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Microsoft Power BI vs QlikView 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
Ranking in Reporting
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
319
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (1st)
QlikView
Ranking in Reporting
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
161
Ranking in other categories
Embedded BI (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 26.9%, up from 25.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of QlikView is 3.3%, up from 3.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Arjun Meda - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The scalability is good. We have 20 people in my organization using this solution and plan to increase usage."
"In my opinion, Microsoft BI is a low-cost solution, and it could be an interesting solution for a tourism company."
"The product is easy to use and simple to navigate."
"The dashboard is very nice and it is very simple to understand every single component."
"The solution is very intuitive, you do not need to have too much programming knowledge to use it. Advanced Excel users can use it very easily."
"The most valuable aspect of Microsoft Power BI in my field is the insights it provides from analyzing data. Sometimes, these insights go beyond what traditional analysis can reveal due to the large volume of data involved. In terms of improving our data analysis process, it starts with identifying data sources, followed by cleaning and filtering out irrelevant data. Then, we categorize and structure the data to achieve the best visualization and insights. Regarding Power BI's integration with other tools, although we haven't implemented it ourselves, it's known that Power BI can integrate with systems like SAP or ERP software, which could enhance our analytics capabilities if needed."
"The product's most valuable features are DAX functions for formulas and calculations."
"It's a very easy-to-use solution."
"We can scale it if we need to."
"It's pretty easy to deploy."
"One of the good thing is that you can integrate different data source technologies. So you can model your environment without having any of our views running."
"The solution is fast."
"It is useful to use a tool like this to have a view of data at a point in time. You can extract and create little data sets that you can store, and then over time, you can have a view for tracking changes. Especially when you work with a relational database or a database that's a production database, the data is dynamic, but if you use QlikView, you can take a snapshot of different datasets. In your own time, you can then get insights and report, build, analyze, and draw whatever you need from the data, which is quite useful."
"If you correctly use the product for your use cases, it provides value for money."
"QlikView is one of the strongest tools, I would say. Also, it has a very vast capability to process the data"
"The product’s most valuable feature is its ability to view the entire data available for analysis."
 

Cons

"An area for improvement is data refresh functionality"
"One area for improvement in Microsoft Power BI is serviceability. Compared to one of its competitors: Tableau, there are a lot of things which you cannot do in this tool, that can be done in Tableau."
"The dynamic browsing tables could be better in Microsoft Power BI."
"Capacity could be improved."
"This solution's performance when handling big data could be improved. Right now, if you're handling big data, the application becomes slow and the performance is very low."
"Visualization systems are still relatively young."
"Its setup and support should be improved. We would like to see more material for developers that provides clear explanations about how we can do data mining by using Microsoft BI. It would also be good if we can connect a feature to other customized machine learning solutions."
"It would be nice to use other connectors to link with the data."
"QlikView's UI could be more user-friendly."
"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."
"Better source data connectors."
"Error handling."
"The product's visual capabilities could be improved. The graphs and visualizations are not as aesthetic or easy to create."
"There is a lack of static PDF report generation and automatic resizing of the dashboard to fit the device."
"The user interface and ease of use takes a bit of a learning curve to pick up."
"Although Qliktech's road map clearly states that QlikView has a long way to go, most of the R&D effort seems to be benefiting Qlik Sense."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with one being cheap and ten being expensive."
"Power BI comes with enterprise Microsoft licensing. So for the user, you don't have to pay, but you do have to pay a one-time cost."
"Microsoft BI is not very cheap. A premium license costs roughly 5,000 euros a month."
"Remove the cost of a licence to show a dashboard within SharePoint. Why should readers of a dashboard have to pay to view? ​"
"We have enterprise licenses and some of the other tools or features come as a package and others you have to purchase separately."
"Power BI is cheaper for smaller groups when comparing to competitors. It requires a monthly per-user subscription."
"Setup is easy, and the cost is economical. You do sometimes need to pay additional costs for third party products which "plug-in" to Microsoft BI."
"I rate the product price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price."
"I rate QlikView's pricing a five out of ten."
"The setup costs for QlikView are fair as are the yearly maintenance fees. The licensing becomes a bit more expensive and requires some planning for onboarding."
"QlikView pricing and licensing is on the high side for a small sized company, but it's competitive among its peers."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one being low price and ten being high price, I rate pricing a four."
"The platform's pricing is considered quite expensive, particularly given the dollar-based pricing."
"Its licensing costs are moderate, but it can get expensive due to the numerous add-ons available like those for printing."
"It is expensive for small companies."
"It is quite expensive, rating at around nine out of ten on a cost scale."
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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
43%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
Government
5%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
 

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 ...
What do you like most about QlikView?
If you correctly use the product for your use cases, it provides value for money.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for QlikView?
Qlik Sense's licensing metrics are flexible. They provide packages based on needs, like named licenses, developer licenses, or shared pool licenses. There is also a core-based license option for or...
What needs improvement with QlikView?
QlikView lacks self-service capabilities, which means users depend on the IT team to make changes. Qlik Sense offers a more modern approach with self-service features, allowing users to build dashb...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI
No data available
 

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
Canon, Gatorade, Amcor, Panasonic, Fila, Cambridge University Hospitals, Global Retail Bank, North Yorkshire Police department, Lanoo Group Publishers, and AonGroep Nederland.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Power BI vs. QlikView and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
837,501 professionals have used our research since 2012.