Looker Studio vs Microsoft Power BI vs QlikView comparison

Google and Microsoft are both solutions in the Reporting category. Google is ranked #8 with an average rating of 7.8, while Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.0. Google holds a 3.0% mindshare in RT, compared to Microsoft’s 24.3% mindshare. Additionally, 81% of Google users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Looker Studio

Read 14 Looker Studio reviews

1,941 Views
854 Comparison Views

81% willing to recommend

Microsoft Power BI

Read 326 Microsoft Power BI reviews

23,400 Views
9,594 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

QlikView

Read 162 QlikView reviews

3,219 Views
1,835 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Looker Studio

Microsoft Power BI

QlikView

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Looker Studio, Microsoft Power BI, and QlikView based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle and others in Reporting.

To learn more, read our detailed Reporting Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Reporting

September 2025

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Helped 868,275 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Looker Studio is 3.0%, up from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 24.3%, down from 26.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of QlikView is 4.4%, up from 3.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Reporting Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Microsoft Power BI	24.3%
QlikView	4.4%
Looker Studio	3.0%
Other	68.3%

Reporting

Featured Reviews

Vijay Subramanyam

Delivery Head at cblsolutions

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.

Read full review

Shoury Priyanshu

Senior Manager, Strategy & Consulting at Viacom18 Media Pvt Ltd

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.

Read full review

Arjun Meda

Assistant Vice President at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

Useful for data visualization and business intelligence

Many of the features in Qlik Sense need to be available and reintroduced in QlikView. I believe many of the features have been added to QlikView after the layout containers were introduced. QlikView used to be a way more customizable tool than Qlik Sense is in the present time. Improvements are required in the hide and unhide functionality that falls under the layout container feature that has been used in my company in recent times. Hiding off the apps in the app overview tab based on the access was a really good feature that needs to be introduced back in the product since I see that, at the moment, there are multiple groups on the tool, owing to which multiple changes on the QMC part is required to handle the solution. Only the person with access to the dashboard in QlikView could have a link to the dashboard through QlikView's hub or access points. With Qlik Sense, one can see whatever is available in the stream. If a user wants to control everything in the product, then there is no need to make multiple changes in the QMC at the individual app level. The aforementioned area can be considered to improve Qlik Sense.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Looker's ability to perform aggregation before visualization allows for effective data slicing and dicing."

"The product's initial setup phase is very simple."

"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."

"The integration with Excel and Google Sheets is a valuable feature, making it easy to access and visualize data."

"The solution is free so that is a good feature."

"The ability to integrate with a great variety of data sources."

"This has improved our organization by allowing people to see their data and develop visualizations themselves."

"I find it favorable regarding speed of development, ease of building, and flexibility."

More Looker Studio pros

"The Microsoft Power BI app is very good. It's also very flexible."

"Microsoft BI is very easy to set up and use."

"It's quite flexible, and it's easy to create reports using this system. It is very graphic and very user friendly."

"I like Microsoft BI's drill-down feature and its overall ease of use."

"The solution's most valuable feature is the graphic representation."

"Technical support is quite good."

"The best feature of this solution is the way you can plan, communicate, and visualize all the knowledge you extract from the data for the customers. I like the way you can show or visualize the information a client needs to answer a business question."

"The most valuable feature of Microsoft BI is its visualization and its ease of use."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

"On the positive side, QlikView's scripting is a great asset as it functions as an ETL."

"The search feature: ability to see the related data."

"The most valuable aspect is its extensive library on Microsoft, providing a robust framework for implementation."

"It is useful to use a tool like this to have a view of data at a point in time. You can extract and create little data sets that you can store, and then over time, you can have a view for tracking changes. Especially when you work with a relational database or a database that's a production database, the data is dynamic, but if you use QlikView, you can take a snapshot of different datasets. In your own time, you can then get insights and report, build, analyze, and draw whatever you need from the data, which is quite useful."

"It excels in supporting database connections and various database types."

"We use QlikView for its cost-effectiveness and ease of integration with databases."

"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."

"It's incredibly fast and can handle large volumes of data without slowing down our operations."

More QlikView pros

Cons

"Other tools might be worth considering if you need more advanced features or support for a larger user base."

"There are issues with integration and I encountered limits and warnings, especially with my pivot table size."

"It's not yet a replacement for a complete BI tool."

"The tool should come up with data modeling layer features that are present in other products like Power BI."

"Panels are not as easy to use as other data extraction UIs."

"There is a significant degree of sophistication required to compete with Tableau or Cognos."

"The tool should improve on live data integration for quicker data reflection."

"Stability and scalability an be improved for a full ten."

More Looker Studio cons

"I think because I'm moving more into RPA, I'd definitely like to see integration across the RPA, Power BI, or Tableau platforms, because that integration could then make automation and mundane reporting much faster."

"The look and feel should be updated in terms of the types of dashboards and graphs that you can produce. They aren't as visual as some of its competitors."

"The solution's documentation needs improvement."

"The solution doesn't integrate well with third-party tools."

"The product’s on-premise reporting servers could support real-time data refreshing capabilities like its on-cloud version."

"It would be better if they had some video tutorials. Most people from an Excel background may struggle with measures in Microsoft BI."

"It could have more of a hold on big data. Manipulating big data on this solution complicates things. This needs to be improved."

"It needs more analytic tools."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

"It needs work with visualization."

"The tool is expensive in Turkey."

"QlikView is probably on the pricier side than other BI tools."

"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 Qlik view's scripting has somewhat of a learning curve."

"I would like to see more advanced features from Qlik Sense integrated into QlikView to keep it competitive and up-to-date."

"Installation and deployment could be made easier and quicker."

"They should offer the capability to directly access data from SaaS environments, as it would simplify the migration process, and while it may seem like a minor enhancement, it would be beneficial to our clients."

"Enhancing user-friendliness would be highly beneficial."

More QlikView cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 product is available for free."

"The tool is free."

"The solution is free but the Google Looker is expensive."

"The cost is quite affordable based on feature analysis."

"The price of the license can be better."

"I have not had a customer suggest the solution is too expensive. There are licenses to use the solution."

"Both cost-wise and implementation-wise, this product is a good choice."

"Microsoft BI requires licenses."

"There are a few options available for purchasing a license. Typically the number of users you have will determine the price of the license. The more users you have the more you will pay."

"The pricing is good. It's pretty competitive because I have worked on a few other tools as well, and Power BI is on the cheaper side."

"Compared to others, I think it is reasonable."

"I rate the product price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

"Its licensing costs are moderate, but it can get expensive due to the numerous add-ons available like those for printing."

"Pricing is a bit too high and I think licenses should be unlimited."

"QlikView is more expensive than one of its competitors."

"I rate the product's pricing a three out of ten."

"Qlik is fairly high in terms of pricing."

"It has an annual license. It is expensive as compared to other competitive tools that do more for less. In South African rands, we pay about 100,000 to 200,000 a year."

"I rate QlikView's pricing a five out of ten."

"It is quite expensive, rating at around nine out of ten on a cost scale."

More QlikView pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user79932

Senior Manager - BI Head at NVidia

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

University

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

Government

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	5

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	134
Midsize Enterprise	57
Large Enterprise	165

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	73
Midsize Enterprise	36
Large Enterprise	75

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Google Data Studio?

We are aware that there are areas in Looker Studio that could be improved. Out of the box, if you don't utilize a tem...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Google Data Studio?

Regarding the product, I was doing research for a client in the LMS industry. I was seeing what else was out there an...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What do you like most about QlikView?

If you correctly use the product for your use cases, it provides value for money.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for QlikView?

The license cost per user or per year for QlikView is about 500 Euros annually, and since we are South African-based,...

See all answers

What needs improvement with QlikView?

In QlikView, I believe the improvement that should be made is to bring the costs down, as you'll have to be competiti...

See all answers

Comparisons

Amazon QuickSight vs Looker Studio

Compared 43% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs Looker Studio

Compared 7% of the time

Qlik Sense vs Looker Studio

Compared 4% of the time

IBM Cognos vs Looker Studio

Compared 4% of the time

TIBCO Jaspersoft vs Looker Studio

Compared 3% of the time

More Looker Studio Competitors

Tableau Enterprise vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 13% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 10% of the time

Databricks vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 7% of the time

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 7% of the time

KNIME Business Hub vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 4% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

Tableau Enterprise vs QlikView

Compared 17% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs QlikView

Compared 10% of the time

MicroStrategy vs QlikView

Compared 6% of the time

IBM Cognos vs QlikView

Compared 5% of the time

More QlikView Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Looker Studio

September 2025

Download Looker Studio product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

September 2025

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Buyer's Guide

QlikView

September 2025

Download QlikView product report

Also Known As

Data Studio

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

No data available

Overview

Google Looker Studio is a free tool designed to help users create visually appealing reports and dashboards, making data easier to understand. It allows you to connect to various data sources such as Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and spreadsheets. With Looker Studio, you can create charts and graphs to showcase trends and comparisons, build comprehensive dashboards that provide an overview of your data, and customize reports to match your brand or preferences. Additionally, you can share your reports online or export them as PDFs for wider distribution.

Google

Microsoft Power BI is a powerful tool for data analysis and visualization. This tool stands out for its ability to merge and analyze data from various sources. Widely adopted across different industries and departments, Power BI is instrumental in creating visually appealing dashboards and generating insightful business intelligence reports. Its intuitive interface, robust visualization capabilities, and seamless integration with other Microsoft applications empower users to easily create interactive reports and gain valuable insights.

Microsoft

QlikView is a Business Intelligence tool that allows you to keep tabs on all of your business-related information in a clean, clear, and easy to access database that is intuitive to build and simple to navigate. It is ideal for business owners who wish to improve overall output by creating the most productive system possible.

Qlik

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

Canon, Gatorade, Amcor, Panasonic, Fila, Cambridge University Hospitals, Global Retail Bank, North Yorkshire Police department, Lanoo Group Publishers, and AonGroep Nederland.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle and others in Reporting. Updated: September 2025.

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