I use the solution primarily for business intelligence. It’s commonly applied in the financial, human resources, and sales sectors, providing comprehensive insights across various business functions.
BI Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Has valuable associative data model providing comprehensive insights across various business functions
Pros and Cons
- "The platform's most valuable feature is its associative data model. It allows me to discover hidden data and gain insights that are not immediately visible."
- "The product's visual capabilities could be improved. The graphs and visualizations are not as aesthetic or easy to create."
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
The platform's most valuable feature is its associative data model. It allows me to discover hidden data and gain insights that are not immediately visible.
What needs improvement?
The product's visual capabilities could be improved. The graphs and visualizations are not as aesthetic or easy to create.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using QlikView since 2012.
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The product is stable. I rate the stability a ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The platform is highly scalable. I have worked on projects with up to five servers to ensure scalability for large numbers of users.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have also used Power BI. The main difference is that QlikView provides a complete solution for data extraction, transformation, and loading, whereas Power BI is primarily focused on data visualization and often requires additional tools for comprehensive data manipulation.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is relatively easy, though there can be challenges related to licensing due to the variety of license types available. The deployment often involves a team of people, depending on the complexity of the implementation.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The platform's pricing is considered quite expensive, particularly given the dollar-based pricing.
What other advice do I have?
The associative data model in QlikView uses color-coded indicators (white, green, and gray) to show data associations. This helps me identify how data points relate to one another and discover hidden insights.
I rate it an eight.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
Last updated: Aug 20, 2024
Flag as inappropriateQlik Technical Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
It is a highly sophisticated self-service business intelligence tool for developers and analysts.
Pros and Cons
- "E-T-L, The Extract, Transform, and Loading capabilities of QlikView make it a highly sophisticated self-service business intelligence tool for developers and analysts."
- "The user interface and ease of use takes a bit of a learning curve to pick up."
What is most valuable?
E-T-L, The Extract, Transform, and Loading capabilities of QlikView make it a highly sophisticated self-service business intelligence tool for developers and analysts who desire much more advanced handling of dirty or unconsolidated data. QlikView scripting language has numerous transformation functions.
How has it helped my organization?
As a consultant for my organization using Qlik to design management dashboards, analysis and ad-hoc reports, I have seen the way it has helped many of our clients get the desired reports and analysis for their stakeholders and top directors which would normally take time and more effort to get.
What needs improvement?
The user interface and ease of use takes a bit of a learning curve to pick up. There is no drag and drop functionality at the development stage unlike its competitors. Maybe QlikSense could handle that area.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using the solution for five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We haven't yet encountered any issues with stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
QlikView is a memory intensive application and does sometimes start to weigh on your PC resources. Also you would need to learn some development tricks to manage unnecessary time wasting when loading large database sources, like the use of QVD – QlikView proprietary data format - for faster and efficient loading times.
How are customer service and technical support?
The Qlik community is very vibrant and you find or get answers to most issues started or any other areas.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We did not use a solution previously.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is pretty straightforward for personal use, except when you are looking at deploying the QlikView server which will entail some configuration instructed during the installation process.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
QlikView pricing and licensing is on the high side for a small sized company, but it's competitive among its peers.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
As a consultant in the area of business intelligence and data analytics I have had to personally evaluate QlikView with other self-service BI tools such as Tableau, Power BI and MicroStrategy.
What other advice do I have?
Invest in the memory and RAM of your PC or server you intend to use for QlikView. Ensure you have all the necessary resources and connectors installed for proprietary databases.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: My organization is a Qlik Partner.
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QlikView
December 2024
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824,067 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Senior Manager at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
The associative engine and feature-rich expression scripts are the most valuable features of this product.
What is most valuable?
The associative engine and feature-rich expression scripts are the most valuable features of this product.
How has it helped my organization?
Easy, low-TCO solution to consolidate and visualise data for analysis and reporting purposes.
It provides better visibility of the company's position and its operations.
What needs improvement?
I would like to see more visualisation objects features.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used QlikView for more than a year.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
I encountered minimal deployment issues.
How are customer service and technical support?
Technical support is excellent.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have experience with other similar visualizers, but QV offers a better experience in terms of ETL development.
How was the initial setup?
Initial setup was straightforward, with a simple, easy interface. We had a simple setup anyway, not much complexity. We were able to get QV up and running in a very short turnaround time.
What about the implementation team?
It was implemented in-house assisted by a lean vendor advisory team.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: We are also an SI partner.
Project Manager at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
We now have set up and shared dashboards across our services. Not all the features are available for Mac users.
What is most valuable?
Dynamic dashboards is definitely the most valuable feature. You select your filters and all your graphs and tables are automatically updated; it really saves time when doing analysis!
How has it helped my organization?
Thanks to Qlikview we have been able to set up and share dashboards across our services. We can monitor our internal productivity and revenue, but as well our client’s activity and be proactive if we see a sudden change in volumes. We also monitor our service levels.
Qlikview is giving visibility to our directors and VP , accounts department, as well as operational managers who can follow on their teams productivity.
What needs improvement?
Qlikview is very intuitive and user friendly compared to other solutions, however I regret that some of their features are not available for Mac users.
A build your own report feature on standard .qvw would be great. Qlik has recently launched Qliksense, it answers this need but we cannot use the Qliksense feature on Qlikview reports. An all-in-one solution would be perfect.
For how long have I used the solution?
Since 2008
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
Initial database set up was the main concern.
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service is good, however we mainly use the Qlikview community. We can reach out to other users / developers who are always available to help.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Before Qlikview we had 2 BI solutions : Cognos and Hummingbird. Hummingbird was more a database extraction tool available for our clients. We then developed our own operational web-based database for our clients to check their transportation invoices and extract instantly the data they needed for reporting purposes. When this solution was live and operational we stopped Hummingbird as it did not make any sense to maintain both solutions.
In parallel, Cognos was our BI tool for dashboards/ graphs. We decided to change to Qlikview since Cognos was more complex in terms of development and less user friendly.
How was the initial setup?
I would say straightforward. Training was provided by our supplier, and our developers already had BI knowledge .
What about the implementation team?
Our vendor (Decideis) helped us with the initial set up and training; we then deployed the solution ourselves.
We are really happy with their knowledge of Qlikview.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Cognos was evaluated and Qlikview was highly recommended by one of our customers.
What other advice do I have?
Define precisely your needs, your budget and the resources available to set-up, deploy and maintain the solution. There are different solutions on the market, choose the one that will answer your needs.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Director of IT at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
QlikView on the Clouds
With the #cloud and #BigData becoming more relevant for enterprises, there is a lot of interest to explore ways of using QlikView on the Cloud. While discussions on private cloud, public cloud and hybrid clouds are continuing, I would focus on using QlikView on Infrastructure on Cloud in this short coverage.
Any enterprise wanting to run QlikView on an off-premise “Cloud” infrastructure can do so by using the QlikView image available on Amazon EC2 cloud. This can allow enterprises to create off-premise, often distributed deployment of QlikView. In essence, running QlikView on Amazon EC2 is very much like running QlikView in-premise. The licenses for QlikView are required to be purchased. The software distribution need not be installed on the Amazon EC2, but a ready-made image of QlikView already available on the Amazon can be chosen and deployed in no time. Refer how QlikTech uses Amazon to run the Demo environment.
The key aspect is, like any other cloud deployment, data stays in cloud. Where enterprises have their current data in the enterprise data center, then moving the data to the cloud could become a bandwidth intensive exercise. Companies who have data already on EC2 are luckier.
Extraction of data into QVDs from their source, and transferring QVD files over to the cloud server is a good way to optimize bandwidth and storage usage. Even if applications like CRM etc. are already in cloud, they exist in separate service providers, and the data still needs to be transferred to the virtual server where QlikView is running. Bandwidth will still be used for the same amount of data.
Following are some key situations when an enterprise can look at cloud:
1. Quick pilot to be done, without waiting for infrastructure additions
2. Do not want the upfront capital costs for server hardware
3. Need a flexible quickly scalable solution
4. Relatively less amount of incremental data being generated
5. As for security, the features of security discussed in chapter “QlikView Security” are relevant in the cloud deployment as well. Integration with data sources and portals are all the same as the in-premise deployments.
Some of the benefits in using cloud deployments include:
- Zero infrastructure requirements
- Elastic scalability
- Instantly available
- Users are up and running in 15 minutes
- Standard QlikView user license pricing (licenses can be moved from and to cloud)
- Shifts expenses from capital expenditures to operational expenditures
- Platform neutrality - Available through Amazon’s fast and reliable Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Web service
Currently, most organizations cannot move completely to cloud, but need a coexistence of in-premise and cloud infrastructure/solutions. QlikView can also be implemented in a hybrid fashion, to take advantage of the cloud benefits. QlikView is not available as a “Saas” or a “PaaS” offering at the moment. OEM offering of QlikView allows OEM customers to custom license QlikView and deploy on a multi-home/multi-tenant servers to offer pay-per-use services. For more information, refer to QlikView Blog: “QlikView and the Cloud - Have it your way” and QlikCommunity discussion “QlikView in the Cloud”.
Integration of QlikView with SalesForce, Workday and other solutions like OrangeScape is possible. Lot of companies who use SalesForce have integrated the QlikView dashboards into the SalesForce portal itself, as a separate Tab. The same is possible with other applications, to embed / integrate QlikView into the cloud front-ends seamlessly.
Integrating employees and extranet users (intermediaries, partners, customers and vendors) is a need in many situations, providing interactive analytics to them. One large global security appliances company has integrated QlikView into their SalesForce interface to provide analytics to their vendors. Implementing Single-Sign-On - using various identity stores is another aspect - where there are challenges. Solutions are emerging through integration partners. Security aspects of this integration need careful planning and execution - require a deep understanding of what is possible. Also the various deployment options need to be kept in mind while planning a cloud integration. I have treated these at length in my book.
With more and more cloud solutions emerging, integrating QlikView on Cloud and offer as a cloud SaaS is slowly emerging as a solution of choice, among the Cloud SaaS providers. More movement of QlikView to the cloud is a natural progression I believe.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Using QlikView on cloud would drastically reduce a company's costs in terms of hardware acquisition and increase performance.
Project Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
QlikView is a highly effective management tool, allowing a broad area of analysis.
Valuable Features:
QlikView is based on a different technology from OLAP technology. Called AQL ™ (Associative Query Logic), this technology has been patented since 1994.
If there is no need rethinking QlikView OLAP cubes, development and implementation of new elements, reconfiguring the graphical interface. Also, working with databases is much more flexible. Thus reducing the time and that the costs of implementing new analysis / reports.
QlikView is easy to use, letting you easily analyze large volumes of data! Interactive graphical interface to predominantly assures unquestionable advantage over other applications. From a few clicks you can find any information in your database, no matter how "hidden" or detailed as!
QlikView is a highly effective management tool, allowing a broad area of analysis. Virtually any existing information in the database the company can be valued by this application, stimulating her performance in an integrated context.
• Qlikview has its own ETL engine built-in
• You can analyze millions of data - QlikView is easy to use, letting you easily analyze large volumes of data!
• Time to implement - Any user / manager can define its own set of analyzes
• Partner Network – Qlikview has more than 1000 partners world wide
• Development - Qlikview has Scripting
• 64-bit in-RAM DB - Qlikview is faster than Tableau
• QlikView is based on a different technology from OLAP technology. Called AQL ™ (Associative Query Logic), this technology has been patented since 1994.
• Interactive graphical interface - Extremely intuitive interface (requires almost no training);
Room for Improvement:
QlikView should give you just that: gather, provide access to, and analyze data and information about their company operations
So, QlikView has little success by itself, so we have to go with: ERP, CRM, or some planning and estimation solutions (this would take what-if scenarios) which means other costs besides the costs of implementing QlikView
This is why QlikView offers the possibility to perform what-if scenarios.
• QlikView has little success by itself, so we have to go with: ERP, CRM, or some planning and estimation solutions (this would take what-if scenarios) which means other costs besides the costs of implementing QlikView
• QlikView can display better analysis but it takes more skill and time to develop/design than with Tableau.
• Qlikview it is stronger than Tableau for reporting only, but it requires more training and is less intuitive than Tableau
• You have to employ IT specialist
• It is limited by RAM, so Qlikview is not very scalable
I chose QlikView specialization rather than other BI solution available on the market due to the advantages this technology offers:- Good price compared to other solutions;
- Flexible licensing system (but not complicated and consists of dozens of modules that other solutions);
- Very little development time;
- Easy maintenance;
- Ability to provide Business Intelligence Off-The-Shelf.
- In QlikView, you can develop yourself analyzes you need in just minutes
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
While development of dashboards may take a bit longer than other solutions QlikView is very intuitive to regular users who need to explore the data in a true interactive analytical fashion .
IT Admin at a logistics company with 501-1,000 employees
Preparing daily reports without requiring additional manpower was the biggest benefit.
What is most valuable?
We appreciate the different methods how data can be provided to a developer, designer and end users. Develop new reports from production databases to final reports without additional tools and
the high-performance loading data from database without any performance issues on the database environment. The loading performance of QlikView data container.
How has it helped my organization?
With the solutions of QlikTech, we are able to provide management with requested reports with proven data within a short time.
We can scale the user properly for the report environment in different and multiple ways.
Preparing actual daily reports without requiring additional manpower was the biggest benefit for our company.
What needs improvement?
We would like to provide our customers with reports in PDF or other popular formats that are not included in the publisher; additional licenses are required for the print and PDF tool. From my point of view, a reduced functionality for this should be included with Enterprise Server Edition or Publisher.
But so far, every new version includes new benefits for us.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have used QlikView since 2010. That includes one year of testing QlikView Personal Edition for development and comparing the functions with our previous BI solution. We started using QlikView in production at the end of 2011.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
We implemented different versions of QlikView within a few years, starting with version 8, Small Business Edition to Enterprise. We also moved to new hardware environment, but never had any issues. All versions we had in production were always stable. At the same time, we never used the first release of a new version for the server environment; the QlikView application has always been tested. Developing and deploying new reports are always tested in test environment before we publish. Scalability of reports should be considered separately.
How are customer service and technical support?
Issues with the software itself are really rare; we just needed help implementing license keys after installation because direct internet access on the server was not available one time during setup. We always get help within a short / acceptable time. Normally, we just use the big user community for further help or information.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Before 2012, we used SAS and Crystal Reports for reporting and BI. When we started looking for other solution, we evaluated the new version of Crystal Reports, but there was no comparable alternative to QlikView.
How was the initial setup?
A comprehensive concept for the initial setup is very important; there are various ways to implement the server infrastructure. If the concept was done properly, implementation might be complex but not difficult. We never had to contact QlikTech for additional support.
The documentation itself, user forum and several tech days was always helpful to start.
What about the implementation team?
We implemented the whole environment without any additional support. Before we start working with the product, we organized in-house training from a vendor partner for developers and report designers based on our requirements.
My advice for implementation is to create a team made up of developers and IT department staff to set up the concept for test and production environments.
Training for IT and developers is available from the vendor, or if you organize in-house training from the vendor partner. Provisioning of data should be the responsibility of the IT department. You can also plan to have the vendor or vendor partner implement the product.
What was our ROI?
The vendor offers multiple possibilities for getting started with QlikView. It also depends upon how many reports you need for initial go-live. Starting with the Small Business Edition or Enterprise depends on the company size and the number of users who will work with QlikView.
What other advice do I have?
The only important advice is to take enough time for the concept of the future environment.
That will make it easy to implement all needed add-ons with future changes.
Follow the vendor’s suggestions for scale responsibilities (IT, developer, designer and end user).
The Qlik user forum will be always helpful to find a solution.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Information Publishing Portfolio Manager at a comms service provider
My most valuable asset in QlikView is the ease with which any datasource can be integrated into the QlikView model for reporting.
What is most valuable?
The traditional BI tools are extremely limiting in the fact that they require very strict controls on the sources of data. This is understandable in very large corporates, but in a small- to medium-size business, where most supporting data sources are nothing more than an Excel spreadsheet, this is a pain. Therefore, my most valuable asset in QlikView is the ease with which any datasource can be integrated into the QlikView model for reporting.
How has it helped my organization?
The models created by QlikView have put critical information at the fingertips of management for decision-making processes. Our warehouse and distribution managers now have a view of the movement of stock, fulfilment of orders and can plan for demand more proactively. We produce our management sales dashboards daily and use the tool to integrate proof of delivery documents with sales orders.
What needs improvement?
I have several lower-level users who don’t need full functionality of the tool, but do need to access more than one model. In this regard, the licencing structure is limiting and costly for a user who is not using the analytical aspects of the tool. QlikView only offers full-user CALs (expensive) and document CALs (less expensive), but those licences only allow the user to access one model.
For how long have I used the solution?
The business has been using this product for four years.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
I did not encounter any deployment, stability or scalability issues.
How are customer service and technical support?
Our implementation provider is very capable, but it is important to partner with a vendor who has industry, regional and technological capabilities, as this cuts down the time to develop customised requirements. Also, it is not necessary to limit yourself to one vendor and lots of freelancers are cost effective for specific requirements.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I looked at IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects, and MicroStrategy. The main draw cards to QlikView was the cost and flexibility.
How was the initial setup?
Initial setup was straightforward.
What about the implementation team?
A team from the implementation provider did the installation and it was simple.
What was our ROI?
Our ROI is the ability to immediately take catalytic interventions with information at hand, implementing immediate savings from lost business and being able to put products to market more effectively.
In-depth analysis on the user roles using the tool should be done prior to implementation as non-managerial staff could probably use a shared licence scenario enabling lower licence count.
What other advice do I have?
If possible, a site visit to other consumers of the tool often sheds a lot of light on work that can be done before implementation to overcome unnecessary problems and delays. For example, properly mapping financial processes, documenting and getting them signed off before a QlikView model is developed will save time and money in rework after the fact. Also forming a network of other users who are not related to the vendor is very valuable in getting unbiased advice.
It is quite versatile and reasonably cost effective.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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