Looker vs Microsoft Power BI vs QlikView comparison

The compared Google and Microsoft solutions aren't in the same category. Google is ranked #10 in EBT , and holds a 6.4% mindshare in the category. Microsoft is ranked #1 in BIT , with an average rating of 8.1, and holds a 9.3% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of Google users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Looker

Read 19 Looker reviews

2,532 Views
1,013 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

Microsoft Power BI

Read 329 Microsoft Power BI reviews

24,257 Views
15,524 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

QlikView

Read 163 QlikView reviews

4,643 Views
1,671 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Looker

Microsoft Power BI

QlikView

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

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

Find out what your peers are saying about Salesforce, Qlik, MicroStrategy and others in Embedded BI.

To learn more, read our detailed Embedded BI Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Embedded BI

March 2026

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

Embedded BI Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Looker	6.4%
Tableau Enterprise	17.6%
Qlik Sense	8.6%
Other	67.4%

Embedded BI

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Microsoft Power BI	9.3%
Tableau Enterprise	6.7%
Amazon QuickSight	3.7%
Other	80.3%

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Reporting Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
QlikView	3.7%
Microsoft Power BI	17.4%
Tableau Enterprise	16.5%
Other	62.400000000000006%

Reporting

Featured Reviews

Kishore Jhunjhunwala

Sr Analytics Consultant at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

A cloud solution for operational reporting but is expensive

Some basic feature that is available in other reporting tools is missing. Looker has the ability to show more than 5,000 rows for operational reporting. Some reporting tools allow users to scroll down to see more than 5,000 rows, but in Looker, you have to download the entire dataset. Looker should consider adding a scroll-down option to allow users to view large datasets on screen without downloading them. Looker has some options for granting users access as viewers. However, viewers cannot download the entire dataset. Only superusers can download the whole dataset on the Explore screen. This is a big limitation, as you cannot give any user viewer access. You can give access to superuser access, which is a cost to the company.

Read full review

Antonio Flor

Lead Anaplanner at Chaucer Group

Data integration has improved reserving and expense control while collaboration drives fast dashboards

Regarding drawbacks or weak points in Microsoft Power BI, it may not be directly related to the tool itself, but with our architecture, as we couldn't get a service account, which is an email address that has no relationship with the employees, just to establish the connection with Anaplan. We couldn't get it to work on SSO, so we use an employee account which could be a point of weakness, meaning if the person leaves, that connection will break. If the person goes on holiday and we need to refresh, we have to change the connection as well, but we have to live with that since we're not using SSO on the service account. Regarding the natural language processing feature, we're trying to avoid using it too much because it can slow down the connection, so as much as possible, we try to build the logic and any transformation in Anaplan, and then deliver an end product to Microsoft Power BI.

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Srdjan Grbic

Financial Controller with task of Business Intelligence Implementation at a wholesaler/distributor with 1,001-5,000 employees

Daily invoice analytics has become streamlined and complex data modeling is now simplified

We are not using analytics features and possibly predictive analytics and forecasting features in QlikView, although they are available. QlikView is very flexible, but we are currently using only tabular presentation of data because that is what we need. Presenting a large volume of data in QlikView with graphics can be overwhelming for the majority of people who want to see a lot of information in one picture. It would be beneficial to have AI or ML features in QlikView. However, I think they will decommission QlikView, and AI features are already available in Qlik Sense, so you would need to migrate to that platform.

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

"Technical support is the best ever."

"It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time."

"I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I didn't face any issues with stability."

"In the past, adding a new dashboard to our product was a multi-week development effort, now our nontechnical product management and client success teams can create, launch, and maintain high quality dashboards with no interruption to the development team."

"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."

"The most valuable features are the ability to create visualizations for non-technical employees, as well as the ability to provide ways to dynamically slice the data."

"If one has to deal with large volumes of data, which I categorically could tell is big data and has to create visuals, Looker is the tool to go."

"Looker is an extremely valuable product that can really transform your company's ability to use data to answer challenging questions."

More Looker pros

"The virtualization of Microsoft BI is very good."

"The amount of customization that you can do is good, and it's relatively straightforward to do."

"The solution's initial setup isn't too complicated."

"Microsoft BI's most valuable features are the user interface, which is easy to use and light."

"Ease of development and maintenance."

"Microsoft BI is scalable."

"The data manipulation and data cleaning tasks are handled in the backend by Power Query in Microsoft Power BI."

"Microsoft B's beneficial features are that it is a Microsoft product and it is well known by the staff here in the company. It suited the available skills."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

"It's user-friendly and easy to use, even for new users."

"QlikView is a highly effective management tool, allowing a broad area of analysis."

"This is a very cool application with endless options of creativity and visuals."

"Extraction from almost all data sources provides a lot of value to me."

"Now reports are available in short time in a single source."

"Customer Service: Excellent, good reviews by Gartner as well.Technical Support: Excellent, good reviews by Gartner as well."

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

"Annual Information from public sector following transparency laws are now publicized in an automated way, whereas previously this task involved a lot of scripting development and data warehouse routines such as ETL, and now all this is done using QlikView and raw data."

More QlikView pros

Cons

"This product is useful for non-technical users, who are able to use the interface to easily slice data. But for the admin users who are responsible for maintaining the schemas and files behind the scenes, it can easily become a chore, as there is a lot of manual work involved in defining the schemas of the connected database(s), as well as any refactored tables; the restrictive syntax also makes maintenance difficult."

"The visualization capability of the product is limited."

"They need to work more on interactivity in order to help users interact with the tool itself, and it needs to be more user-friendly."

"The integration with different databases must be improved."

"There is a lot of customization that we needed/need to build ourselves. Other BI tools have more out of the box."

"Looker doesn't connect to Excel, which is a huge disappointment because a lot of data is presented in Excel. Also, it can't consume data directly from REST APIs, which is necessary. Looker needs to expand its horizons when it comes to data sources. The inability to connect to different data sources is hampering our use cases. Currently, it only has an ODBC connection that connects to a database. It needs to connect to other data sources, such as Excel, APIs, and different platforms."

"It needs to be more user-friendly."

"The pricing model makes sense, but can be very expensive, potentially prohibitively so for smaller companies."

More Looker cons

"The default parameters of the prompt could be improved by including a dynamic option."

"I would like it to be a little bit more secure when I'm using the design feature on my desktop. For example, to have the ability to set up security passwords for opening the file. Currently, they don't have that. Tableau, for example, has a visual way of doing data processing steps, whereas the Power BI system still has some code, although it is very low code. It would be great to have the kind of view that Tableau has."

"Microsoft needs to do some more research and development to make it more stable."

"The way you navigate the product, compared to other products in this industry, could be improved a bit."

"For our reporting services, it would be good to have the capability for email-based subscriptions. I want to be able to change the sender dynamically, without having to rely on running through an exercise passage."

"Capacity could be improved."

"The solution is somewhat costly in comparison with MSBI tools."

"I feel that scalability is one area where there is room for improvement. When there is a huge volume of data, like when we apply the aggregation, the reporting slows down."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

"In QlikView 11, there is a password for the section of code, but there is no user management with a password that allows access to data when opening the file."

"It is really old. We are moving towards converting everything into a Power BI environment. We want to have a self-service type of BI environment where different levels of users in organizations can log onto a portal and retrieve the data they need or get the necessary insights for decision-making that's important for them or their business unit. They have built a new version of QlikView called QlikSense, which probably competes with newer BI tools, such as Power BI, but they are far behind. That's why we are moving towards a newer tool that's easier to use and has more visualizations to represent the data."

"The pricing is high."

"Syntax editor needs some work, it's frustrating to have valid syntax being flagged as incorrect."

"It would be nice if QlikView could be plugged into the company's website or an online portal such as QlikSense is capable of. There are ways around but it takes enormous time to develop."

"Scalability really depends on the size of your data and QlikView server architecture. For the biggest data sets, it could become an issue at some point."

"QlikView should not loose its original flavour."

"Besides the fact it’s quite a useful tool for data visualization, the final user interface is not that intuitive."

More QlikView cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is cheap."

"The price of Looker usually depends on the solution's provider, but it is usually cheaper than the other products in the market. Looker is offered at different prices for different companies."

"I do not have to make any payments to use the solution."

"It's not cheap, but it's not expensive for big companies."

"Looker is expensive and could be made better by reducing it."

"Our license is paid yearly and we have found that we have to be careful not to over-extend our usage in order to avoid upgrading our capacity plan."

"The current licensing model that Microsoft BI has is expensive. My customers have told me the cost is approximately $20 per user and this can get expensive fast. There should be a one-time purchase option if the customer has a lot of users."

"The pricing is reasonable."

"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."

"Microsoft BI requires licenses."

"MS BI comes with all the tools and it is, to the best of my knowledge, the most affordable solution."

"We have premium licenses, but you can use it for free. You can share the content with anyone else, so you can use it for free."

"We view it as an expensive product."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

"It is not very expensive. I think it it is on par with other similar products on the market."

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

"The pricing is too high compared to the other solutions on the market."

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

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

"It is expensive for small companies."

"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."

More QlikView pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user79932

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

Marketing Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	135
Midsize Enterprise	58
Large Enterprise	166

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	73
Midsize Enterprise	36
Large Enterprise	76

Questions from the Community

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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...

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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...

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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 ...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for QlikView?

I would rate the pricing for QlikView as not cheap, but it is reasonable.

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What needs improvement with QlikView?

We are not using analytics features and possibly predictive analytics and forecasting features in QlikView, although ...

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What is your primary use case for QlikView?

The primary use case involves analyzing data on a daily invoice level with QlikView. Building metrics using simple la...

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Comparisons

Tableau Enterprise vs Looker

Compared 12% of the time

MicroStrategy vs Looker

Compared 8% of the time

Databricks vs Looker

Compared 8% of the time

ThoughtSpot vs Looker

Compared 7% of the time

Domo vs Looker

Compared 5% of the time

More Looker Competitors

Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 17% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 14% of the time

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 7% of the time

Databricks vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 2% of the time

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 2% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

Tableau Enterprise vs QlikView

Compared 13% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs QlikView

Compared 5% of the time

MicroStrategy vs QlikView

Compared 5% of the time

Zendesk vs QlikView

Compared 5% of the time

Qlik Sense vs QlikView

Compared 3% of the time

More QlikView Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Looker

March 2026

Download Looker product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

March 2026

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Buyer's Guide

QlikView

March 2026

Download QlikView product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

No data available

Overview

Looker is a powerful data analytics platform that empowers businesses to explore and analyze their data in real time.

With its intuitive interface and robust features, Looker enables users to easily create and share interactive dashboards, reports, and visualizations.

The product's advanced data modeling capabilities and seamless integration with popular data sources make it a top choice for organizations looking to gain valuable insights from their data.

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

Yahoo!, Etsy, Kohler, Hipcamp, Hubspot, Kickstarter, Venmo, Dollar Shave Club, 600+ customer

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 Salesforce, Qlik, MicroStrategy and others in Embedded BI. Updated: March 2026.

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