QlikView Reviews

Our primary use case is an application that our users use to get the profitability on a monthly basis.

It's pretty easy to deploy.

I would want them to have more options as a user. It would be nice for them to create their own dashboards and add fields.

I did not encounter any issues with stability of the product. 

I did not encounter any issues with scalability of the product. 

We usually use a partner for technical support, so I cannot really rate the service. 

We had the partner help us set up the product for us. So, I do not remember any difficulty with the setup process. 

It is not very expensive. I think it it is on par with other similar products on the market.

• The in-memory engine is really powerful, making it possible to deal with huge data records on the fly (more than 400 million in a table). I have built data models with over 1 billion records and the performance is good.
• With in-memory calculations at the UI (on the fly), it is possible to build charts, tables, etc. directly on the user interface (UI).
• Cubes are built on the UI. No need to pre-aggregate data, but it is of course possible to do that in the script (which I would not recommend) or better deliver data as SQL-View.
• Scripting possibilities to build complex applications and functionality.
• Web integration capabilities, for ex. you can include JScript Objects or R for better visualization.

We are service providers and built applications for our customers, not for us. Our customers are able to evaluate their marketing campaigns at the aggregated and customer levels. They can use micro-segmentation to select the leads.

We actually use QlikView, which does not allow easy-to-use framework management. There is a deployment framework, which I do not find easy to use and somehow not stable. I hope QlikView can improve this.

I have been using this solution for 3.5 years now.

There is no general rule, but we use the deployment framework, which allows us to produce a QV application user with four different levels of deployment:

• One level for the extraction of the data (1 to 1)
• In the second level, we get the original tables and based on the user requirements, build the data model and make the necessary transformations.
• In the third level, we get an intermediary state of the data model to be loaded in the end-user application.
• The fourth level contains the end-user application. We do a “binary” load, which is a command line in the QlikView script that allows us to copy 1-1 to the application we are copying from, in this case, from the third level. We have separate development from production and testing in a highly reachable environment (cluster environment).

It is stable, but of course stability depends on your IT infrastructure and deployment chosen.

Data model, data size, RAM size, hardware CPUs and UI expressions / charts, are strongly related. It is possible to scale QV without problems, but the issue is more complex than not having enough RAM. Complex expressions at the UI level, single threaded object calculations, complex data models, huge data size, etc., can alter the performance of the QV application and thus we might think we need to scale. There are many tools to measure QV performance and to try keep them at an optimal level. Otherwise, if everything else is fine, we need to increase RAM. Actually, we have 1 TB RAM on our production server.

Technical support is good, but could be improved.

Initial setup was straightforward. You need a server, install QlikView with its web server option and then you can start doing applications.

For more complex architectures (clustered, with two or more servers), you will probably need Qlik Tech support.

We contacted Qlik Tech directly for a cluster implementation (at my current company).

Pricing/licensing depends on your company size, the uses of QV, # of users, among others. Named CALs, at approx. 1.200 EUR (see the Qlik website), would be required if you have permanent users with write access to different applications, while Document CALs are good if you have users that will only see a document to perform their jobs. There is good and simple documentation explaining your best pricing / licensing model.

For my previous company I compared Tibco, QlikView, Tablaeu, and other tools, as indicated in the Gartner Quadrant. We did workshops with them, and were happy with QV because you can build something immediately. In the case of Tablaeu, you need a really well-established ETL and / or views. Otherwise, it is complicated for a normal user to build correct charts. Users have normally very little understanding of the data structure. Other tools need pre-aggregation and a long development process. With QV, it is possible to use views, pre-aggregated or raw data and you can still manipulate the data in the script, i.e. do ETL (see Deployment Framework).

1. Check your user and business requirements first and check if QV can help you solve your user / business needs.
2. If yes, check what are the potential uses of QV and describe the environment, company or unit size, # of users, # of applications, # of KPIs, and data volume. After this first check, you may be able to determine how big would your applications be, and thus estimate current and future RAM, necessary IT Infrastructure, # of servers, etc. I would talk to IT to see how to integrate QV into your IT environment. Many people start with an isolated QV implementation in their unit, which is fast, but then you have no single point of truth (this may discourage adoption because the user does not trust the data). But it depends on your goals.
3. Start working and promote user adoption, showing good functionality, fast implementation, and reliable data. QV can then become the main BI tool in the company.
4. Looking forward, QV can be extended in the use of mash-ups, Jscript extensions and analytics with R, so that you can build up in the future. Qlik Sense is a new Qlik Tech product, which offers many new possibilities.

I'm using the product for traffic purposes, leads, and some users. It's about the approval ratio. I'm using data to see what I want to see and based on this, I'm creating some reports for myself and management. Whatever I want to see, whenever I want to look something up, I can do so with this product.  

If we have an FTD, we can see when this FTD came in. This is very, very important for me and for our team to see how the actual FTD came in and when, as, for our department, we are building campaigns for traffic. If we have an FTD that registers today and deposits today, this is different than another scenario where we have when leads from last year that are deposited today. The faster I can see this, the more helpful it is. This is a key feature for me.

It's easy to use in terms of navigation. Once you open it up, you see everything that you can do. You can see what filters you have to choose from right at the beginning, on the first page.

Sometimes the filters are disappearing, and I'm not sure why this is happening. It might be when it's refreshing or updating. I'm not sure. For example, maybe when I'm doing a report and it's refreshing, I can see that all my filters are gone and I need to start again from the beginning. This is the main issue for me.

I've used the solution for one year and six months. 

For the past year and six months, it has been very stable. The numbers are correct as far as I can see. Based on this, reports are created. We haven't had an issue. It's reliable. 

We have 30 or 40 people using the solution currently.

I'm not sure of total scalability, however, based on the scalability of the data, of course, it has a lot of scalability available since we have thousands of FTD leads. We need scalability. So far, we haven't had a problem achieving it. 

That said, if the solution can scale according to the number of users, I'm unsure.

As of now, project coordinators and the business intelligence team are using it. 

I don't have any communication with technical support.

I'm using Qlik Sense as well. It's something very similar. It's just some different places that you're going to have. You're going to find some different filters, however, at the end of the day, it's very similar.

I didn't handle the initial setup and I'm just the one user. 

I'm an end-user of the product.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using at this time. 

My advice to everyone that is using QlikView that's a beginner is to check every page that it has. When I started using it, after one or two months, I found a lot of pages that were very important for the company. If I knew they were there from the beginning, I would have checked those pages instead of using only one or two things. Every page has very important info.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

QlikView’s associative model is a fantastic design that enabled the Green/White/Grey feature. This feature greatly helped us highlight the relationship between different kinds of data.

To further explain the Green/White/Grey feature, let’s take a sales report of an electronics shop as an example. In this report, it may have dimensions (Product Category, Salesman) and expressions (Sales Qty, Sales Amount).

Green means the values of dimension that you have selected. Under the Product Category dimension, it will have different values e.g. Smartphone, Laptop, Desktop. If we want to see the sales performance of Smartphone, we can click on Smartphone, then it will become green. We can also select multiple values e.g. Smartphone and Laptop in the dimension.

White – shows the values of dimension which are related to the another dimension values that you have selected.

Grey - shows the values of dimension which are NOT related to the another dimension values that you have selected. By following the previous example, we have selected Smartphone in Product Category dimension. In the Salesman dimension, Salesman e.g. Jeremy or Janice who have have sold Smartphone will be shown in white color. Another Salesman, e.g. Roy, who didn’t sell Smartphone will be shown as Grey. This is very useful for us to identify relationship between dimensions

Its “Search Object” function is also very useful for us to search for the information we needed.

“Section Access” is another great feature as we can identify user authority on accessing data in an easy way.

Another feature "Set Analysis" which enabled us to configure different behavior for each dashboard. So that some dashboards (e.g. YTD) can be freezed and not affected by some of the filter selections.

My experience using QlikView was in a F&B chain store with outlets around the world. In such a F&B chain store, there are a lot of dishes and they are changing frequently with a high transaction volume.

In such an environment, a search function is very helpful for us when we want to find out the sales performance and trend of a specific dish.

Qlik’s associative model greatly helped us identify customer purchase behavior and we can define combos according to this information.

By comparing with the latest data discovery tools like Tableau, Qlik Sense and Sisense, the layout and colors are not eye catching enough. It looks like a very powerful excel with a lot of powerful features for analysis. But it may not be good for presentation.

I used it for two years.

Qlik is able to import data directly from a transactional database and create joins between the tables in there. However, I encountered a performance issue with high volumes of data.

Therefore, I suggest designing a data warehouse and use it instead as Qlik’s data source. The performance will be much better.

Actually, I can’t remember any issue that I was required to check with customer service or technical support. For nearly all of my questions, I can get answers in the Qlik community.

I have previous experience with IBM Cognos. It was a very comprehensive solution that can be used for pixel-perfect reports, email schedules and also data analysis. However, there are many more development and implementation steps than with Qlik.

Also, Cognos requires a steep learning curve even for a user with a technical background.

As we wanted an easy and user-friendly self-service BI solution, QlikView is more suitable from this perspective.

On the server side, it is quite straightforward and we didn’t encounter any problem.

On the client side, the user can access it by browser or a desktop application. For the desktop installation, it can be downloaded from internet. And the configuration to connect the server is very easy; even end-users are able to do it. We prepared just one slide and end-users are able to follow it.

We implement it through a collaboration with the vendor. The vendor team is responsible for installation and configuration. And the in-house team is responsible for development.

My advice is to use a data warehouse as the data source, which can greatly reduce Qlik implementation time, as creating too many joins in Qlik is not a best practice.

My advice is to start small with the named license scheme as the price is much cheaper and it will be much easier to gain management approval.

People who have interest on QlikView should also take a look on Qlik’s another product Qlik Sense. They have similar features (e.g. Section Access, Search function, Associative model).

QlikView relies more on the IT side. IT builds the base and a majority of end-users make use of it. Some power users can build dashboards, share with others and create formulas in there.

Qlik Sense is a self-service BI tool. It is easier to use and stronger in visualization. But some advance formulas might not be available.

• In-memory performance – It allows slicing and dicing of a huge volume of data in the dashboard very fast if designed optimally.
• Scripting – It provides a flexible data-preparation layer, along with the ability for data integration from multiple data sources. This enables creating a reporting data model inside QlikView from a transactional system without impacting the performance of the transactional system, if designed correctly.

Overall, it enabled connecting the entire spectrum of data into a single dashboard in:

• Finance – connecting sub-ledger txn details all the way to GL
• Supply Chain

• Self-service capability is very limited, though it has been improved in QlikSense. However, it will require an additional license & server to set it up.
• Dashboard capabilities and features are not on par with Tableau, though the same has been attempted in QlikSense. However, Tableau still has better dashboard features.
• Real-time analysis with live connection (direct discovery) is very limited.
• The current version is missing a variety of connectors and they need to be procured separately.
• Not adaptive to display across various screen resolutions

I have used this solution for two years.

Initially, there was an issue with LDAP and SSO integration (a compatibility issue with an earlier version of SiteMinder).

Initial setup was non-clustered and we encountered performance issues. It resolved once we moved to better infrastructure in a clustered environment of QlikView.

Technical support is very geographically oriented, but isn’t truly 24X7.

Initial setup was not intuitive, but straightforward for a Qlik admin expert.

A vendor team implemented the solution.

I evaluated Tableau. However, we selected Qlikview because:

• Tableau’s current recommendation is to build dashboards directly on top of the reporting DB (for example – data mart or consumption layer) to avoid doing complex logic or transformation inside the tool and using a hybrid approach of live connection and extract. Tableau is currently not an extract-heavy tool. However, with the recent HyPer acquisition, we are expecting some changes.
• Incremental loading (updates and deletes) inside Tableau is a challenge, which can be achieved very easily in QlikView.
• Limitation in Tableau on # of columns and rows in table view

Evaluate visualization tools based on your organization need and appetite to spend on BI technologies overall (DB, etc.)

We're using the solution to make reports, follow up, check our numbers, and basically manage the data.

It's user-friendly and easy to use, even for new users. The solution is simple to understand. It's easy to explain it to the new members of the team; they don't need much training, and it's really straightforward.

We don't have to export the data and make the pivots and everything else in Excel. We can manage our tables over there for what you want to see.

The initial setup is simple. 

It is stable.

The scalability is there. 

They could improve the update time. Sometimes it takes longer to update, so we see numbers of maybe half an hour ago or one hour ago. If it could be updated faster. That would be something that would help us a lot.

I've used the solution for five years. 

The solution is stable. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

I don't see a limit in terms of scalability. I can see the users, I can see a lot of numbers there since we have individual entries. We've never had trouble with expanding. 

In the company, in my team, almost everyone is using it and we're about 20 people. You could say above 50 people for sure using it in our organization. 

Now we don't have a lot of agents. In the past, we had more agents working with us and it was more than that. 

Mostly the BI department and managers are using it. Whoever deals with the entries and the numbers basically deals with it. All of us use it daily.

I've never spoken to technical support. If there is anything wrong, we speak with our tech team and then they speak with QlikView.

We also use QlikSense. QlikSense is much faster than QlikView, however, on QlikView, we go to a view that we call dynamic. We have two columns that we can choose from for what kinds of entries we want to see and then it makes them show a pivot and a lot of filters above. You can make your own table on the spot without having to spend much time on it. It's something we don't have in QlikSense. This is why we still use QlikView at the moment. Everything we need, basically, we can see on both QlikView and QlikSense.

The solution is easy to set up. It's straightforward. It's not overly complex. 

While our tech team is large, there are two or three people dealing with opening users in general, not just in the software. They take the tickets when we need to add someone. 

We have a tech team that is doing the implementation. We just send the request to the tech team. That said, it doesn't take long until they reply back to us and give us the user. I'm not sure for how long they need to install, however, my request is usually solved within an hour or two.

I don't directly deal with the pricing of the solution. 

We are end-users. 

It's my understanding that we're using the updated version, however, I'm not a hundred percent sure of that.

I'd advise new users to basically know the timeframes, whenever they're doing reports. There are different ways to choose the timeframe and it could be a bit confusing if you don't know how to use it. Apart from that, it's super user-friendly and you don't need much training in order to use it. Just to know your values and your timeframe.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I was using the solution for data exporting for the organization I was working for. I use it just for the data most of the time.

The product is very user-friendly and easy to operate. 

The initial setup was very easy.

It's pretty stable.

We can scale it if we need to. 

It works properly most of the time. I can't speak of any areas that need improvement in terms of features. 

It would be ideal if it was a little bit faster. They could improve the speed. It's not slow per se, however, sometimes it just takes some time to give you the results you want. 

I've used the solution over the last 12 months at least.

The solution is stable and we haven't had any downtime. There are no bugs or glitches. it doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution can scale as needed.

We have at least ten people on the solution currently.

I've never directly dealt with technical support.

The initial setup was pretty simple and straightforward.

We had an IT person that installed the program. We mostly dealt with it, however, he helped explain the features to us. 

I don't handle the licensing aspect and therefore can't speak to the exact costs. 

I am just a customer and an end-user.

I'm not sure which version of the solution I'm using. 

I'd recommend the solution as it is pretty user-friendly in general. 

Overall, I'd rate the solution an eight out of ten.