Microsoft BI vs Qlik Sense comparison

Microsoft BI is a business intelligence solution that connects to all your data sources and turns your data into insightful and useful business information that is relevant to all levels of the business, ensuring data accuracy, consistency, and security.

Microsoft BI combines familiar Microsoft tools - Office, SharePoint, and SQL server - with extra features for end-users, such as Power View and Power Pivot. This powerful product gives businesses a competitive advantage by allowing end users to better analyze their data, collaborate, and better present their data.

The BI platform empowers members of your organization to make data-driven decisions that drive strategic actions quickly by allowing them to work together easily on the same data, share insights, and collaborate on reports using other Microsoft Office applications.

Microsoft BI Benefits

Some of the benefits of using Microsoft BI include: 

• Scalability: Easily scale the Microsoft BI platform to help reduce costs and minimize the security risks and complexities that arise as a result of maintaining multiple systems.

• Secure analytics: Protect your data with sophisticated data security features, including sensitivity labeling, end-to-end encryption, and real-time access monitoring. View and share meaningful AI-based insights enriched by data visualizations.

• Regular user-driven innovative updates: Get weekly and monthly updates that improve the capabilities of Power BI based on thousands of ideas submitted each year from a community of over 500,000 members worldwide.

• Seamless integration with Microsoft products: Microsoft BI connects with Microsoft 365, allowing you to create Excel queries, data models, and reports for the Power BI dashboards. These integrations make it easy to collect, analyze, publish, and share Excel business data.

• Access Microsoft BI from any location: BI can be accessed at any time from anywhere using its mobile app, allowing ease of access to distributed teams or businesses across many locations. The business intelligence platform also enables teams to work on any file at the same time.

• User-friendly dashboard: View and manage your data in a user-friendly and intuitive customized dashboard. The Microsoft BI platform enables teams to work independently while exchanging analytics between different departments and users. With Microsoft BI, you can easily create personalized dashboards that combine on-premises and cloud data into a single view, allowing you to monitor enterprise data from multiple business applications.

• Easy installation: Install the platform in minutes just by creating an API key and inputting it into the software.

Reviews from Real Users

Microsoft BI stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its integration options and its data analytics capabilities.

Tariq R., an operations & BI analyst at American Hospital Dubai, writes, “Power BI is a complete ecosystem. It has an integrated ETL tool and good connectivity with applications such as Office 365 and SQL. Power BI supports the DAX and Power Query M languages. These languages are making Power BI very strong in data analytics, and you can do many types of analysis. ”

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.”