Looker vs Qlik Sense comparison

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2,207 views|1,755 comparisons
80% willing to recommend
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3,876 views|2,417 comparisons
96% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Looker and Qlik Sense based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Embedded BI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Looker vs. Qlik Sense Report (Updated: March 2024).
769,236 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The stability of Looker has been good since I have been using it. However, it depends on what components are being used.""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's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time.""The product is easy to use.""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.""From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great.""We can centralize all our data models."

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"Qlik Sense has given us visibility into our data to make informed decisions.""The reports are better looking than in QlikView.""What I found most valuable in Qlik Sense is its flexibility. It's a very flexible tool, and it has a lot of capabilities compared to Tableau and Power BI. In Qlik Sense, you can take data from any of the systems, and you can do data transformation, prepare the data, then present your KPIs. Data transformation isn't present in Tableau, Power BI, and other tools. In Qlik Sense, you're able to get the data and directly present that data. The presentation layer is also very good in Qlik Sense. My company is very happy with this tool.""Qlik DataMarket""It is very easy to use, and the Qlik data engine has been able to handle everything we have thrown at it.""This solution has improved our organization by making our analysis results available to customers.""The most valuable features of Qlik Sense are its speed and seamless development of web technologies.""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."

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Cons
"It needs to be more user-friendly.""The product does not have documented material.""The visualization capability of the product is limited.""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.""Stability needs improvement.""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.""The integration with different databases must be improved.""Integrations with other BI tools could be better."

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"It would be nice to have more native features from QlikView built into Qlik Sense.""The scripts available in the solution are not great.""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.""Qlik dashboards are not friendly with end-users, but they have been enhancing this shorted in some recent releases and next releases hopefully.""As we are a very process-oriented company, we would like to see more extensions maintained from Qlik, because it's a huge budget problem to choose the right one.""Better searching capabilities would be a nice addition.""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.""Error handling is an area that needs to be improved."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Looker is expensive and could be made better by reducing it."
  • "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."
  • "It is cheap."
  • "I do not have to make any payments to use the solution."
  • More Looker Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The solution is worth it."
  • "Understand the break over price point for switching to the Enterprise license."
  • "Licensing could be cheaper."
  • "Licensing: Review the named model and move towards a usage model (e.g., cores, memory, computers, API calls, etc.)."
  • "The cost is not bad considering the flexibility and support you receive from Qlik. I believe it is worth the cost."
  • "Start small with tokens. You can always buy more."
  • "Currently, our ROI is clear and concise decision-making. This timely addition will easily add $15 million to our bottom line in 2017."
  • "You will spend more time on educating your staff than licensing the product."
  • More Qlik Sense Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability.
    Top Answer:I do not have to make any payments to use the solution. In the beginning, Looker may work fine for its users. If advanced users who have experience with BI tools use Looker, then they may find it to… more »
    Top Answer:The visualization capability of the product is limited. From an improvement perspective, the product should have more visualization capability. I can't clean data in Looker, and if I try to do it… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer:The most valuable features of Qlik Sense are its speed and seamless development of web technologies.
    Ranking
    5th
    out of 31 in Embedded BI
    Views
    2,207
    Comparisons
    1,755
    Reviews
    10
    Average Words per Review
    634
    Rating
    7.7
    2nd
    out of 31 in Embedded BI
    Views
    3,876
    Comparisons
    2,417
    Reviews
    22
    Average Words per Review
    567
    Rating
    8.6
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    QlikSense
    Learn More
    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.

    Qlik Sense is a visual analytics and business intelligence (BI) platform that gives users full control over their system’s data. From this platform they can control every aspect of their system data. It maximizes an organization’s ability to make decisions driven by their data.

    Benefits of Qlik Sense

    Some of the benefits of using Qlik Sense include:

    • Easily manipulate data: Qlik Sense allows users to easily combine and otherwise manipulate their system’s data. It allows them to create interactive visual representations of your datasets. The many different ways that the data can be represented offer many potential options for how to analyze the data. These choices enable users to easily gain critical insights.
    • Easily automate alerts and routine actions: Qlik Sense enables users to keep a close eye on their data. Automatic alerts that will notify them if their data changes in any way. Users don’t need expert knowledge of coding to create automated data-driven events. Users of all experience levels can take advantage of this benefit. Qlik Sense enables routine actions to be automated when necessary data insights will spur the system to take action. This combination of analytics and other tools empower users to take charge of their data.
    • Customize reporting: Users can set Qlik Sense to generate custom reports. These reports can also be customized to be shared by way of one of several methods, allowing users to control who sees their data and what they see.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Qlik Sense stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its associative analytics technology and its remote access capability. Qlik Sense employs an associative analytics engine that gives users the ability to take their data analytics to the next level. Users can create visual connections between different datasets spread across their network, creating deep insights that enable users to gain a full understanding of their data. This engine is easily scaled up to allow a large number of users to benefit from the deep insights that it provides. Users can access Qlik Sense from anywhere in the world. Qlik Sense has an online portal that can be used consistently from anywhere at all. Having the ability to remotely analyze data gives users flexibility when it comes to choosing how to deploy their manpower.

    Jarno L., the managing director of B2IT, writes, “The associative technology features are the solution's most valuable aspects. Qlik was the first company to implement an in-memory associative analytics engine. This basically means that all data is loaded into memory, but it also means that instead of joining data together, the data is associated together. From the front end, from the user interface point of view, data can be joined or included or excluded on the fly. It can be drilled down and drilled through and users can slice and dice it and that type of thing can be done from anywhere in the data to any other place in the data. It doesn't have to be predefined. It doesn't have to have hierarchies or anything like that.”

    Tami S., the senior business intelligence analyst at the La Jolla Group, writes, “With the changing business landscape, it is nice to access Qlik Sense through an external website. As an organization when we use QlikView Desktop, we need to connect to our internal network. We can access QlikView through the QlikView access point but the website has a little different look and feel than the desktop application. We appreciate that Qlik Sense is browser-based and the user experience is the same whether at home, in the office or on a boat. As long as the user has internet access, performance is the same.”

    Sample Customers
    Yahoo!, Etsy, Kohler, Hipcamp, Hubspot, Kickstarter, Venmo, Dollar Shave Club, 600+ customer
    Abbvie, Airbus, Barclays, BT Openreach, BMW, Daimler AG, HSBC, IKEA, Nationwide Building Society, Royal Mail Group, Sanofi, Siemens, Wendy'', Vodafone, Volvo
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company25%
    Financial Services Firm17%
    Recruiting/Hr Firm8%
    Marketing Services Firm8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization33%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm19%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Retailer10%
    Healthcare Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization49%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Computer Software Company6%
    Manufacturing Company5%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise42%
    Large Enterprise32%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business15%
    Midsize Enterprise39%
    Large Enterprise46%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    Large Enterprise53%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business9%
    Midsize Enterprise54%
    Large Enterprise37%
    Buyer's Guide
    Looker vs. Qlik Sense
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Looker vs. Qlik Sense and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    769,236 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Looker is ranked 5th in Embedded BI with 19 reviews while Qlik Sense is ranked 2nd in Embedded BI with 112 reviews. Looker is rated 8.0, while Qlik Sense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Looker writes "The APIs are exposed at every level, so it's highly modular". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Qlik Sense writes "Customizable with good ROI and a quick learning curve". Looker is most compared with Amazon QuickSight, Tableau, Google Data Studio, Databricks and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, whereas Qlik Sense is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, Microsoft Power BI, Apache Superset and SAP Analytics Cloud. See our Looker vs. Qlik Sense report.

    See our list of best Embedded BI vendors.

    We monitor all Embedded BI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.