Looker vs QlikView vs Tableau Enterprise comparison

Google and Qlik are both solutions in the Embedded BI category. Google is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.0, while Qlik is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.1. Google holds a 8.2% mindshare in EBT, compared to Qlik’s 11.2% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of Google users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Qlik users who would recommend it.

Looker

Read 19 Looker reviews

2,819 Views
930 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

QlikView

Read 162 QlikView reviews

3,219 Views
1,062 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Tableau Enterprise

Read 307 Tableau Enterprise reviews

19,755 Views
2,963 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Looker

QlikView

Tableau Enterprise

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Looker, QlikView, and Tableau Enterprise 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

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Helped 867,341 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

As of September 2025, in the Embedded BI category, the mindshare of Looker is 8.2%, down from 11.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of QlikView is 11.2%, up from 7.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tableau Enterprise is 27.4%, down from 34.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Embedded BI Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Tableau Enterprise	27.4%
QlikView	11.2%
Looker	8.2%
Other	53.2%

Embedded BI

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

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

Uzair Faruqi

Head Of Analytics at Mjunction Services

Ease of developing dashboards and receiving strong technical support have enabled efficient data visualization

Introducing custom features, such as NLP-based reports, is not very good in Tableau. My MD has been asking us for a way to write in natural language to request reports that the system should generate, but that isn't very effective with Tableau. As a developer, I can develop an on-demand report in Python quite easily, but exposing a REST API on the Tableau platform is not a very easy task. AI enablement is an area for improvement for Tableau, and that is something they might have to work upon. I have heard that ThoughtSpot is quite better in this regard, but the cost of ThoughtSpot is much higher. ThoughtSpot has lots of natural language-based report generation features that Tableau lacks.

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

"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."

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

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

"We can centralize all our data models."

"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."

"The product is easy to use."

More Looker pros

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

"QlikView is extremely flexible in terms of visualization tools for communicating complex data insights."

"The platform's most valuable feature is its associative data model. It allows me to discover hidden data and gain insights that are not immediately visible."

"QlikView is a scalable solution that multiple users can easily use."

"The integration with Salesforce has helped us gain access to crucial sales data in real-time."

"The most useful feature of QlikView for me is the QVD concept."

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

"A well designed app brings freedom of inquiry to meetings, allowing me to answer questions in real time and this has transformed progress and outputs of our monthly group meeting."

More QlikView pros

"The drill-down approach and interactivity in Tableau are highly effective."

"Tableau's most valuable features are user-friendliness and have a connection between multiple source systems. You can publish a report by using Tableau Public and there you can make your data online, not only batches of data, you can use it as an online analytical tool."

"Its performance is pretty good, and the development time is very low."

"I like Tableau's heat maps and the storyboard. You can create data stories and tons of visuals with it, and it goes together really well. Tableau lets you manipulate the data in various ways."

"Self-service is most valuable. Users can pick up quickly and do the resolution. There are a lot of out-of-the-box features, and it satisfies most of the needs. If users are properly trained, they can deal with any situation."

"I have found Tableau easy to use and the features are superb."

"The solution deployment was straightforward."

"The most valuable feature is the interface, which is user-friendly and intuitive."

More Tableau Enterprise pros

Cons

"The product does not have documented material."

"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."

"Stability needs improvement."

"The visualization capability of the product is limited."

"It needs to be more user-friendly."

"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 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."

"If a user wanted to see something not included in the application the new object had to be created by a power user or developer because Qlik view's scripting has somewhat of a learning curve."

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

"Error handling."

"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."

"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."

"Better source data connectors."

"The only thing I would improve about it is the fact that it refreshes all the time, and when it does that, it just deletes all the options you had, all the filters that you had selected, so you need to select them from the beginning."

"The pricing is high."

More QlikView cons

"At the organizational level, increasing the servers' capabilities to support us as an enterprise tool."

"The look and feel of the tool itself, including the dashboard features and data visualization, could be improved. The graphs in Tableau also have room for improvement."

"The use of this service in the desktop version is annoying due to the constant updates which lead to reinstalling the application. If they could give support with updates on the same downloaded version, it would be great."

"The charts in Tableau are quite limited."

"There are not enough language options. It needs to be offered in more than just English."

"I am a BI consultant. I have worked on different reporting tools, such as Power BI and MicroStrategy. As compared to other tools, Tableau lags behind in handling huge enterprise-level data in terms of robust security and the single integrated metadata concept. When we connect to large or very big databases, then performance-wise, I sometimes found Tableau a little bit slow. It can have the single metadata concept like other tools for the reusability of the objects in multiple reports."

"The pricing is high. I'm using a student license, however, I know that even this license is very expensive. I've tried to have this product in our organization, however, it's quite expensive. We don't have the internal budget."

"It's already using 32 gigabytes of memory, but the performance is not so good. It's very heavy."

More Tableau Enterprise cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

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

"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."

"The platform's pricing is considered quite expensive, particularly given the dollar-based pricing."

"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."

"Qlik is fairly high in terms of pricing."

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

"My firm got the product at a cheap price, but in general, I believe that the product is a bit costly."

"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."

"QlikView pricing and licensing is on the high side for a small sized company, but it's competitive among its peers."

"I rate QlikView's pricing a five out of ten."

More QlikView pricing and cost advice

"We are on an annual license which costs us $1,400 which is very expensive. Microsft BI is less expensive."

"The license is very expensive."

"Tableau is free."

"The price of Tableau could improve. The license is too expensive."

"There is a license required, we pay an annual license which is priced fair."

"Tableau's prices are relatively high for our market. I am from Serbia, so many companies in this market don't have the ability to pay for expensive software. My clients are quite satisfied with a lot of Tableau's qualities except for the prices."

"Its price is higher than Power BI and QlikView. Tableau costs around $70 per user per month, whereas Power BI is around $8 to $9. QlikView is around $30. Tableau has various prices for various models such as Creator, Designer."

"We are paying an annual licensing fee."

More Tableau Enterprise pricing and cost advice

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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

10%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

10%

University

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	73
Midsize Enterprise	36
Large Enterprise	75

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	117
Midsize Enterprise	66
Large Enterprise	182

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...

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What needs improvement with Looker?

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

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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

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 ...

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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...

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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....

See all answers

Comparisons

Databricks vs Looker

Compared 15% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs Looker

Compared 12% of the time

Qlik Sense vs Looker

Compared 9% of the time

IBM Cognos vs Looker

Compared 8% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Looker

Compared 6% of the time

More Looker Competitors

Microsoft Power BI vs QlikView

Compared 14% 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

Microsoft Power BI vs Tableau Enterprise

Compared 19% of the time

Domo vs Tableau Enterprise

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Tableau Enterprise

Compared 6% of the time

Databricks vs Tableau Enterprise

Compared 5% of the time

Qlik Sense vs Tableau Enterprise

Compared 3% of the time

More Tableau Enterprise Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Looker

September 2025

Download Looker product report

Buyer's Guide

QlikView

August 2025

Download QlikView product report

Buyer's Guide

Tableau Enterprise

August 2025

Download Tableau Enterprise product report

Also Known As

No data available

Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online

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

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

Tableau Enterprise offers powerful features for creating interactive visualizations, dashboards, and maps, including drag-and-drop functionality and easy integration with multiple data sources, promoting real-time collaboration and self-service analysis.

Tableau Enterprise stands out with its ability to create user-friendly, interactive visualizations, making it pivotal for business intelligence applications. Users benefit from its seamless connectivity and advanced analytical functions, facilitating data blending and storytelling. Despite a complex learning curve and high licensing costs, its features like geospatial analysis and efficient content distribution drive its indispensable value for data-driven insights. Enhancements in predictive analytics and support integration with machine learning tools further its capabilities across industries.

What are the most valuable features?

Interactive Visualizations: Enables users to create engaging reports.
Drag-and-Drop Functionality: Simplifies data analysis processes.
Data Integration: Offers seamless connectivity with multiple sources.
Real-Time Collaboration: Supports synchronous data sharing.
Advanced Analytics: Provides predictive analytics and geospatial analysis.

What benefits and ROI should users look for?

Informed Decision-Making: Facilitates data-driven insights.
Efficiency in Reporting: Streamlines dashboard and reporting tasks.
Cost-Effectiveness: Despite high licensing, value in robust analytics tools.
Customizable Options: Tailors analytics to specific needs.

Tableau Enterprise is widely used for business intelligence, supporting industries like healthcare, telecommunications, and finance. Organizations utilize it to analyze performance indicators, operational insights, and financial analytics, enhancing decision-making through interactive reports and real-time data integration.

Salesforce

Sample Customers

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

Canon, Gatorade, Amcor, Panasonic, Fila, Cambridge University Hospitals, Global Retail Bank, North Yorkshire Police department, Lanoo Group Publishers, and AonGroep Nederland.

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.

Find out what your peers are saying about Salesforce, Qlik, MicroStrategy and others in Embedded BI. Updated: August 2025.

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