Qlik Sense Reviews

Qlik is being used as a Business Intelligence and Data Analytics solution. It currently extracts the data from our database and online sources via a Rest API connector. The data is then transformed in the load script and stored in a .qvd file format.

Once this has been completed, applications use a combination of the .qvd files depending on their functionality to allow reporting on areas of the business. Any area with data can be reported on with graphics tailored to the needs of the business. 

Qlik Sense has allowed us to compile and analyze our data in real-time, thanks to the various and specific applications that have been designed and built. This has allowed the organization to make data-informed decisions and has also removed the need for manual tasks, checks, and calculations.

In turn, this has allowed the organization to better utilize time and resources, improving business efficiency and productivity. However, it is worth noting that this is only as good as your data. You must ensure your organization has clean data!

Qlik has a powerful load script that uses an enhanced SQL language which is excellent for loading and transforming the data. 

Qlik can also store data out into a .qvd file format which is very highly compressed. This file format can then be ready by Qlik extremely quickly, allowing it to rapidly process thousands of rows of data. Qlik also has a range of useful visualizations and also allows for custom visualizations to be created and added as an extension. These can be found online or created by yourself.

Qlik application automation needs additional work and features. However, it is still a fairly new development. It appears it has been brought on to replace many of the Qlik management console's functionality for on-premise Qlik solutions. However, it lacks a lot of the same functionality. It is worth noting that it does have additional functionality in some areas compared to the Qlik Management Console.

An interesting development to Qlik Application Automation would be the addition of functionality that allows writing to .qvd files.

I have been using Qlik sense for three years, however, I have only been using Qlik SaaS for the past year.

The solution is very stable.

The product is easily and effectively scalable.

So far, we have not had an issue that required support.

Neutral

We did not previously use a different solution. 

The setup is straightforward.

We handled the setup in-house.

ROI is hard to quantify, however, it has definitely earned its cost.

I'd advise users to negotiate directly with the sales team for the best deal.

The product was already in use at the organization.

Qlik Sense on-prem may be a better solution currently. However, Qlik Sense SaaS will overtake this product soon.

Rapid Development is the most valuable feature to my humble opinion. You can build a very nice dashboard and/or report very quickly (simple reports can be ready in a matter of minutes!) even if your data is scattered between different files or even platform (excels, DB, etc.)

1. Managed to aggregate data from several separate legacy and cloud systems into one dashboard to validate expected correlation and insights.

2. Managed to save valuable time to managers by building automated quarterly report, which serve them in the business plan meetings with their reps.

1. Qlik Sense (as for ver 3.1) is still missing some key functionality that Qlikview has.

2. Qlik has a fast learning curve due to great online training resources (Qlik continuous classroom), but those are lacking the advance features like building extensions and using the API.

QlikView - 2 years

QlikSense - 1 year

Was not involved in the deployment of the tools.

Not with the Qlik server.

I did found out that our daily backup process fail to backup QVW files from the desktop.

No

Cannot rate since I hadn't used it yet.

Technical support is very good due to the large active community.

Most of the technical advise which I implemented came from posts of members in the community.

No, I didn't use any other solution previously.

I was only involved in the setup of the desktop edition tools, and they are straightforward.

Used mixed teams. The vendor employees are very experienced and professionals.

If you have users that don't need/want to do self-service analytics (which is the main advantage of Qlik Sense), consider buying less licenses for Qlik Sense and instead by a license for Nprinting tool (also a product of Qlik) which can be used to build and automatically send periodical reports extracted directly from the solution you already developed in QlikView.

No, I wasn't on the team who did the evaluation.

Qlik is using what they call "Associative Model". While this is what give Qlik one of its benefits and for you (the developer/user) the ease of building rapid dashboard and reports, Make sure you truly understand this "Associative Model" before you are stepping into the role of building the data model for the solution.

Using Qlik Sense, we created many CXO & Senior Leaders dashboards. Qlik Sense is really helpful to leaders to get insights on time, and they can see granular level data easily. UI is superb and easy to navigate from one sheet to another.

Our company has a plethora of source systems, and providing a single source of truth via a common platform was a challenge. There was also a need for a self-service analytics platform that allowed businesses to make decisions on time using any device.

We needed to build a Common Reporting Platform that talks to multiple source systems and are:

• Visually intuitive
• Integrate Analytics with Mobile App
• Set up Data Governance and create an enterprise data warehouse

Multiple products were considered, but we chose QlikSense.

Initially, data was kept in silos and business users were reporting at their business level. It was a really cumbersome process to collate data at the company level. After Qlik Sense, we prepared data in one place and transformed it to create Qlik UI. 

The company has a plethora of source systems, and providing a single source of truth via a common platform was a challenge. There was also a need for a self-service analytics platform that allowed businesses to make decisions on time using any device.

Proposed Solution

We worked to build a Common Reporting Platform that talks to multiple source systems and is visually intuitive, integrates analytics with mobile and has Data Governance.

The most valuable aspects of the solution include the :

• ETL and visualization, user stories, and insight advisor
• Self-Service - a clean and modern user experience with Global Smart Search, Associative Exploration, and Advanced Navigation
• Data Visualization  or rich charting, visual interactivity, and smart visualizations
• Data storytelling
• Rapid API development
• Embedded analytics
• Custom extensions
• Powerful, multi-source data integration
• Direct discovery
• Qlik admin  from the Qlik Management Console
• Qlik Sense Monitoring
• Deployment Console
• Data Governance

Qlik Sense brings in the concept of shared libraries where one user can create custom dimensions (even with drill-down functionality), measures, and even visualizations and save it to the "Master Items," from which the other users can simply drag and drop to use it for their analysis.

We are planning to move to Qlik SaaS to mitigate the below issues - 

• The app performance is a challenge for all users
• Section access and other security parameters are complex
• Managing the environment is a major task for company upgrades are not being leveraged to the recent releases
• Regularly maintaining all the environments with the same version and implementations
• Auto ML is a need as this will help businesses make data-driven decisions.
• Use cases about salesforce embedding is critical
• Real time data ingestion and automaton of the ETL are becoming important
• Alerting and reporting for the business users for their analytics requirements is needed

Previously We were using Qlik Enterprise onPem, but we moved to Qlik SaaS last year. 

The product is stable with very good features.

This is very easy to scale. 

Customer service support was good bit not extraordinary. 

Positive

It was complex migration process - Qlik Onprem to Qlik SaaS. 

Through Qlik Services, we migrated our dashboards to Qlik SaaS

We are able to save many manhours by automating the solution.

Qlik Sense is excellent for Leadership reporting purposes. Its specialty is quick data rendering, and data drill-down, which has been quite useful. The GUI is excellent.

Dashboards and reporting: we host a dashboard and reporting system for the whole company with a full set of rules of governances. Mashup pages or embedded iframe are good choices to manipulate Qlik Sense dashboards to any formats.

Ad hoc data analytics: with strong data load engine and in-memory processing, we could use Qlik Sense to do most of the statistical tasks or data minings task, or even export processed data to do further advanced analytics by another platform.

Self-service BI: in-memory processing make self-service data analytics become a joyful activity. 

Data collection, cleaning, transforming, and visualization become convenient, easy, and quick. Consequently, business users can make use of data by the fastest way and transform into better data-centric mindsets. 

Installing and deploying Qlik Sense is quite simple. With Qlik Sense Enterprise (multi-cloud) or Qlik Sense Business (SaaS on cloud), we even don’t need an IT guy to set up anything, deploying a dashboard and reporting system becomes simple and done in a few minutes with some simple steps. 

Data load engine of Qlik Sense is the most valuable, it supports a strong script language which could support complex data transform and processing tasks, it could be used to replace an ETL framework, we can use Qlik Data Load Engine to get data from many kinds of data sources , then process, clean, transform and store to datamart by QVD file (an optimized file type of Qlik), finally visualize data effectively with in-memory technology which make the self-service analytics become a interesting activities.

The cost of the Qlik ecosystem is higher than other competitors.

The license mechanism of Qlik is quite complicated and not exchangeable. Such as 2016, they charge licenses by token, 1500$ for a token / 1 user. 2018: they change to 2 kinds of licenses: professional 1500$ / user, analyzer 800$ / user. 2019: they support subscription with 70$ Monthly for professional, 40$ monthly for analyzers, but for those you’re using perpetual licenses, they don't support acquiring more subscription licenses. The maintenance fee yearly are also high, 20% of the perpetual license.

Qlik dashboards are not friendly with end-users, but they have been enhancing this shorted in some recent releases and next releases hopefully.

More than thee years.

Good. But sometimes recently, very slow response .

Setup is simple and straightforward.

In-house.

Higher cost comparing to other solutions

I was working for a power utility company, so our primary use case for Qlik Sense was consumption data and customer billing.

Qlik Sense is essentially a web-based tool even though it's on-prem – you're working off an HTML page – so it's pretty quick. Your processing speed does not matter because you're using a lot of stuff through the web. That's great because it brings down the cost in regards to hardware.

At the same time, learning the language is quite easy. It's not SQL, it's not Python, it's natural database language, so you can pick up the usage pretty easily.

There is room for improvement in the storytelling mode and the report sharing. Qlik Sense also does not have a subscription base like Power BI. So a lot of the analysis is housed in community pages that are managed by either the author or a database administrator, or whoever the Qlik Sense manager is there. It doesn't lend itself to being shared quite easily, because it requires licensing for viewers to consume.

I would also like to see a PowerPoint integration introduced. Power BI, for example, offers a slide deck that can be downloaded and inserted it into your deck. I'm referring to Power BI because that's what I use the most and that's the standard for me. Tableau has this integration in addition to a superior visualization tool. I think Qlik Sense has a better engine than all the three that I've mentioned, but in regards to sharing the analysis, it's clunky; it's not as good.

I have five years of experience with Qlik Sense. 

The stability of a solution depends on the process that brings in the data. We had a strong Qlik Sense production data pipeline that is always firing and we didn't have any resource issues where we were running out of space or anything like that. I think that for the most part, any tool will work well if the environment that it's set up on is well prepared.

Qlik Sense does have a lot of connection APIs that you could do. However, I think Microsoft Enterprise customers can run into challenges with it. We were Microsoft Enterprise, so eventually there was going to be some issues in regards to just how this tool was going to be able to grow with the company. I think it really depends on how many systems you have and how ingrained you are with those systems.

The solution does replace a lot of legacy products, which helps reduce costs, but you really do need somebody that knows what they're doing to get all the integrations done right.

The tech support we received was great. They were very knowledgeable and explained things quite well. They were very gracious with their time. Obviously, they were charging us, but they were well trained. We received tech support through our vendor. 

Positive

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. However, a lot of expertise from the backend was required from the vendor to get the solution running. So even after Qlik Sense had been deployed, we still had a lot of issues with development and it wasn't very self-service.

As far as maintenance went, from my standpoint, it didn't really feel like there was a big team working on Qlik Sense. I'm sure there was probably scheduled maintenance that was done during off-peak hours and it didn't really disrupt any of the daily production; reports were still running as planned. There was maybe one or two hiccups towards the end before I left, but again, that was during the pandemic, so a lot of things were probably falling behind. 

The deployment was done through a vendor, which was a problem. The vendor was ingrained into a lot of the deployment of our analysis and trying to get things off the ground from a proof of concept to production and the expertise was not shared very well with the in-house talent. We were always having to go back to them. That created a revenue stream for them, which became very expensive for us. 

Anytime somebody wanted to develop something, we were having to buy hours (paying consultancy charges), and ultimately, it was not sustainable. This model ends up being so much more expensive than deploying something that is a little bit more self-serving and can be deployed across your admin user rates.

It's not a tool that can be the one-all because the license does not cover all the services that a small business or even an enterprise needs to lean on because it requires too much from the vendor to support it.

Qlik Sense is a middle of the road solution in terms of price; just average in regards to pricing. It has a great following because of QlikView and an organization can save money if it goes through Qlik Sense as opposed to doing the full deployment of QlikView. Qlik Sense is a robust solution tool, but it's hard keeping up with the big guys now. 

At my company, the licensing had to do more so with having other users, like non-technical users and business users, and enabling them to view the reports and the analysis. So I don't know if they've changed the licensing to a read-only or reader, but at the time when I was there, it was all or nothing. So you basically were a power user or you were just not going to get it.

My organization might have had a deal for 200 seats. I don't know how much a seat cost us though. 

We handle a large volume of data, and it is very challenging to get insight from it. By using Qlik and filling a dashboard on top of it, our ability to analyze and identify our strengths and weaknesses has improved.

The most valuable features are that Qlik has a very strong ATL available and the capacity to handle large volumes of data.

Areas for improvement include user-friendliness, self-service, and some of the visualization options for generating reports.

I've been using Qlik Sense for three to four years.

Qlik Sense's stability is good.

The scalability is good.

Qlik's technical support is great.

Previously, we used QlikView, but we upgraded to Qlik Sense based on an OEM suggestion that QlikView was about to shut down, so we should migrate in order to keep our support from the OEM and technical partners.

The initial setup is straightforward - I would rate it five out of five. We used an agile methodology to implement, starting with one module and then adding multiple modules and enhancements later on.

We used an in-house team for implementation.

We pay for our license on a one-year basis, and I would rate Qlik's pricing four out of five.

We evaluated Tableau and Power BI and chose Qlik Sense because it has an ETL capability.

I would recommend Qlik Sense for those dealing with large volumes of data. Qlik sense can give you complete end-to-end BI implementation. I would rate this solution as nine out of ten.

Qlik Sense is used as a Business Intelligence and analysis tool as part of a dual BI tool strategy. The software is hosted on two multi-node environments; production and ad-hoc.  

The production environment hosts the main reporting suite of apps, while the ad-hoc environment is used for one-off or ad-hoc analysis as well as pre-development. A third environment is used for testing releases or developing extensions and features. 

NPrinting is also used to supplement the capability of Qlik Sense in cases where the users aren't able to access the environment. This happens, for example, with external or third-party reporting, etc. 

Qlik Sense has enabled the simplification of reporting and increased the efficiency of its production. Time-saving efficiencies have translated into genuine bottom-line improvements via the reduction in FTE.  

Its implementation has improved the ways of working in the BI teams and stakeholder engagement improvements have been noted. Moderate cost-saving efficiencies from decommissioning legacy software and recycling hardware have been recognised, as well as delivering a far better customer experience for users.

Qlik's comprehensive ETL capability makes it stand out from other vendors. The ability to connect to a wide variety of data sources and its ability to transform the data quickly and efficiently is extremely powerful; especially when speed to market is the priority for app development. 

The front end has more than enough capability and visualisation options available and rarely is there any limitation that cannot be surmounted quickly and efficiently.

A steady stream of updates ensures that the product keeps moving forward and the output looks great on mobile devices. 

The SaaS offering is being enriched quickly in order to attract new customers to that space and encouraging existing customers to make the switch. The Enterprise solution is therefore lagging behind SaaS in features. As such, the user needs to invest additional expenditure to ensure that all the services are available for the Enterprise solution.  

A lot of the features available in QlikView have now been introduced to Qlik Sense so it would be good to see that effort continue to go into developing front-end capability further still.

We have been using Qlik Sense for seven years.

Support was extremely good in the early days of QlikView, possibly less so since Qlik has been sold.

We implemented it through the vendor. Excellent service and "aftercare".

We use Qlik Sense as an on-premise enterprise self-service BI solution with a single physical Windows server.

We also have value-added products to support our solution including Qlik GeoAnalytics and Qlik Nprinting. We have dual-use licenses with QlikView for all of our users. All licensing is based on individual user names and access, which allows for unlimited use per user.

The end-users range from senior-level executive management to individual contributors such as data and business analysts.  All development is performed via web browser and no desktop client is necessary.

My organization now has data from disparate systems at their fingertips in a way that lets them get the answers they need when they want it. We previously relied on manually intensive legacy reports that provided static data and information.

Customers would need to constantly request updates to their analysis to answer additional questions and turnaround times were often days to weeks. Now, insights are gained within seconds, which has reduced reporting requests significantly from all areas of the organization.

QlikView was a framework for rapid application and dashboard development. Qlik Sense takes that rapid development to a whole new modern level.

I can stand up new dashboards and data discovery tools often within one to two days.

The speed of execution, modern visuals, and the power to get and manipulate data from anywhere are why you should choose this product.

Qlik's performance is among the fastest in the industry due to its in-memory architecture, which allows data to be loaded and cached in RAM for maximum efficiency.

The augmented intelligence features don't work well for the analytical user. They are difficult to set up correctly and often don't generate anything insightful.

The SaaS options often include these extra features and they are rolled out sooner and automatically.  Unfortunately, this is not an option for my organization at this time. There have been updates that include some new chart times but it's still lacking some common modern ones.

I've been using Qlik Sense for about two years and have been using QlikView for about 10 years.

Have had no issues with stability or downtime since implementation

Performance is industry leading and scales directly with hardware as you would expect

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

Setup was significantly more complex than QlikView and some of the competition but allows for more modern and robust administration.

Our in-house team was responsible for the initial setup.

For on-premise enterprise users, a number of additional features come at a premium cost.

We evaluated both Tableau and Power BI.