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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
6.7
Number of Reviews
120
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 ability to design complex data models and equations."
"The ability to integrate with a great variety of data sources."
"I find it favorable regarding speed of development, ease of building, and flexibility."
"Looker's ability to perform aggregation before visualization allows for effective data slicing and dicing."
"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."
"Data Studio integrates seamlessly with other Google products, and we can use it with other APIs if we like."
"This has improved our organization by allowing people to see their data and develop visualizations themselves."
"The product's initial setup phase is very simple."
"It has allowed us to manage our staff more effectively and frees up time for our analysts to analyze new problems and opportunities."
"Set analysis is great for its power user capabilities such as performing an IF on an aggregated column. The ability to create custom coloring expressions based on values is also a good idea although not as easy as I wished it was."
"The number of visualizations that are present in Qlik is very useful for our developers to help our business partners tell stories with their data. Qlik continues to add to and enhance these visualizations with each release. We are also very excited to leverage the integration between Qlik Sense and Qlik Catalog as we roll that out soon."
"Qlik Sense provides features to manage and govern data, ensuring data security, accuracy, and regulation compliance."
"We can bring data from multiple sources and easily blend it in Qlik and create a data model (star schema)."
"It is extremely clean to view, easy to use, and intuitive to develop with. There are a host of online resources to provide assistance to new users."
"Placing buttons on my sheets creates a unique user experience and clears up clutter at the same time."
"The reports are better looking than in QlikView."
 

Cons

"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."
"The tool should improve on live data integration for quicker data reflection."
"It's not yet a replacement for a complete BI tool."
"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."
"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."
"Other tools might be worth considering if you need more advanced features or support for a larger user base."
"Some of the charts are still a bit basic and screen rendering on different sized monitors can be an issue."
"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."
"Areas for improvement include user-friendliness, self-service, and some of the visualization options for generating reports."
"Ultra-customization: It needs no limits on which charts can have x amount of dimensions, y amount of measures, z amount of color expressions, etc."
"The product could be less expensive."
"The next version should include more standard integrations."
"In my opinion, collaborative development of the Qlik Apps is a bit tricky and difficult in the Qlik Sense Cloud."
"There is an inability to effectively manage (pre)caching (scheduling, assigning for respective user groups, etc), especially without community extensions or uour own development."
 

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 solution is free but the Google Looker is expensive."
"The cost is quite affordable based on feature analysis."
"The tool is free."
"The product is available for free."
"The solution is worth it."
"Costs are a little high on the license/token side. However, if you look at the TCO, it is not too bad, particularly against Power BI."
"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."
"Ultimately, the cost is low, and it implements fast. The limiting factor is how quickly your staff can keep up."
"Understand the break over price point for switching to the Enterprise license."
"It is a little expensive for the Italian market. Normally, Qlik Sense has two types and costs. The medium cost is around 700 euros per year."
"Licensing could be cheaper."
"You need to pay 5,000 Norwegian kroner per user. Microsoft Power BI is slightly more expensive than Qlik Sense."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
8%
 

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.
864,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.