The associative/relationship engine and fast performance are the most valuable features of the product for me. It is excellent for number crunching with basic visualizations and known questions.
Solution Architect at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It is excellent for number crunching with basic visualizations and known questions.
What is most valuable?
How has it helped my organization?
QlikView is used internally for financially-focused groups. It has moved folks out of Excel land into interactive/shared analytics.
What needs improvement?
I would like to see improved performance/scalability at high data volumes + high user concurrency. Having only in-memory capability for hosting source data is a constraint.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using QlikView for 2.5 years.
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October 2024
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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
No issues with deployments/stability. Departmental-scope in use has it well-positioned here.
How are customer service and support?
Technical support is very good.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Nothing else was reviewed, given the business area lead had previous experience with QlikView and wanted that for his department.
How was the initial setup?
Initial setup is straightforward. It is not a complex system to install.
What about the implementation team?
We used a regional vendor that had experts in the platform to help us install/configure/jumpstart our use, working directly with the business department in need.
What was our ROI?
ROI is unknown. However, licensing costs continue to increase in QlikView and in Tableau, which we also use, forcing us at some point to consider consolidating to one and/or turning some existing/owned MicroStrategy licensing inward to replace if the the upward pricing trend continues.
What other advice do I have?
Pick the right tool for the job/consumers of the products. There is not a single product that can cover all personas/use cases well or there would be only one product out there commanding the world – and there’s simply not just one. QlikView is great for numbers-focused users who live in Excel today and want a better way to create common metadata and analytics that can be easily distributed/consumed by target users.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Information Systems Development Manager(Senior) – Divisional Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
With its associative data capability, one click causes a whole ripple effect though the whole dashboard.
What is most valuable?
QlikView’s associative ability. The AQL that QlikView uses to associate and ‘bring together’ similar data types (based on name) is extremely powerful and useful. One click causes a whole ripple effect though the whole dashboard, because everything is associated to one another.
How has it helped my organization?
We have used code to create a calendar effect. We then loop through that calendar, executing SQL at the end of each month. This is not easy to mimic in normal SQL, and would require an SQL package to perform such a thing.
QlikView allows us to perform these feats with ease.
What needs improvement?
QlikView does not work very well with very large data sets. I would like to see that improved.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used this product since Jan 2013.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Besides the stability issue with large data sets, I have not encountered any other deployment, stability or scalability issues.
How are customer service and technical support?
Technical support is 3/10.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have not evaluated any solution similar to QlikView (e.g. Tableau).
We did not previously use a similar solution.
How was the initial setup?
Initial setup was straightforward.
What about the implementation team?
A vendor team implemented it. They knew the tool best and we could get it up & running a lot quicker. Part of the implementation included training.
What was our ROI?
Not easy to answer. What we use it for, internal to the company, is to track internal costs as we manage quite a number of cost centers. We've successfully managed our budgets and have recovered quite a substantial amount of money for our CC as QV has allowed us to track incorrect CC billing.
What other advice do I have?
QlikView really works well. We have had no complaints from users about its functionality. There has never (or hardly) been a time where a user makes a comment like “Oh, pity that QlikView can't do this…”
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Buyer's Guide
QlikView
October 2024
Learn what your peers think about QlikView. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Operations Officer Team Leader at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
Easy to use, simple to navigate, and reliable
Pros and Cons
- "Once you open it up, you see everything that you can do."
- "Sometimes the filters are disappearing, and I'm not sure why this is happening."
What is our primary use case?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used the solution for one year and six months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
I don't have any communication with technical support.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
I didn't handle the initial setup and I'm just the one user.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Data Manager at a wellness & fitness company with 10,001+ employees
Transformative. Lightning fast, flexible and a breath of fresh air
Pros and Cons
- "A well designed app brings freedom of inquiry to meetings, allowing me to answer questions in real time and this has transformed progress and outputs of our monthly group meeting."
- "Syntax editor needs some work, it's frustrating to have valid syntax being flagged as incorrect."
What is most valuable?
Ability to connect and transform data from a variety of sources into the same application. From an analytical development perspective, there is a wide scope to create complex calculations within chart expressions, (including recursive expressions), which, combined with the trellis functionality, means more output with less setup effort.
A well designed app brings freedom of inquiry to meetings, allowing me to answer questions in real time and this has transformed progress and outputs of our monthly group meeting.
Finally, it really is a case of data instantly updating upon selection. No more watching an egg timer as a server churns away.
How has it helped my organization?
Meetings are now proactive rather than reactive with analysis conducted straight away. We're making better informed decisions - and more of them!
I have automate a complex set of analysis within a matter of days (as a relatively novice user), that had taken weeks, with less useful outputs, in other software.
What needs improvement?
Syntax editor needs some work, it's frustrating to have valid syntax being flagged as incorrect. It would save time troubleshooting errors that don't exist when the script runs or charts render.
For how long have I used the solution?
1 year, but not a heavy user - though this will change!
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Solutions Manager Business Intelligence at a marketing services firm with 51-200 employees
With in-memory calculations at the UI, it is possible to build charts, tables, etc. directly on the user interface.
Valuable Features
- 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.
Improvements to My Organization
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.
Room for Improvement
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.
Use of Solution
I have been using this solution for 3.5 years now.
Deployment Issues
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).
Stability Issues
It is stable, but of course stability depends on your IT infrastructure and deployment chosen.
Scalability Issues
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.
Customer Service and Technical Support
Technical support is good, but could be improved.
Initial Setup
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.
Implementation Team
We contacted Qlik Tech directly for a cluster implementation (at my current company).
Pricing, Setup Cost and Licensing
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.
Other Solutions Considered
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).
Other Advice
- Check your user and business requirements first and check if QV can help you solve your user / business needs.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Product Manager - Healthcare Analytics at a healthcare company with 51-200 employees
It's helped us aggregate our client-based data, but it is a very heavy RAM utilizer.
Valuable Features
- KPI's
- Dashboard creation
Improvements to My Organization
Powerful, scalable, and a bit addictive, allowing you to "see" your data in ways never thought possible. We can now take medical stats presented in an academic journal and applying them to community-based medicine. This literally changes physician behavior like no other tool.
We were struggling with running application reports, and were spending substantial time, and high-end resources to deliver the basics. Implementing QlikView for our clients also allowed us to aggregate our client-based data and see "What type of reports are they running" "What time of day" "Which users". This data alone allowed us to immediately focus on the points of user experience which would impact the users the most.
Room for Improvement
Online education, but they are revamping.
Use of Solution
I've used it for two years.
Deployment Issues
No issues encountered.
Stability Issues
No issues encountered.
Scalability Issues
QlikView is a very heavy RAM utilizer (all strong BI tools are). When we hit around 20 concurrent users, the user experience began to suffer. We contacted Qlik Support and they assisted us with a review of our infrastructure. We followed their suggestions to the tee, and were back with great speed!
Customer Service and Technical Support
Customer Service:
It's excellent, and very responsive.
Technical Support:It's excellent.
Initial Setup
Simple, low level learning curve.
Implementation Team
We did it in-house.
ROI
Currently $1 spent = $3 recouped (including labor/support/Infrastructure).
Pricing, Setup Cost and Licensing
Push for more services in your installation (consulting, IT, Development, Design). Sales can be very creative.
Other Solutions Considered
We also looked at Tableau.
Other Advice
Review your end-goals, internally and externally. This can be a powerful tool for your clients but also for internal decision making.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
BI Expert at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Advanced information applications can be built, not only simple ones.
What is most valuable?
As a BI professional sometimes you have to tackle projects with poor or no documentation at all, just the datasources and some vague requirements. In QlikView it is quite easy build up a first data model (dimensional or not) and use the first stage to understand the entities and relations between it and the business. From there you can explore the business, understand the users real requirements and needs and improve the model with a few changes, without much effort. This is because Qlikview has a very flexible and short cycle of development in each iteration.
For the user QlikView is a wonderful tool of data discovery, providing powerful tools to navigate easily between a sea of data in an intuitive, easy, and clear way, allowing them to go from facts to KPI and vice versa.
How has it helped my organization?
Qlikview can be used both as an advanced reporting tool as well as an BI KPI tool, becoming the base for continuous process improvements. In general the benefits of the tool become clear at the early development stage when the user is challenged to input clearly his ideas, problems and needs and that will affect the process in which he participates. Typically in a second iteration the key user will ask for a new release more oriented to advanced KPIs rather than just reports. This is a direct consequence of the process making things clearer and evolving. So the main value supplied by Qlikview is to reduce uncertainty, make the participants question, discover, interact with each other, and eventually improve the process. Properly used should function as an improvement catalyst for the processes involved.
What needs improvement?
It is well know that the ETL is quite far away from leading products like Data Stagem Informatica and others. Currently Qliktech is working on this problem with Expressor, a powerful graphic dataflow tool. Another area is the licensing scheme, which leaves out many SMO. To remedy this and try to stop the eruption of third parties (e.g: Tableau), QlikTech launched Qlik Sense, although the future is unclear and there may be a possible merge of the two branches (Qlik Sense + QlikView). Finally QlikTech, since release 10/11, leaves the development of new graphic charts to the community with mixed results.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have using it for the last five years, since 2010 at least.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
The deployment of the dashbords, in the simplest scenario, is so easy you just drop a unique file (qvw extension) in the published folder and the solution appears into the main web page that works like an index of all solutions: the access point.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The product has great stability although in some circumstances, especially if it is low in resources or the reload process encounters some kind of dead lock while extracting the data from the DB, it could/will result in the shutdown of the service. The good news is the automatic behavior: I never saw corrupted data or unstable behavior, just restart the service / reload and all works well again.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The product is designed to scale both horizontally and vertically. Some organizatations which have servers and dashboards that handle until 30 Tb of data have had some issues that finally have been addressed by the support service of QlikTech.
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service:
The customer service is provided by the local reseller and is fine. We have mainly used it to get the new releases and some support during the installation.
Technical Support:The technical support in my country is provided by the master reseller and it looks good even when they have to pass the case to Qliktech to figure-out the problem and find a solution. In this last case it can be somewhat delayed because these cases needed to reach the top levels of the service.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have used (and still use) Microsoft BI: SSISm SSAS and SSRS. The productivity level of QlikView is quite superior, whilst Microsoft licensing scheme is really better, specially when there are large number of users and a lot of SQL licences deployed making it (MS) much cheaper.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was absolutely seamless and the only requirement for a successful deploy is a little training to the users, not only about how to use QlikView, but what can be done with QlikView, giving them the initial spark.
What about the implementation team?
In general the vendors which I have worked with were very well qualified, although not very inclined to share information easily.
What was our ROI?
This question is hard to answer because except for a few cases its impossible to measure how the project (not the tool) improves the results of the organization. Such measures are available at the organizational level, but it is difficult to quantify the proportion of the contribution from one tool to a whole process.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The start cost is around of US $25.000 and the annual royalties are around 20% that includes customer and technical support and upgrades.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I have evaluated Tableau and Microstrategy. The first one is too basic (wonderful if you are a final user). The second one: extremely complex, just for very large organizations and large IT teams.
What other advice do I have?
Think seriously about the possible population of users, how it will grow-up, and check the licensing cost and its limitations.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Head Of Business Intelligence at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
User-friendly, easy to understand, and reliable
Pros and Cons
- "The scalability is there."
- "They could improve the update time."
What is our primary use case?
We're using the solution to make reports, follow up, check our numbers, and basically manage the data.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used the solution for five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is stable. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
I've never spoken to technical support. If there is anything wrong, we speak with our tech team and then they speak with QlikView.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I don't directly deal with the pricing of the solution.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Qliksense is replacing Qlikview and ease of use and increased functionality is available with Qliksense. The company and support engineers are very helpful and the development community is strong for both products - Qlikview and Qliksense. For heavy Excel and .net developers and users, this is the better tool. We tried tableau also and Tableau was more complex.