QlikView Reviews, Competitors and Pricing

it_user225840

Business Analyst ( Marketing BI Analytics) at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Aug 31, 2016

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You can use bookmarks for filters, rather than entering inputs every single time.

What is most valuable?

The server load, the QVD load, ease of variable declaration, and the different dynamic charts are very valuable to me.

How has it helped my organization?

Our complete BI transformation and production was done through QlikView instead of basic Excel reporting and analysis, reducing manual input, ease of automation and more reliability in numbers, thanks to fewer human input errors.

What needs improvement?

Currently we are building a pane to use filters and select options. For a dashboard, if they would add a "Column value" filter option like what you see in Amazon on the left hand side, that would be useful.

It could also have an autosave feature, which it direly lacks.

A direct feature to export views to PowerPoint, instead of external plugins, could be useful.

Sometimes large files are difficult to read and QlikView crashes midway. So you need to start from scratch. Instead, if it could support reading and processing large files with a lot of records (4 million +), that would be useful. This was one such issue we faced while doing a BI transformation as the data generated was huge.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used QlikView for 3-4 years now.

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How are customer service and support?

We did not seek technical support. I simply researched answers in forums and through Google searches, blogs etc.

What about the implementation team?

With the help of IT teams, the QlikView online servers were set up (one for production, one for testing). So, implementation was done completely in-house.

What was our ROI?

ROI can't be measured directly, but the power of BI can be visualized through QlikView.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I personally feel the QlikView server license is extremely expensive and might not be affordable for most organizations. However, all clients felt QlikView was so easy to operate, see results live and visualize in great charts, easily copied to PowerPoint. They were able to easily log in, select their regions, time period and view the results in a single shot instead of viewing multiple Excel reports and looking up, etc.
They used bookmarks for their filters and that made it even easier, rather than entering the inputs every single time.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated Spotfire, Tableau and finally chose QlikView to be deployed for all dashboards in the organizations.

What other advice do I have?

QlikView can be a powerful tool in your organization if you are serious about a complete BI transformation and moving away from standard Excel reporting.

Given standard training and experience, migrating to QlikView is a very good choice.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user238098

Reporting Analyst at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Aug 31, 2016

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Non-technical stakeholders can quickly engage with and navigate through their data as business information.

Valuable Features

QlikView enables fast visualisation, analysis and navigation through data. It is very flexible, and offers easy-to-develop, quick-value tools for navigating and understanding data.

Improvements to My Organization

QlikView allows non-technical stakeholders to quickly engage with and navigate through their data as business information.

Room for Improvement

Data modelling is often a protracted process, with no toolset available apart from scripting. The consequent data models are not very portable at all.

Use of Solution

I have used this solution for five years, sometimes more intensively than others.

Stability Issues

One of QlikView's greatest strengths is its in-memory handling of large amounts of data. The flipside to this is some ongoing leakage, which makes it sensible to reboot once a week.

Customer Service and Technical Support

Qlik's support model for everyone except large enterprises is through consultant partners, so it depends on the quality of the partner. On the whole, they seem to be good.

Implementation Team

It was implemented via a consultant partner. They were technically very good, but one should ensure the consultant delivers comprehensive documentation. A solution is only as good as the ability to navigate through it and enhance it as the business changes.

Other Advice

Although normal advice would be to mandate that the implementation deliver to business-specific requirements, it is strongly recommended to understand the product's great capabilities, and to exploit the competitive advantages of the product. Otherwise, it becomes just another business intelligence tool blindly shoehorned into a business that doesn't gain the best value and ROI from it.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

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QlikView

February 2025

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Learn what your peers think about QlikView. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: February 2025.

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it_user130470

Technical Associate at a real estate/law firm with 10,001+ employees

Aug 31, 2016

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The dynamic interactive dashboard is the most valuable feature of the product to me.

What is most valuable?

The dynamic interactive dashboard is the most valuable feature of the product to me.

How has it helped my organization?

Lots of scripting used to be required to build high quality dashboards.

What needs improvement?

This cannot be considered a self-service product. It requires IT support.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used QlikView for one year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

This is quite a stable product, but very huge data loads must be complemented by good hardware. Otherwise, there could be performance issues.

How are customer service and technical support?

Technical support is OK.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

The only reason we chose this product is its dynamic interactive dashboard. It works well on iPad. We liked the product, as compared to MS BI.

How was the initial setup?

Initial setup is quite straightforward, but it requires good hardware for high data loads.

What about the implementation team?

An in-house team and a vendor team collaborated on the implementation.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It is quite expensive. There are two types of licenses: Named User licenses and Doc CAL licenses.

What other advice do I have?

You need to have good scripting skills.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user326526

Senior Business Analyst at a logistics company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Aug 30, 2016

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It runs in-memory so you can increase the speed by increasing RAM, depending on your budget.

What is most valuable?

Intuitive data insights and standard reporting.
It runs in-memory so you can increase the speed by increasing RAM, depending on your budget.
It has its own ETL tool, QlikView Connector.

How has it helped my organization?

It gives intuitive data insights to improve and optimize our global supply chain (help drive and build strategy to improve on-time delivery, reduce quality and damage returns, etc.), with a few simple clicks to drill down to the details (down to the SKU level and call centre conversation details with customers). The dashboard gives management a holistic picture on our important KPIs.

What needs improvement?

Enhance predictive analytics and big data; this is the future trend.
Simpler, cleaner charts and visualization (easier user acceptance)
Formatting and repositioning the menu/charts takes a bit long. It does not have drag-and-drop capability like Tableau does.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using QlikView for 2.5 years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

There’s no version control, which means you can't roll back to earlier versions once overwritten/published.

How are customer service and technical support?

I rate technical support 6/10.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I also evaluated MS BI and tableau. Compared with MS BI, I find Tableau and QlikView have stronger visualization; intuitive data insights; less development lead time - MS BI requires creating OLAP cubes, which takes more time; clearer and simpler charts; and intuitive data mapping/insights.

How was the initial setup?

Initial setup was straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

We implemented it in-house. QlikView is running in memory, so it depends on your organization to achieve the balance between cost of server RAM and performance. Besides, the data quality and accuracy is very important, no matter what powerful visualization tools are used.

What was our ROI?

Tableau seems to have easier user acceptance than QlikView because of the simpler charts and big data integration, increasing the possibility of helping an organization transform from reactive analysis to predictive analysis.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Server versions are not cheap and pretty similar for both Tableau and QlikView in terms of price. I don't see a big difference; it really depends on your organization's need.

What other advice do I have?

If you have more developers/technical people and want to do more standard reporting without Hadoop, go for QlikView; if you have more business users with some SQL knowledge and would like to do predictive analytics, and integration with big data platform Hadoop, go for Tableau.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user254223

Project Manager - Business Intelligence at www.datademy.es

Aug 4, 2016

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We use QlikView to create department dashboards with useful analysis.

What is most valuable?

Flexibility
Agile development
Intuitive
Very good performance
Excellent user groups

How has it helped my organization?

We use QlikView to create department dashboards. We can create powerful dashboards with useful analysis in a few days.

What needs improvement?

I think its visualization has room for improvement, and I know Qlik Sense has better visualization.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used it for two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It's difficult to manage big and complex data models, but the reason is that there isn't a semantic layer in Qlikview, but not having a semantic layer is a good point in other aspects, like agile development.

How are customer service and technical support?

Excellent, very good and active community.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I have used Business Objects and Microstrategy. QlikView is a different tool. It has advantages and disadvantages compared to Business Objects or Microstrategy. The main advantages are flexibility and agile development.

How was the initial setup?

It was straightforward.

What was our ROI?

We haven't calculated the ROI yet.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I think the pricing is really competitive.

What other advice do I have?

QlikView is an excellent reporting and data discovery tool. I have used it on a departmental scale, but not on a corporate level so I don't know how it will behave on that level.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user377319

Analytics Application Consultant Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Jan 31, 2016

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The associative and in-memory technology are the most valuable features.

What is most valuable?

The associative and in-memory technology are the most valuable features.

How has it helped my organization?

It’s an easy way to create dashboards with minimal training. This product is good and I can collect data from multiple data sources.

What needs improvement?

They need to improve on the idea, concept and support.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used it for five years, alongside Qlik Sense.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

There were no issues with the deployment.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There were no issues with the stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

There were no issues with scaling it.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

8/10

Technical Support:

8/10

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

No other solution was in place, but I have tried others and they can't offer what Qlik can.

How was the initial setup?

QlikView initial set-up is simple just run the installer and click next.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

If you can license QlikView with Qlik Sense it’s very good.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Tableau
MicroStrategy

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: I’m Qlik Partner in Indonesia

it_user6855

CEO with 51-200 employees

Jul 7, 2013

More than just a pretty face, there is some truly innovative, and very useful technology on offer here

QlikView has more than just a pretty face, there is some truly innovative, and very useful technology on offer here. The company talks of maintaining associations between data, and this facilitates a much more flexible approach to data exploration and visualization. In practice what this means is that users can search available data resources with the knowledge that any relevant items will be retrieved, no matter how disjoint the origins of the various data items. In a way it is almost a merging of enterprise search with BI – something I talked about several years ago. The QlikView Business Discovery Platform provides an enterprise wide solution to the need for information. It embraces IT (instead of alienating it), business users and analysts. This is comprised of three main components – the QlikView Server, QlikView Publisher and QlikView Desktop.

QlikView Desktop is where the associations between data items are established and where the user interface is laid out for QlikView Apps. An SQL like scripting language is used to create associations for use by business users and analysts.
QlikView Server is the engine of the architecture where in-memory processing takes place and where issues such as security are addressed. It also handles communication with clients (web browsers, mobile or desktop) and includes a web server, although Microsoft IIS can also be used.
QlikView Publisher loads data from the various defined data sources and distributes documents to the QlickView Server(s) for consumption by users.

Because the users generate their own reports and visualizations IT is left to get on with addressing the infrastructure issues associated with BI, including security, capacity, governance and systems management. The analyst typically uses QlikView Desktop to create the data models users will need. Meanwhile business users are presented with an environment where the data can be viewed as a unified whole, where a rich visualization environment is provided and where needed, QlikView supports extensive collaboration features.

QlikView has clearly thought the whole thing out both conceptually and practically. The net result is that every function in the organization should get what it wants. This is a different, and potentially much more productive, approach to BI. The capability does not extend to data mining or other forms of analytics, and it doesn’t pretend to. The scripting language provides ample means to create highly bespoke solutions to individual organization needs, and as a BI tool it should not run into any dead-ends. QlikView is certainly worthy of serious consideration.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user7161

Consultant at a consultancy with 51-200 employees

Jun 17, 2013

Managing QlikView Server Without a Publisher

I have many clients who are using QlikView Small Business Edition or Enterprise Edition without Publisher. I'd love for them to add Publisher because I HATE HATE HATE managing file permissions in windows. I love that publisher automatically distributes QlikView documents to the User Documents folder and I can easily change who will receive each file right from the Management Console AND I don't have to remote into the server to do it

Ok, time to end this publisher love-fest and time to get down to the business of designing our security environment when you don't have publisher. I'm writing this post because I spent a good chunk of the other day fixing a problem we had that was caused by a goofed up security configuration(This is called learning from experience because I goofed it up). So after banging my head on the wall trying to figure it out I thought it would be a good idea to share with the interweb.

Here is my use case...

I work for a company who has 25 Named user CALS and 100 Document CALS(Probably not an important detail) There are several departments using QlikView Dashboards Each department includes sensitive data in their Dashboards so they must remain private to the department. There is also a Corporate Dashboard used by the C Suite and the CEO often uses the department dashboards to explore information about some key clients.

Our data is built by first extracting data from the source databases into QVD files. Dimensions are conformed and key fact tables are also built in QVD format. The Conformed Dimensions and Facts are combined into data models based on user requirements and finally the data models are binary loaded into the user applications and presented on Access Point.
A three tier data flow model provides the framework needed to present clear and consistent data to all your applications.

So let's start planning. We want to set up a folder structure to use in our Small Business Edition server to manage user access to their documents, and provide organization for our ETL framework, remember we don't have publisher. Obviously we can get very complicated with this but for the sake of explanation I'm going to make a single directory our starting point, I'll call it "QlikWarehouse".

Applications The Applications folder contains our user facing QlikView documents I always add one folder for each application and I design my security around those folders. You should create a "QlikView Users" group in active directory and assign read/write access to the Applications folder. Then you will override inheritance for "QlikView Users" on the application specific directories and grant read/write access to a group that corresponds to the folder for that application. In the QEMC you will set the Applications folder as the "Root" folder, when you do this the QlikView Server will add several files in the Applications folder, if your users do not have read/write access to these files then they will see login failure errors and you'll get to bang your head on the wall to figure out the problem.

Load Scripts Load scripts is added to the QlikView environment as a mapped meta folder. Mapping it into the QEMC will allow you to set the reload schedule for your data. It is essential that your users do not have access to this folder. If they do you will be exposing documents to the users that will not have any data in them and probably cause nothing but confusion for your users.

Data Most of the files in the data directory will be QVD files but you must map it because the data model files will live in here but just like the load scripts your users should not have access to this directory.

Active Directory security settings needed to manage your QlikView SBE deployment.

Following this kind of configuration will allow you a couple of advantages.

Management Got a new Application? Create an AD group to go along with it and make it a member of Qlikview Users.

Simplicity Users only see the applications that they have access to, period.

Compatibility This structure is compatible with publisher so if you do decide to expand your Qlikview footprint you'll be ready to go. It won't be a turnkey deployment but this structure is close enough to adapt to the Source Docs/User Docs division in publisher.

I'd like to encourage comments since this is just what I've been doing when I deploy a server, any suggestions, criticism or praise(especially praise) is welcome.

A quick note on the images in this post, I would like to give credit where it is due. Many of the individual icons have been clipped from various presentations I have received from Qliktech however the overall diagrams are my creation(even if not terribly creative).

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.