Looker vs Microsoft Power BI vs QlikView comparison

The compared Google and Microsoft solutions aren't in the same category. Google is ranked #6 in EBT , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 8.2% mindshare in the category. Microsoft is ranked #1 in BIT , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 14.5% 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

2,819 Views
930 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

Microsoft Power BI

Read 326 Microsoft Power BI reviews

23,400 Views
14,274 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

QlikView

Read 162 QlikView reviews

3,219 Views
1,062 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Looker

Microsoft Power BI

QlikView

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

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: August 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Embedded BI

August 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 867,676 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

Embedded BI Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Looker	8.2%
Tableau Enterprise	27.4%
Qlik Sense	12.0%
Other	52.400000000000006%

Embedded BI

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Microsoft Power BI	14.5%
Tableau Enterprise	11.0%
Amazon QuickSight	4.9%
Other	69.6%

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Reporting Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
QlikView	4.4%
Microsoft Power BI	24.3%
Tableau Enterprise	20.6%
Other	50.699999999999996%

Reporting

Featured Reviews

Kishore Jhunjhunwala

Sr Analytics Consultant at a tech vendor 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

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

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

"The product is easy to use."

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

"From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great."

"Looker allows you to generate the most optimal SQL queries in a DC through UI actions. We had signed a contract with Google Cloud to use BigQuery. That was the primary reason we adopted Looker. It works better with BigQuery than any other BI platform. We also like how this tool was developed. It was designed with an eye toward microservices architecture."

"It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product."

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

"The stability of Looker has been good since I have been using it. However, it depends on what components are being used."

More Looker pros

"One of the most valuable features of Microsoft Power BI is its easy way of sharing data within the organization or outside."

"Power BI allows you to create user defined charts which is really useful."

"Most of the clients I am interacting with are looking towards Power BI because of the cost and simplicities. It provides an entire feature set and a complete solution. It has tight integration with Office 365, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Technology Stack, and datatypes like R and Python."

"Power BI is a general-use visualization system. I can express the performance of our network through high-level key performance indicators."

"It's a pretty scalable product."

"Microsoft Power BI is an easy tool for data analysis."

"Power BI is more powerful than other tools because it is new for us. Each new version has more capabilities, and we're expecting AI and ML features in the next version."

"The dashboards of Microsoft BI are easy to use."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

"Data transforming with scripting, and the associative model that lets users browse data in an easy way, are the most valuable features."

"The in-memory feature gives us better insight. It's also easy to drill down into the information and select information."

"The initial setup is not very complex."

"This solution has simplified getting to and understanding our data, no matter where it is housed."

"Once you open it up, you see everything that you can do."

"You can do a lot of things on the back end which are not possible in the other solutions on the market."

"The solution is fast."

"Scripting as per a customer's need, which is a pretty cool feature and not available in other tools."

More QlikView pros

Cons

"The product does not have documented material."

"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."

"Stability needs improvement."

"The integration with different databases must be improved."

"It needs to be more user-friendly."

"The main area of concern in Looker is probably related to blending the data from the different sources, including the data present internally in the company and on the cloud."

"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."

"The visualization capability of the product is limited."

"Maybe they can enhance the UI a bit. Right now, it's very basic, I would say, compared to the MicroStrategy or Qlik."

"The solution struggles with large amounts of data."

"Power BI could be improved by implementing more options for data integration. Nowadays, the cloud takes care of scalability and security. As we all know, data sources are increasing, so we get data from a variety of streams. But if we could get the downstream data into the database and update the reports more easily, Power BI would be better."

"Its setup and support should be improved. We would like to see more material for developers that provides clear explanations about how we can do data mining by using Microsoft BI. It would also be good if we can connect a feature to other customized machine learning solutions."

"Visualization systems are still relatively young."

"We would like it if they added more Python libraries in the Power BI service. For Power BI service right now, you can use Python, but it is limited to a few libraries or a few packages from Python."

"People without private emails cannot publish and, frankly, this doesn't allow for easy training."

"At times, I feel that the system needs improvement in single sign-on, especially for the on-premises side of the tool."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

"Reducing costs is the main improvement needed, as this is the biggest burden currently faced in the South African market, with Microsoft converting QlikView customers due to the perceived cost reduction."

"Error handling."

"QlikView lacks self-service capabilities, which means users depend on the IT team to make changes."

"Though the initial setup phase is simple, when it comes to the integration with the custom systems, the configuration and the compatibility sometimes take some more time."

"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."

"There is no automation or drag and drop functionality."

"It would be nice if QlikView could be plugged in 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."

"QlikView's UI could be more user-friendly."

More QlikView cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"It is cheap."

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

"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."

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

"It would be better if the price was cheaper."

"I used the tool's free version."

"Microsoft BI is not expensive."

"Power BI is subscription-based, and you have three options. The Pro edition, which is the standard one, is about $9 per user. The Premium edition, which provides AI and cloud capabilities but at a limited size, is for small to medium enterprises. It is about $20 per user. For large enterprises, such as manufacturing facilities, there is an option for the capacity. The capacity subscription is about $4,000 per capacity level. They also have an option for the on-premises version, but it is not common to see someone going for the on-premises version. The on-premises version requires a specific license that is attached to SQL Server. I believe it is about $17,000, but I'm not sure about it."

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

"In the beginning, the solution cost approximately $1,000 per month, we have a Microsoft startup subscription. There is a subscription pack for startups company which we are able to have for one year."

"From a cost point of view, it's competitive in the enterprise space, although it's not as competitive when you add up all of the additional costs. Things like integrations cost extra and it's probably where Microsoft makes more of the money."

"I believe that the price is reasonable, at least for an enterprise solution."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is moderate, in the medium price range."

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

"On a scale of one to ten, where one being low price and ten being high price, I rate pricing a four."

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

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

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

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

"The setup costs for QlikView are fair as are the yearly maintenance fees. The licensing becomes a bit more expensive and requires some planning for onboarding."

More QlikView pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Embedded BI solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

867,676 professionals have used our research since 2012.

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

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

12%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Government

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	5
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	6

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 Looker?

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

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Looker?

I do not have to make any payments to use the solution. In the beginning, Looker may work fine for its users. If adva...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Looker?

The visualization capability of the product is limited. From an improvement perspective, the product should have more...

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

Databricks vs Looker

Compared 15% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs Looker

Compared 12% of the time

Qlik Sense vs Looker

Compared 9% of the time

IBM Cognos vs Looker

Compared 7% of the time

ThoughtSpot vs Looker

Compared 6% of the time

More Looker Competitors

Tableau Enterprise vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 13% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 9% 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 5% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

Tableau Enterprise vs QlikView

Compared 18% 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

SAP Analytics Cloud vs QlikView

Compared 4% of the time

More QlikView Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Looker

September 2025

Download Looker product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

August 2025

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Buyer's Guide

QlikView

August 2025

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: August 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

867,676 professionals have used our research since 2012.