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Looker Studio vs Qlik Sense comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Looker Studio
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (9th)
Qlik Sense
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
119
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (4th), Embedded BI (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. Looker Studio is designed for Reporting and holds a mindshare of 2.9%, up 2.6% compared to last year.
Qlik Sense, on the other hand, focuses on Data Visualization, holds 7.0% mindshare, down 9.4% since last year.
Reporting
Data Visualization
 

Featured Reviews

Vijay Subramanyam - PeerSpot reviewer
The ability to perform aggregation before visualization allows for effective data slicing and dicing
Looker's ability to perform aggregation before visualization allows for effective data slicing and dicing. The seamless integration with Excel and Google Sheets and custom filter creation features facilitate detailed trend reports and analysis. Looker has significantly improved productivity by reducing the time spent on creating summary reports from weeks to a day.
Vishal_Goyal - PeerSpot reviewer
In-memory data storage boosts performance
The advantages compared to other BI tools show architectural differences. The main feature is that it keeps all the data in memory. It doesn't retrieve the data from data sources when I need it on the dashboard; instead, it quickly provides the desired data, making it very fast compared to other BI tools. The ROI is very high using Qlik Sense. It offers many benefits of BI. It is flexible from a developer's point of view, allowing me to accomplish many tasks compared to other BI tools. From an end-user perspective, it's convenient and performance-oriented, providing something meaningful from all the organization's data.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The solution is free so that is a good feature."
"The best thing about the tool is that it allows you to share information easily and dashboards with colleagues and teammates because it's all online. No matter where you are, as long as you have the Internet, you can connect and use these dashboards. Google made good documentation for this tool. There are many examples of how to use and create dashboards and videos on YouTube. So, I think it's easy to learn."
"I am impressed with the tool's scheduling mechanism, refresh mechanism, and different types of charts."
"Looker's ability to perform aggregation before visualization allows for effective data slicing and dicing."
"The ability to integrate with a great variety of data sources."
"I find it favorable regarding speed of development, ease of building, and flexibility."
"The integration with Excel and Google Sheets is a valuable feature, making it easy to access and visualize data."
"The company dashboard is useful because we could share it via a link as a reminder for everyone to check it weekly. We observed the progress of our portfolio from last week to the current week, allowing us to compare revenues."
"We began to see how our processes and other team's processes were negatively affecting the bottom line. We were able to provide tips to other teams to help improve their processes."
"Qlik Sense is a very powerful and useful tool."
"I would rate it more than nine out of ten."
"The integration with R & Python for predictive modeling, and possibly machine learning in the future, is very valuable."
"It has improved our organization by providing data to decision-makers in a safe visual environment."
"Qlik Sense brings in the concept of shared libraries where one user can create custom dimensions (even with drill-down functionality), measures, and even visualizations and save it to the "Master Items," from which the other users can simply drag and drop to use it for their analysis."
"The tool's data analysis is useful to help out the teams across the globe and to track their work."
"The ETL component allows us to pull from many different sources, making pulling data in easy."
 

Cons

"There are issues with integration and I encountered limits and warnings, especially with my pivot table size."
"The tool should improve on live data integration for quicker data reflection."
"Other tools might be worth considering if you need more advanced features or support for a larger user base."
"The tool has a lot of room for improvement. It's not very professional and allows for only simple tasks like indicating KPIs or quick calculations. It lacks a good calculation-based language like Power BI's DAX, making it less suitable for professional use. Additionally, the variety of visualization tools is limited, and customization options are restricted."
"Insisting on forums, blogs and community outreach in communications, and posting videos on an established calendar would be useful."
"It's not yet a replacement for a complete BI tool."
"The challenges with Google Data Studio are associated with the security part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"There is a significant degree of sophistication required to compete with Tableau or Cognos."
"The product could be improved by implementing a user-feedback ranking system."
"There are some tools like Alteryx, which are used for data preparation. These features can be built into Qlik to make the process smoother."
"The SaaS offering is being enriched quickly in order to attract new customers to that space and encouraging existing customers to make the switch. The Enterprise solution is therefore lagging behind SaaS in features."
"I would like to see more native features from QlikView integrated into Qlik Sense."
"The management console appearance needs improvement to its look."
"Even though a huge set of learning material is available, anyone starting his/her journey on learning the software doesn't even know where to start it. The so-called Continous Classroom service is not cheap, but there are many free tutorials, they are not sorted or enlisted adequately though."
"In my opinion, collaborative development of the Qlik Apps is a bit tricky and difficult in the Qlik Sense Cloud."
"Appearance could be enhanced, especially when compared to Tableau or Power BI."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is available for free."
"The tool is free."
"The cost is quite affordable based on feature analysis."
"I think the tool is cheap because you don't need to pay anything for using the tool. However, when connecting and analyzing other data sources, you should consider where to analyze this information because Google Data Studio doesn't handle much data well. You must also consider how you will connect this data to it. In this case, you might need to hire DevOps or a data team to help with these issues."
"The solution is free but the Google Looker is expensive."
"Qlik Sense is pretty good in terms of price."
"The costs can initially become quite high. Make sure you have a clear understanding of who will truly use the product as opposed to someone that will simply receive the end report."
"For personal use, the desktop version of Qlik Sense is absolutely free, and you can share visualizations with others and to a personal cloud space, though limited with storage space."
"The new licensing model is much better."
"You will spend more time on educating your staff than licensing the product."
"We have 20 licenses for Qlik Sense, and it is a special license that allows people in the whole company to use it over time. You buy this license and there are some minutes that can be used. For example, for the users that used only a few minutes in a month, we use this license. All the people have the ability to work with Qlik Sense. However, the number of licenses is not the number of users. The number of users that uses Qlik Sense is approximately 35 people."
"Licensing can start to get expensive, but compared to other tools in this space it is about average."
"Ultimately, the cost is low, and it implements fast. The limiting factor is how quickly your staff can keep up."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
7%
Educational Organization
31%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Google Data Studio?
The company dashboard is useful because we could share it via a link as a reminder for everyone to check it weekly. We observed the progress of our portfolio from last week to the current week, all...
What needs improvement with Google Data Studio?
From the perspective of infrastructure, I cannot provide a valuable opinion on the ease of use and customization options of Looker Studio. I can ask our designers how they feel since they have expe...
What is your primary use case for Google Data Studio?
We use Looker and Looker Studio, as Looker licenses Looker Studio for data presentation and reporting. With GCP, we use Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, Kubernetes, and we utilize BigQuery extensively. ...
Seeking lightweight open source BI software
It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement. Some great tools in the market are Qlik Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos Enter...
Seeking lightweight open source BI software
There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...
What do you like most about Qlik Sense?
The most valuable features of Qlik Sense are its speed and seamless development of web technologies.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Data Studio
QlikSense
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Genesys, Shueisha
Abbvie, Airbus, Barclays, BT Openreach, BMW, Daimler AG, HSBC, IKEA, Nationwide Building Society, Royal Mail Group, Sanofi, Siemens, Wendy'', Vodafone, Volvo
Find out what your peers are saying about Looker Studio vs. Qlik Sense and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
860,632 professionals have used our research since 2012.