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Looker Studio vs Qlik Sense vs Tableau Enterprise 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 Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Looker Studio2.5%
Tableau Enterprise14.1%
Microsoft Power BI13.2%
Other70.2%
Reporting
Data Visualization Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Qlik Sense4.8%
Tableau Enterprise9.7%
Domo3.7%
Other81.8%
Data Visualization
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Tableau Enterprise5.8%
Microsoft Power BI7.5%
Amazon QuickSight3.2%
Other83.5%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Heron Ziegel - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Engineer at Quartz Consulting Group
Has supported quick dashboard creation and data sharing but lacks tools for managing multiple reports efficiently
We integrated Looker Studio with other platforms in our data ecosystem; we tried integrating with Sheets, and that went okay, but it could have been better. It could have been better because it needed a very specific format to read the data, so we had to reformat the sheet file. Looker Studio was mostly just helpful in that it provided live updating charts for tracking performance indicators in the organization. Integrating with a database was very difficult because there wasn't a lot of feedback for what was going wrong with the connection. I don't remember if we reached out to support. I didn't personally reach out, but my boss may have. I didn't reach out to support, so I do not have experience with it to rate it. We worked with the free version of Looker Studio initially, and we upgraded at some point to the pro version; I don't remember if we actually paid for it or if it was just a free trial. The pricing was reasonable. I remember doing a price comparison, and it was pretty reasonable, but it did have fewer features than a lot of other software, which was okay for a comparable price but a little cheaper.
SW
Solution Architect at Predoole Analytics
Unlocks actionable insights through user-friendly analysis features
The self-service capabilities that Qlik Sense offers are significant. They offer natural language processing, allowing users to ask questions in layman language, and Qlik Sense will create charts and narratives automatically. Users can access any dashboard developed in Qlik Sense from familiar portals such as Okta or other company portals through embedding features. The integration with chatbots, particularly Microsoft Teams, allows users to access dashboards and ask questions directly within Teams. The collaboration feature enables users to share analysis by taking snapshots and tagging team members within the Qlik Sense interface, eliminating the need for lengthy emails or screenshots. The storytelling feature allows users to create presentations directly in Qlik Sense using dashboard analysis, making it easier to answer questions during meetings. The subscription feature enables users to receive charts and sheets via email instead of navigating to the dashboard, facilitating monitoring purposes. Qlik Sense offers alerting capabilities where users can set thresholds for KPIs and receive notifications when these thresholds are reached. The platform also includes AI/ML features for predictive modeling through a no-code component, allowing business users to create and deploy AutoML models without depending on data scientists. The Qlik Answers component, featuring generative AI capability, enables users to get answers from unstructured data including Excel, HTML documents, or Microsoft Word documents by creating a knowledge base. The user-friendly interface operates on a drag-and-drop approach, with Qlik Sense suggesting appropriate charts based on selected dimensions and measures. The associative engine capabilities allow data association between tables, implementing selections across related tables. The platform uses a color-coding system (white, gray, and dark gray) to show related, excluded, and unrelated data selections, providing insights beyond traditional BI tools.
Swetha Dhanasekar - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior GenAI Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Centralized dashboards have transformed workforce trend analysis and speed up decisions
Tableau Enterprise helps us to consolidate the data and visualize daily and weekly trends in a clear and centralized dashboard, offering powerful features such as interactive dashboards, real-time data refreshing, advanced visual analytics, role-based access control, secure data, and seamless interaction with multiple data sources and automated reports. This will help us to analyze trends and collaborate across teams and scale analytics across the organization. These features help my team specifically by centralizing all employees' data in one place. This helps us reduce manual tracking and gives us real-time visibility into work from home versus office trends. The interactive dashboards allow quick decision-making, and the automated refresh time saves us a lot, while role-based access ensures data is shared securely with the right stakeholders. Tableau Enterprise has had a strong positive impact on our organization by improving data visibility, speeding up decision-making, and managing reports efficiently. The team can now access and track trends more effectively, and collaboration has improved using interactive dashboards. Overall, it has enhanced effectiveness and fostered a data-driven culture across the organization. The specific outcomes showing this positive impact include speeding up decision-making, which is the biggest impact because it saves us more time. Reporting time actually reduces sequentially since the dashboards refresh automatically. Data security is stronger, and data accuracy has improved, thanks to a centralized data source. Decision-making is also much faster since leaders can view real-time impacts instead of waiting for manual entry.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I find it favorable regarding speed of development, ease of building, and flexibility."
"The ability to design complex data models and equations."
"The product's initial setup phase is very simple."
"I am impressed with the tool's scheduling mechanism, refresh mechanism, and different types of charts."
"We previously used Microsoft Power BI, but Google is better."
"I would rate this solution eight or nine out of ten."
"Valuable features include advanced integrated analysis and easy implementation."
"The ability to integrate with a great variety of data sources."
"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."
"The flexibility of Qlik Sense and the addition of 3rd party extensions allow us to extend the use of Qlik Sense beyond analytics and bring the platform to the core of our digital workplace, augmenting analytics with workflow, and team collaboration."
"Qlik Sense has provided insight into specific areas that enabled us to shorten the supply cycle, give a better overview of the company's production, increase profitability, and improve the effectiveness of respective vaccines."
"The mapping capabilities within the GeoAnalytics extension have been a game changer."
"We have found the use of AI to be the most valuable feature."
"The most valuable features of Qlik Sense are its speed and seamless development of web technologies."
"It uses an associative engine + an in-memory environment: I don't have to calculate hypercubes."
"We were able to identify easy things, such as when a contract was loaded incorrectly."
"Everything is user-friendly, and the visualizations are high quality and esthetically pleasing."
"The scalability is simply awesome."
"The product has the best features for analytical views and filters."
"Our company used Cognos Planner and a few other BI solutions before, and Tableau is less expensive and easier to use, making it an easy choice to make the switch."
"The ability to create visualizations of data is the product’s most valuable feature to me because it provides a meaningful view of the data and the metrics used by our clients."
"It has a shallow learning curve and so you can go to market very, very, very quickly."
"Enhanced application development Less time spent with end users Better interaction with end users Better application quality"
"It is definitely easy to use. It is intuitive, and more or less, everything can be done from the front end. As such, there is no concept of metadata. You can just take data from a database and start building your own stuff, such as OLAP data warehouse. You don't need extensive metadata modeling like Oracle BI."
 

Cons

"Stability and scalability an be improved for a full ten."
"The tool should come up with data modeling layer features that are present in other products like Power BI."
"It's not yet a replacement for a complete BI tool."
"The performance of Looker needs improvement, particularly the report loading time, which is critical for business users."
"From the perspective of infrastructure, I cannot provide a valuable opinion on the ease of use and customization options of Looker Studio."
"The challenges with Google Data Studio are associated with the security part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"I would appreciate improvements in the data modeling features, as it's not straightforward, and it's not what people in analytics are used to."
"Insisting on forums, blogs and community outreach in communications, and posting videos on an established calendar would be useful."
"They should generally focus more on the evolution of current capabilities rather than doing everything but only at 50% effectiveness."
"The support aspect could be improved, particularly in terms of response time for high-priority issues, especially when dealing with production environment client issues that require immediate attention."
"I would like to see more types of visual elements and better configuration options for additional flexibility when developing charts."
"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."
"Qlik Sense requires one to have a lot of technical knowledge."
"The only issue with scalability that I can see is that you can't export more than 1,000,000 cells at a time."
"Only when our usage outgrew our physical environment (server size) did we have stability issues."
"It would be nice to have a better system for help tickets than a community forum."
"Some of the command choices have to be memorized and are not intuitive."
"With Tableau, when you're dealing with very large datasets, it can be slow so the performance is an area that can be improved."
"About Tableau Server, it has to access various OS, not only Windows' server."
"Connectivity seems to be a sticky point, but it's also a hard nut to crack at the level that I would love to see."
"The setup was easy but we are having some problems with the configuration that is taking a long time. We have done some initial tests and some of the delays could be from bandwidth issues. However, the whole installation process should be simplified."
"With Tableau, there is a gap in its ability to handle very large-scale data."
"Reports should be downloadable as PDF files."
"Similarly, in Power BI, for integrating with the latest ML algorithms, we have decision trees and primarily multiple machine learning algorithms. We don't have such a feature in Tableau."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is quite affordable based on feature analysis."
"The solution is free but the Google Looker is expensive."
"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 tool is free."
"The product is available for free."
"Start small with tokens. You can always buy more."
"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."
"I'm not able to reveal the licensing cost for Qlik Sense, but because it was a huge deal, the cost was less than the usual cost. The license wasn't that costly. It was the infrastructure that was very costly."
"You need to pay 5,000 Norwegian kroner per user. Microsoft Power BI is slightly more expensive than Qlik Sense."
"Qlik Sense is pretty good in terms of price."
"Qlik Sense and its pricing model can follow any scalability."
"The solution is worth it."
"I would rate Qlik's pricing four out of five."
"Be careful with the Tableau Viewer's licenses, and stay with the right number of users."
"I rate the product price in the Indian region a seven to eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."
"For our organization, the cost hasn't been an issue."
"In Indian Rupees, Tableau costs about 30,000 to 40,000 per year."
"I like the payment model. For the people who need to create, they buy their licenses. Everyone else can use the free Tableau Viewer. This is much better than some of the competitor products, which require full licences for everything."
"Its price is reasonable. Everything is included in the license."
"Tableau has core-based and user-based licensing, and it is tied to scalability. The core-based licensing is about you buying a certain number of cores, and there is no restriction on the number of users who can use Tableau. The restriction is only on the number of cores. In user-based subscription licensing, there is a restriction on the number of users. Big companies and government organizations with a lot of users typically go for core-based licensing. User-based subscription licensing is a more common model. It has user roles such as creator, explorer, and viewer. A creator is someone who does the groundwork or development work. An explorer is someone who is into middle management but is not technically savvy, such as a category head. A viewer is like a typical decision-maker in senior management. For each role, Tableau is priced differently. The viewer role has the minimum price, and the creator role has the highest price. This pricing is available on their website. Everybody can see it."
"There is a license for this solution and we pay on an annual basis."
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager - BI Head with 5,001-10,000 employees
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
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
7%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
8%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise40
Large Enterprise88
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business117
Midsize Enterprise67
Large Enterprise185
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Google Data Studio?
I would appreciate improvements in the data modeling features, as it's not straightforward, and it's not what people ...
What is your primary use case for Google Data Studio?
I used Looker Studio mainly for reporting, where I created multiple dashboards on it. I wouldn't say I made the most ...
What advice do you have for others considering Google Data Studio?
I confirm that we have a call regarding my experience with Zoho. Looker Studio is a good visualization tool, but I wo...
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 ...
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Qlik Sense?
It is not about performance. It is just about how expensive it is to implement.
Tableau vs. Business Objects - Which is a better solution for visualization and analysis?
Both tools have their positives and negatives. First, I should mention that I am relatively new to Tableau. I have be...
Which would you choose - Tableau or SAP Analytics Cloud?
Tableau is easy to set up and maintain. In about a day it is possible for the entire platform to be deployed for use....
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Tableau?
Regarding pricing, while I cannot comment on specific user licenses, Tableau is indeed more expensive than Power BI. ...
 

Also Known As

Data Studio
QlikSense, Qlik Analytics Platform
Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online
 

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
Accenture, Adobe, Amazon.com, Bank of America, Charles Schwab Corp, Citigroup, Coca-Cola Company, Cornell University, Dell, Deloitte, Duke University, eBay, Exxon Mobil, Fannie Mae, Ferrari, French Red Cross, Goldman Sachs, Google, Government of Canada, HP, Intel, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Macy's, Merck, The New York Times, PayPal, Pfizer, US Army, US Air Force, Skype, and Walmart.
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