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Looker Studio vs Microsoft Power BI 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:
 

Mindshare comparison

Reporting
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
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.
Shoury Priyanshu - PeerSpot reviewer
Facilitates seamless data aggregation with some outdated visual elements hindering user appeal
Real-time data integration is an area for improvement. Although I've worked on several solutions involving real-time integration, it's not very user-friendly and often lags, especially with over a million data rows. This makes Power BI difficult to manage as loading times can reach one or two minutes, which is problematic today. There are challenges with scalability, requiring multiple pages in dashboards to manage these issues. Visualization could be improved as it appears outdated. Users, especially newcomers, find it unappealing and not user-friendly.
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 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."
"The ability to design complex data models and equations."
"Looker's ability to perform aggregation before visualization allows for effective data slicing and dicing."
"This has improved our organization by allowing people to see their data and develop visualizations themselves."
"I am impressed with the tool's scheduling mechanism, refresh mechanism, and different types of charts."
"The integration with Excel and Google Sheets is a valuable feature, making it easy to access and visualize data."
"The product's initial setup phase is very simple."
"The ability to integrate with a great variety of data sources."
"My favorite feature is the power query editor, where it can do the data transformations."
"This is a self-service BI tool, so it doesn't require a huge amount of technical training, knowledge, or a background in BI in order to induct new people into it."
"Provides data feeds for enterprise KPI reporting."
"It is a good platform for data analysis, organization, and all of the other interim performances that are necessary."
"The most valuable feature is shareability, where we can publish work to the cloud and share it with team members."
"I have found the best features to be the dashboard creation, graphs, charts, and presentation bar graphs."
"I like that I can use Power BI to upload data. That is very important for me. The visualization is also convenient and easy to use."
"You can learn a lot of things quickly using resources like ChatGPT or Microsoft's own solutions, which are very helpful within the Microsoft ecosystem."
"Qlik Sense is much more user-friendly and easier to read then QlikView."
"The tool's data analysis is useful to help out the teams across the globe and to track their work."
"The product is reasonably priced."
"Unique data visualizations created based on - among others - customer reviews and hands-on experience. Qlik is an experienced company in the Business Intelligence / Data visualization area, that doesn't necessarily mean it is the best solution, however, based on my personal experience it is much more complex than Power BI and Tableau as I've had some things to do with these two concurrent softwares."
"The changes in a dashboard are very easy."
"It has high performance when interacting with dashboards and reports."
"The most valuable feature of QlikSense is that you can capture the data without modifying it and then perform the ETL (extract, transform, and load) process."
"Some of the valuable areas of this solution include producing individual reports and closing the gap."
 

Cons

"The challenges with Google Data Studio are associated with the security part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The performance of Looker needs improvement, particularly the report loading time, which is critical for business users."
"When you physically install a product on one machine instead of the cloud, you have a better visibility, best icon quality, etc.. It's more of an issue with how we are adapting to the transition. We are still in the early moments of using this tool, and we need to go deeper to discover some improvements."
"There is a significant degree of sophistication required to compete with Tableau or Cognos."
"From the perspective of infrastructure, I cannot provide a valuable opinion on the ease of use and customization options of Looker Studio."
"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."
"Panels are not as easy to use as other data extraction UIs."
"Insisting on forums, blogs and community outreach in communications, and posting videos on an established calendar would be useful."
"Its desktop tool is a little bit memory CPU intensive, and it can be improved, but the machines nowadays come with a lot of memory. For the desktop users who are using it on the desktop, we recommend that they do an upgrade. It is a minor issue. We can fix it on the desktop."
"In Microsoft Excel, you are able to have tabs. However, in Microsoft BI you do not have this flexibility."
"Although there are many visualizations, most of them are paid separately because they have been developed by private developers. The visualizations that come off the shelf are quite few."
"From a scalability and performance perspective and based on my understanding and feedback from end users, there's room for improvement in data processing, scaling up, and leveraging the cloud. That could be an enhancement area for me to look into."
"They can provide a user-friendly and easy way to use this tool for people who don't know about programming or technical things. It will be quite good if they can improve the look and feel and make it simpler to operate. They can make it easier to create some of the reports. They can also include predefined templates that you can directly use."
"It's quite difficult to learn how to use Power BI."
"The only concern I have faced with Microsoft BI is the time it takes to find out an issue and rectify it."
"Whenever you work on the same dashboard or on the same code, Microsoft Power BI doesn't have a good architecture that allows multiple people to work on the same project."
"Currently, we are not very happy with the iPad or iPhone app because it is not working as we want."
"The scripts available in the solution are not great."
"This solution would be improved by adding some Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning (DL) components that are easier to interpret and design."
"The next version should include more standard integrations."
"The reporting solution recently added to the latest Cloud version, since December or January, is not fully developed. The ability to use tabular reporting, like in dashboards, would be a great feature."
"Report generation without the need for NPrinting, which has limited capabilities anyway, would be an improvement."
"Appearance could be enhanced, especially when compared to Tableau or Power BI."
"One area of improvement is that it doesn't offer an API for accessing processed data stored in the QED files."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is free."
"The cost is quite affordable based on feature analysis."
"The product is available for free."
"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."
"The solution's pricing is medium."
"Its pricing is great."
"I'm not very familiar with the licensing aspect, as it operates in the cloud as a SaaS (Software as a Service) model. Essentially, you pay based on cloud cost models, which might include hourly rates or similar billing structures introduced by Microsoft. Many organizations utilize it and pay for its services, somewhat like Office 365. It's a cloud-based platform that provides the necessary services, including support, for development, and you pay accordingly for the usage."
"Price is the best feature of Power BI! You get a lot of value for the price. If you know how to use it, it's a great BI solution for your money."
"Power BI is cheaper for smaller groups when comparing to competitors. It requires a monthly per-user subscription."
"The solution’s pricing is reasonable."
"For my primary use case, i.e. teaching students, the free version of Power BI is adequate."
"I would advise that Microsoft BI products are rightly priced and the licensing is easy to follow and to fulfill."
"The cost is not bad considering the flexibility and support you receive from Qlik. I believe it is worth the cost."
"I would rate Qlik's pricing four out of five."
"Ultimately, the cost is low, and it implements fast. The limiting factor is how quickly your staff can keep up."
"Qlik Sense pricing and licensing is like that of QlikView. It's on the high side for a small company, but it’s competitive among its peers. Use of licenses (referred to as tokens) is a bit confusing. There is a login access pass for infrequent or anonymous access."
"The new licensing model is much better."
"Understand the break over price point for switching to the Enterprise license."
"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 could be cheaper."
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 4, 2015
Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho
1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
University
7%
Educational Organization
22%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
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. W...
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 opti...
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 u...
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 wou...
Is Power BI a complete platform or only a visualization tool?
Power BI is an advanced visualization tool oriented to big data with a very complete set of widgets to visualize info...
How does Oracle OBIEE compare with Microsoft BI?
Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are ...
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 ...
What do you like most about Qlik Sense?
The most valuable features of Qlik Sense are its speed and seamless development of web technologies.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Qlik Sense?
Costs depend on the deal. They offer various licensing metrics based on our needs. For small or large organizations n...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Data Studio
SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI
QlikSense
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Genesys, Shueisha
Accenture Adidas Aetna AIG Airbus Alibaba Allstate Amazon American Express Aon AT&T Audi Bank of America BASF Bayer Berkshire Hathaway Boeing Coca-Cola Comcast Cisco Coca-Cola Dell Disney Emirates Equinix FedEx Ford GE Google H&M Home Depot Honda IBM Intel JPMorgan Chase Kellogg's Kroger L'Oréal McDonald's Merck MetLife Microsoft Nike Oracle P&G PepsiCo Procter & Gamble Prudential Financial SAP Siemens Snapchat Spotify Starbucks Target Toyota T-Mobile Unilever Visa Walmart WeWork World Bank Xerox
Abbvie, Airbus, Barclays, BT Openreach, BMW, Daimler AG, HSBC, IKEA, Nationwide Building Society, Royal Mail Group, Sanofi, Siemens, Wendy'', Vodafone, Volvo
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