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Director of Development at Strat-Wise Consulting
Consultant
Top 5Leaderboard
Tableau provides very fast interactive visual analysis.

I do use both Tableau and QlikView. Although very different, I really like both solutions. They belong to the new BI generation known as Interactive Visual Analytics.

In my opinion, QlikView has a more intuitive interface for regular users or executives that are not technical experts but the development side is a little more complex. Up to version 12 QlikView did not provide drag & drop features.

If a user wanted to see something not included in the application the new object had to be created by a power user or developer because Qlikview's scripting has somewhat of a learning curve.

On the positive side, QlikView's scripting is a great asset as it functions as an ETL allowing the integration of hundreds of different data sources into the same visual app.

Another feature that’s extremely useful is Qlik’s proprietary Associative Model that allows the users to visualize data relationships that exist as well as those that do not.

Tableau on the other hand is a lot easier to use for developers, analysts or power users who need to connect, manipulate and visualize data rather quickly. While this makes Tableau a better fit for the more analytical crowd, it may not be as appealing or intuitive to the regular or casual business users as QlikView is.

Tableau has full pivot, drag & drop and drill down capabilities that are great for developers or power users. They can rotate measures and dimensions and graph them instantly using visualization best practices as suggested by the "show-me" feature.

Tableau’s provides a forecasting function and the capability to connect with the open source statistical program R to include predictive modeling.

Tableau includes a Data Interpreter that makes data cleansing, column splitting and crosstab pivoting very intuitive. Tableau’s latest versions allow joining tables from different data bases and have included the hyper data engine that provides 5 times faster query speeds.

The latest version includes "relationships" with an algorithm that makes
the necessary data connections automatically with no need to perform joins or add Level of Detail scripts (LOD) to eliminate duplicates. However one can still create joins to override relationships if for some reason it was necessary.

Also when opening older files containing joins they are kept under a 
"migrated data base" or the migrated joins can be deleted to be replaced with simpler automatic relationships. Tableau releases updated versions once a quarter.

Both Tableau and Qlik continue to be excellent. They are positioned at the top of the leader's quadrant in Gartner's 2022 Magic Quadrant report for BI and Analytics platforms.


In my experience the choice depends on the fit with the company culture and the users' profile.

Qlik introduction of their new platform called “Qlik Sense” provides intuitive drag & drop functionality to create visualizations. At this point Qlik Sense Desktop is free for personal and small group of cloud business users that need to easily develop analytic applications on their own - with virtually no IT intervention.  

Recently Tableau has moved to a subscription based model but still offers free products: Tableau Public and Tableau Reader to ease the user entry process.

It certainly seems like Qlik Sense is an attempt to regain some of the impressive growth Tableau has enjoyed during the last few years playing in the truly self-service visual BI segment.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
LesCampbell - PeerSpot reviewer
Audit Data Analyst at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Robust solution, but could use a PowerPoint integration
Pros and Cons
  • "Qlik Sense is essentially a web-based tool even though it's on-prem – you're working off an HTML page – so it's pretty quick. Your processing speed does not matter because you're using a lot of stuff through the web. That's great because it brings down the cost in regards to hardware."
  • "There is room for improvement in the storytelling mode and the report sharing. Qlik Sense also does not have a subscription base like Power BI. So a lot of the analysis is housed in community pages that are managed by either the author or a database administrator, or whoever the Qlik Sense manager is there."

What is our primary use case?

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

What is most valuable?

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

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

What needs improvement?

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

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

For how long have I used the solution?

I have five years of experience with Qlik Sense. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

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

How are customer service and support?

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

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

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

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

What about the implementation team?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

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