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QlikView vs Tableau comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 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

QlikView
Ranking in Reporting
5th
Ranking in Embedded BI
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
161
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Tableau
Ranking in Reporting
2nd
Ranking in Embedded BI
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
296
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (2nd), Data Visualization (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of QlikView is 3.3%, up from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tableau is 22.6%, down from 23.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting
 

Q&A Highlights

MR
May 08, 2015
 

Featured Reviews

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.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The user interface and dashboards are very good."
"The language support is very good."
"The most useful feature of QlikView for me is the QVD concept."
"Its ability to build, very quickly, very complicated models."
"The in-memory feature gives us better insight. It's also easy to drill down into the information and select information."
"This is a very cool application with endless options of creativity and visuals."
"It has user-friendly data visualization features, supporting our decision-making process with its business intelligence capabilities"
"Easy to analyze data by click-through."
"Easy for beginners to use"
"It is very good for data visualization. It has very powerful visualizations and is easy to use."
"It is definitely easy to use. It is intuitive, and more or less, everything can be done from the front end. As such, there is no concept of metadata. You can just take data from a database and start building your own stuff, such as OLAP data warehouse. You don't need extensive metadata modeling like Oracle BI."
"There are already connectors to almost every single major database and service that you can possibly think of."
"The initial setup is simple."
"It's very user-friendly. It's not like Power BI, Tableau is very user-friendly. Anybody can use Tableau. It's very easy to adopt things. I can visualize the stats."
"It is easy to use, and it can handle a large amount of data."
"The most valuable feature is that we can integrate with our own database, and it will displays the KPIs. This is highly required from the business side."
 

Cons

"This solution would be improved with the inclusion of a feature that would allow us to add a common library of (our) commands used in load scripts and expressions, so with a keyword, we would get a drop down to select the command we are looking for, as opposed to the generic help."
"More/newer visualisation components need to be added."
"There's room for improvement in the area of management's handling of concerns."
"There could be a feature to analyze the sales and accounting data of the client."
"The solution is quite costly."
"They could improve the speed."
"It needs work with visualization."
"It is really old. We are moving towards converting everything into a Power BI environment. We want to have a self-service type of BI environment where different levels of users in organizations can log onto a portal and retrieve the data they need or get the necessary insights for decision-making that's important for them or their business unit. They have built a new version of QlikView called QlikSense, which probably competes with newer BI tools, such as Power BI, but they are far behind. That's why we are moving towards a newer tool that's easier to use and has more visualizations to represent the data."
"A strict security measure is needed. I believe it is weak in terms of security."
"The solution needs to improve its integration capabilities."
"I would like to be able to set the parameters in a more specific manner."
"The data entered into Tableau must be clean. Otherwise, it won't work properly."
"Many things have to be improved in Tableau. Right now, we make the calculation, and then we get that information. It would be better if business users could do that. I would ask the people at Tableau to provide that option to business users to get that information in one click. It would be better if they automated some calculations. There should be more automation in Tableau. However, there are many things in automation mode, but it is very limited at the moment. We need automation for people who do not know much about Tableau. It would also be better if there were good community support like in Alteryx."
"I would like to have the product be more flexible in terms of creating online shared dashboards."
"We did have issues with Tableau 10.1 server with the brokers failing on heavy load but since moving to 10.2, then to 10.3, this issue seems to have been resolved and the environment is now quite stable."
"The pricing is a bit higher than the competition. They'll need to lower it to stay competitive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It is not very expensive. I think it it is on par with other similar products on the market."
"Its licensing costs are moderate, but it can get expensive due to the numerous add-ons available like those for printing."
"QlikView is a reasonably priced solution."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one being low price and ten being high price, I rate pricing a four."
"Qlik is fairly high in terms of pricing."
"It's reasonably priced and falls on the more affordable side."
"Tableau has core-based and user-based licensing, and it is tied to scalability. The core-based licensing is about you buying a certain number of cores, and there is no restriction on the number of users who can use Tableau. The restriction is only on the number of cores. In user-based subscription licensing, there is a restriction on the number of users. Big companies and government organizations with a lot of users typically go for core-based licensing. User-based subscription licensing is a more common model. It has user roles such as creator, explorer, and viewer. A creator is someone who does the groundwork or development work. An explorer is someone who is into middle management but is not technically savvy, such as a category head. A viewer is like a typical decision-maker in senior management. For each role, Tableau is priced differently. The viewer role has the minimum price, and the creator role has the highest price. This pricing is available on their website. Everybody can see it."
"Tableau is a little cheaper as compared to Power BI and other technologies that we have used in the past. However, if the business users in our organization want to make presentations, Tableau has been asking us to purchase a Tableau Creator license, and $35 per month is expensive for business users. Power BI is giving a free desktop version for business users to connect to any data source and build their own dashboards. That's why we have proposed to use Power BI for most of the business users in our organization."
"Its licensing cost should be improved."
"Its cost is quite high. A corporate license costs about 150-200K per year for all the users, but there was probably some discounted amount. This cost includes everything."
"The company chose to purchase a creator license for me, which was $70. With that license, you can also be an administrator. We also have 20-25 extra licenses and they cost around $20-$35 each. Those are for normal users who will be viewing the dashboards. Those are monthly charges."
"The product's price is relatively inexpensive and manageable for enterprise-level companies."
"The price of Tableau could improve. The license is too expensive."
"It is reasonable based on what it offers."
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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…
 

Answers from the Community

MR
May 8, 2015
May 8, 2015
If you want real world proof. Have a bake off or POC with a real world set of criteria: 4 or more data sources, 100M or more records and mobile, etc. You'll be glad that you did!
2 out of 26 answers
Mar 5, 2015
Each of these DV providers have a strong offering but subltle differentiators: Tableau is your general purpose BI tool-great visuals and user friendly UI. Spotfire is geared more towards the data scientist and incorporates more statistical analysis functions. Qlik excels at reporting and their data association model. Excuse the shameless self-promotion but If you are interested in unique capabilities like connecting to real time streaming data sources and/or semi/un structured data for more sophisticated analysis, I’d recommend also taking a look at Datawatch.
Mar 5, 2015
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
Educational Organization
44%
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

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...
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...
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 been working on and off Tableau for about a year, but getting to work on it consta...
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. This relatively short amount of time can make all the difference for companies ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Canon, Gatorade, Amcor, Panasonic, Fila, Cambridge University Hospitals, Global Retail Bank, North Yorkshire Police department, Lanoo Group Publishers, and AonGroep Nederland.
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 QlikView vs. Tableau and other solutions. Updated: February 2025.
844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.