000. Giving a total cost of $75,000 annually for our usage of IBM Cognos."

"It's more expensive than similar solutions like Tableau and Power BI."

"IBM Cognos price is on the higher side of the spectrum. However, with the features that it brings, such as correlation analysis, it's worth the money. They should look at the pricing more clearly because it's a little on the higher side."

More IBM Cognos pricing and cost advice

"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 solution is priced well for what they offer. However, the premium version is very expensive."

"Pricing, that's where Microsoft beats Tableau. It is priced much cheaper."

"We pay for users who are publishing on the cloud. The desktop version is free. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."

"Microsoft BI is free for the personal edition, but there is also a paid-for professional version."

"Price is the best feature of Power BI! You get a lot of value for the price. If you know how to use it, it's a great BI solution for your money."

"The Report Server is pretty expensive on-premise. But as long companies are happy to use the cloud version, that's very cost effective."

"You don't need a license for development, but if you want to publish to external users, you need a license. The licensing is very costly, but I think that since the advantages and benefits of Power BI are so high, people are willing to pay. I can't blame them."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

"The platform's pricing is considered quite expensive, particularly given the dollar-based pricing."

"It is not very expensive. I think it it is on par with other similar products on the market."

"Pricing is a bit too high and I think licenses should be unlimited."

"On a scale of one to ten, where one being low price and ten being high price, I rate pricing a four."

"It has an annual license. It is expensive as compared to other competitive tools that do more for less. In South African rands, we pay about 100,000 to 200,000 a year."

"QlikView pricing and licensing is on the high side for a small sized company, but it's competitive among its peers."

"QlikView is a reasonably priced solution."

"It is quite expensive, rating at around nine out of ten on a cost scale."

More QlikView pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user79932

Senior Manager - BI Head at NVidia

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

56%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Government

Educational Organization

41%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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 ...

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What do you like most about IBM Cognos?

The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools.

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Cognos?

I need improvements, particularly with the Framework Manager, which has an outdated user interface from older version...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What do you like most about QlikView?

If you correctly use the product for your use cases, it provides value for money.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for QlikView?

QlikView is probably on the pricier side than other BI tools. It's more expensive than the overall implementation of ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with QlikView?

Creating an out-of-the-box solution for modeling capabilities might be beneficial.

See all answers

Comparisons

Tableau vs IBM Cognos

Compared 10% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs IBM Cognos

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs IBM Cognos

Compared 8% of the time

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs IBM Cognos

Compared 7% of the time

SAP Crystal Reports vs IBM Cognos

Compared 2% of the time

More IBM Cognos Competitors

Tableau vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 17% of the time

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 8% of the time

KNIME vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 6% of the time

MicroStrategy vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 2% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

Tableau vs QlikView

Compared 26% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs QlikView

Compared 14% of the time

MicroStrategy vs QlikView

Compared 5% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs QlikView

Compared 4% of the time

Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services vs QlikView

Compared 4% of the time

More QlikView Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Cognos

November 2024

Download IBM Cognos product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

November 2024

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Buyer's Guide

QlikView

November 2024

Download QlikView product report

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics

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

No data available

Learn More

IBM

Microsoft

Qlik

Overview

IBM Cognos Business Intelligence provides a wide range of tools to help you analyze your organization's data. IBM Cognos BI allows businesses to monitor events and metrics, create and view business reports, and analyze data to help them make effective business decisions.

IBM Cognos applies techniques to describe, summarize, and compare data, and draw conclusions. This allows users to see trends and discover anomalies or variances that may not be evident by simply reading data. Data sources that contain information from different areas of a business can be stored in separate packages. Users can see only information that they have been granted access to, based on their group or role.

IBM Cognos BI consolidates the following business intelligence functions into a single web-based solution:

IBM Cognos Insight: Create personal and managed workspaces for data analysis. Using these interactive workspaces, you can share insight results with managers. Cognos Insight supports write-back, and you can also use these workspaces to capture and integrate management goals, commitments, and forecasts.
IBM Cognos Workspace: With IBM Cognos Workspace, you can create rich, interactive workspaces using IBM Cognos content as well as data from external sources. You can view and open your favorite workspaces and reports, edit content in your workspaces, and share your workspaces via email.
IBM Cognos Analytics: IBM Cognos Analytics utilizes built-in AI and intuitive searches which helps users to quickly create the visualizations and a wide range of reports. Cognos Analytics provides cognitive and managed self-service, enabling you to gain insights from controlled and trusted data.
IBM Cognos Report Studio and IBM Cognos Query Studio: Easily create structured and query reports. IBM Cognos allows users to create application and report templates. In addition, report authors can reuse report objects to apply filters, fields, and styles to reports. Users can set the language of the user interface and report content according to the user's native language.
IBM Cognos Event Studio: Receive notifications of events that occur within your organization in real time. Event Studio enables the creation of agents that detect the occurrence of business events, failures, or anomalies, based on the change of specific events or data conditions. Notification can be sent via email, publication in the portal, or by triggering reports.
IBM Cognos Connection: This is the Web portal for IBM Cognos BI and is the central area for accessing all the IBM Cognos functions. In the web portal, users can schedule and distribute reports, create tasks, administer the server and the access permissions, and more.

Reviews from Real Users

IBM Cognos stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its powerful analysis tool and its reporting capabilities.

Prasad B., a senior software engineer at a financial services firm, notes, “The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report. We can receive automated reports as well. They are easy to schedule on a weekly or monthly basis. It is very fast. I mean in means of report output, it's very fast compared to the actual clients involved.”

Microsoft Power BI is a powerful tool for data analysis and visualization. This tool stands out for its ability to merge and analyze data from various sources. Widely adopted across different industries and departments, Power BI is instrumental in creating visually appealing dashboards and generating insightful business intelligence reports. Its intuitive interface, robust visualization capabilities, and seamless integration with other Microsoft applications empower users to easily create interactive reports and gain valuable insights.

QlikView is a Business Intelligence tool that allows you to keep tabs on all of your business-related information in a clean, clear, and easy to access database that is intuitive to build and simple to navigate. It is ideal for business owners who wish to improve overall output by creating the most productive system possible.

Sample Customers

More than 23,000 leading organizations across multiple industries use Cognos. Some examples of Cognos customers include BMW Financial Services, Quinte Health Care, Troy Corporation, Michigan State University, and GKN Land System.

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

Canon, Gatorade, Amcor, Panasonic, Fila, Cambridge University Hospitals, Global Retail Bank, North Yorkshire Police department, Lanoo Group Publishers, and AonGroep Nederland.

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI vs. QlikView

October 2024

Free Report: Microsoft Power BI vs. QlikView

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