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Qlik Sense vs SAS Visual Analytics vs Tableau 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.4
Qlik Sense provides quick ROI through enhanced data access, improved decision-making, cost-effectiveness, and reduced manual efforts.
Sentiment score
6.3
Organizations saw varied ROI from SAS Visual Analytics, noting improved efficiency and financial tracking despite initial cost challenges.
Sentiment score
7.1
Tableau offers rapid insights and cost reductions, enabling users to recoup investments quickly despite some viewing it as costly.
In my organization, we moved from OBI to Qlik Sense due to limitations with OBI, resulting in very high ROI.
The enterprise subscription offers more benefits, ensuring valuable outcomes.
This saves a significant amount of time, particularly for reports that would have needed around fifty people.
The ROI of using Tableau extends to its seamless integration across various platforms, as it's from Salesforce and thus not limited to any specific cloud provider.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.6
Qlik Sense customer service is excellent, but technical support receives mixed reviews; users often rely on the community for help.
Sentiment score
6.8
SAS Visual Analytics customer service is mixed, with praise for technical support but noted gaps in business needs and regional availability.
Sentiment score
7.0
Tableau's customer service is responsive and professional, with praised technical support, though some note wait time concerns.
While tech support is comprehensive, the stability of Qlik Sense means I generally do not need it.
Technical support requires improvement.
In Turkey, the consultant firms are very professional, and they support you.
They provide callbacks to ensure clarity and resolution of any queries.
They provide quick email and phone responses and have Thai-speaking personnel.
The technical support for Tableau is quite good.
I find Tableau's technical support to be good with elite support, but it struggles with usual, general support.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Qlik Sense excels in scalability, handling large data effortlessly, though licensing and integration issues may arise for some.
Sentiment score
7.8
SAS Visual Analytics effectively scales for large datasets and users, though high resource demands and expenses may concern some.
Sentiment score
6.7
Tableau effectively scales with optimized configurations, but performance may decline with extremely large datasets, impacting scalability and cost.
It performs well in terms of performance and load compared to others.
I believe it is easily scalable.
Tableau is easy to use across various dimensions, whether on-premises or on the cloud.
The solution is fully scalable and performs well even with large datasets, provided there is proper supporting hardware.
Tableau's data blending capabilities are an added feature.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Qlik Sense is reliable, with minimal issues and strong support, efficiently handling large data volumes and earning high ratings.
Sentiment score
7.1
SAS Visual Analytics is generally reliable but can face performance issues with large data, often due to user practices.
Sentiment score
7.4
Tableau is generally stable, efficient with varying data sizes, but may struggle with complex datasets or insufficient infrastructure.
The stability is very good.
SAS Visual Analytics is stable and manages data effectively without crashing.
I rate the stability a five or six because Tableau updates very often with new versions or patches.
 

Room For Improvement

Users seek enhancements in Qlik Sense's integration, customization, analytics, and performance, alongside better interfaces, training, and collaboration features.
SAS Visual Analytics is complex and costly, with challenges in integration, performance, user-friendliness, and external language support.
Tableau users seek faster data processing, better customization, machine learning integration, and affordable pricing, plus enhanced support and training.
Power BI has better visualizations and interactions with updates in 2023 that provide ease of use.
Providing an API feature to access data from the dashboard or QEDs could be beneficial.
Maybe more AI or real-time analytics could be incorporated.
In terms of configuration, I would like to see AI capabilities since many applications are now integrating AI.
We cannot send the entire Excel file reports via email within Tableau.
The product owner should enhance its benefits or clarify its role.
It sometimes requires extensive investigation to determine why the data does not appear correctly.
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users find Qlik Sense pricing competitive yet high, with flexible licensing models requiring careful negotiation for cost efficiency.
SAS Visual Analytics is costly for small enterprises, but offers strong analytics and simplicity, though consulting and scaling add expenses.
Tableau's licensing is costly but offers valuable functionality, yet smaller firms find its pricing prohibitive and complex based on roles.
Compared to Power BI, it is definitely costly.
Among the BI tools and data analytics tools, Qlik is the most expensive.
For small or large organizations needing many or few licenses, pricing varies.
Power BI as a much cheaper alternative.
The cost for viewer rights is around $60, but it can vary based on the business and is usually for a year.
Tableau is rated an eight because it is pretty expensive compared to alternatives like Power BI.
 

Valuable Features

Qlik Sense provides intuitive data visualization, rapid development, scalability, and customization with powerful analytics and seamless data integration.
SAS Visual Analytics excels in data visualization, advanced analytics, and user-friendly interface with rapid processing and seamless integration.
Tableau excels with interactive visuals, diverse data connections, and user-friendly interface, driving efficiency and insights alongside strong community support.
From an end-user perspective, it's convenient and performance-oriented, providing something meaningful from all the organization's data.
It is a single product that I can use as an ETL database, BI, and more.
It has an interactive interface with Qlik graphs, pivot, and interactivity, which makes it easier to use than other tools.
The ability to query information from our Excel data into SAS to view specific data is invaluable.
A significant feature for me is the real-time connection to data sources because it effectively manages large data sets.
Tableau serves as a stable dashboarding tool for higher management, aiding in quick decision-making.
Building hyper extracts and visualization capabilities make Tableau a robust tool for data analysis.
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Data Visualization category, the mindshare of Qlik Sense is 7.5%, down from 10.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAS Visual Analytics is 4.5%, down from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tableau is 25.9%, down from 31.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Visualization
 

Featured Reviews

Vishal_Goyal - PeerSpot reviewer
In-memory data storage boosts performance
The advantages compared to other BI tools show architectural differences. The main feature is that it keeps all the data in memory. It doesn't retrieve the data from data sources when I need it on the dashboard; instead, it quickly provides the desired data, making it very fast compared to other BI tools. The ROI is very high using Qlik Sense. It offers many benefits of BI. It is flexible from a developer's point of view, allowing me to accomplish many tasks compared to other BI tools. From an end-user perspective, it's convenient and performance-oriented, providing something meaningful from all the organization's data.
Renato Vazamin - PeerSpot reviewer
Single environment for multiple phases saves us time, and has good visualizations
We had that solution installed previously in another solution, Selvaya, but I don't think we used it at the time. We are now using SAS Detect Investigation as a complementary solution, in which we have part of the process, use a gene, SAS collects information and identifies some business situations, and the business guys use Visual Analytics to explore the results of the process. We previously used the FICO platform, but we switched because FICO's pricing was not scalable. Bringing more data or workloads to the platform required a significant investment in order to scale. We needed to change because we have a lot of data to process every day. FICO was also a little more complicated than SAS Visual Analytics.
ROMIL SHAH - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides fast data access with in-memory extracts, makes it easy to create visualizations, and saves time
When it comes to visualizations, Tableau has a limitation as compared to Power BI. It has a limited set of visualizations. Power BI has the entire marketplace, so you can connect and import many visualizations and use them, whereas Tableau has only 10 or 15 visualizations. There should be more visualizations, and there should also be data integration with more cloud providers. Tableau has recently launched a paid version for the documentation. So, documentation has become a little bit challenging when it comes to Tableau development because we do not have any tool to export the data out of it. It is a license-based feature that you need to purchase to prepare documentation. So, on the documentation front, for preparing clear documentation for any dashboard, it would help if we get an embedded option, rather than buying a license for each user for the documentation. To document anything, if I have to connect to each workbook and see what has been written as a formula and then document in the Word document, it is pretty time-consuming. We have the Microsoft stack, and we are currently evaluating Power BI because Tableau has a limitation of 50 columns for a drill-down report. If we want more than 50 columns, we have found a hack, but there is no ready-made option for doing it. So, we have to use another tool in case we need a drilled report with more than 50 columns. There are many instances where users need 80 or 90 columns for their analysis, and switching between two technologies becomes a challenge. It is not a cost-effective approach for us. Their support should be improved. We are not happy with their support. Whenever we raised queries, we were pointed to a few blogs, and we didn't get a proper solution from them. Their licensing should also be improved. They want us to purchase a Tableau Creator license for business users, whereas Power BI Desktop is free for business users. They should come up with a basic license with one or two connectors that our business users can use for preparing their visualizations. Tableau also charges us per user for users who want the data only through email.
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Comparison Review

it_user6330 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 2, 2013
MicroStrategy vs. Tableau
After a recent presentation, several attendees asked me about the applications of Visual Insights and Tableau. Many companies are investing in both tools and are trying to figure out the right tool for specific applications Tableau has found its sweet-spot as an agile discovery tool that analysts…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
60%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
4%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Government
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
University
8%
Educational Organization
43%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

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 ...
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...
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 do you like most about SAS Visual Analytics?
The most solution's notable aspect, in my view, is the ability to integrate various data sources and harness advanced...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAS Visual Analytics?
It's about an average of five. It's easy to scale, but it comes with cost.
What needs improvement with SAS Visual Analytics?
In terms of configuration, I would like to see AI capabilities since many applications are now integrating AI. It may...
Tableau vs. Business Objects - Which is a better solution for visualization and analysis?
Both tools have their positives and negatives. First, I should mention that I am relatively new to Tableau. I have be...
Which would you choose - Tableau or SAP Analytics Cloud?
Tableau is easy to set up and maintain. In about a day it is possible for the entire platform to be deployed for use....
What do you like most about Tableau?
Tableau is a fantastic tool that provides impressive dashboards and customized reports.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

QlikSense
SAS BI
Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Abbvie, Airbus, Barclays, BT Openreach, BMW, Daimler AG, HSBC, IKEA, Nationwide Building Society, Royal Mail Group, Sanofi, Siemens, Wendy'', Vodafone, Volvo
Staples, Ausgrid, Scotiabank, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, Oklahoma Gas & Electric, Xcel Energy, and Triad Analytics Solutions.
Accenture, Adobe, Amazon.com, Bank of America, Charles Schwab Corp, Citigroup, Coca-Cola Company, Cornell University, Dell, Deloitte, Duke University, eBay, Exxon Mobil, Fannie Mae, Ferrari, French Red Cross, Goldman Sachs, Google, Government of Canada, HP, Intel, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Macy's, Merck, The New York Times, PayPal, Pfizer, US Army, US Air Force, Skype, and Walmart.
Find out what your peers are saying about Salesforce, Qlik, Splunk and others in Data Visualization. Updated: April 2025.
848,253 professionals have used our research since 2012.