QlikView alternatives and competitors

We built a BI system to provide clients with access to the data that we collect. They can access the data report and various reports by using Power BI.

It is built into the Azure cloud. You can't deploy it otherwise.

We have a product called ED Tracker, and we allow clients to subscribe to this product, and they use it through Power BI. It enables us to offer new services to clients and basically allows them to work on the data or report themselves, rather than sending them data with PowerPoint decks, PDF reports, etc. So, we work with our clients through this platform. They need to have the license. If they want to access the system, we just tell them that they need to get a license. The license is very cheap. It is $10 a month per user. It is not very expensive, and once they have the license, they can access our cloud solution.

Its connectivity with other Office applications, mostly with Excel, and the ability to deploy it very easily are the most valuable features. It comes sort of bundled with the cloud, so you don't need to set up a server and a standalone infrastructure. So, getting into the system or building something that you can deploy is very easy and very cheap. With other systems, you need to have a server, and you need to have a license for the server. The initial setup is very costly.

It is an evolving solution. So, it still has some rough edges. As compared to Tableau or QlikView, there are some things that you can't do when you want to. For example, giving specific access to some reports for users. You can get it up and running very fast, but some things are a bit trickier, and for some of the things, you need to actually write code. 

It is sort of a work in progress. They're catching up on the competition, but it still takes time. Other solutions are more mature, and they have been in the market much longer, but it is catching up. It has come a long way in terms of how it was working two years ago, but there are some things that you still can't do with it. For example, permission management and user access management are still a bit limited. It is basically based on the idea that everybody from the organization can see everything or limit the type of data they can see. If I want you to see only one report and the other guy to see another report, I can't do it. There should be a better way to manage permissions and users. It should also support external users much better.

There should be the ability to export to PowerPoint or PDF. It should be more efficient. It's rather clunky right now. Sometimes, the system is inconsistent in the way it does things. 

I have been using this solution for two years.

It is adequate in terms of speed and stability. It is very stable. Sometimes, it is a bit slow. It can be faster, but you need to subscribe and purchase additional packages or resources, and then it becomes more expensive.

We haven't scaled yet, but you have the ability to have a dedicated server on Azure with CPU. You can increase and have an SQL Server, so you can scale it.

As of now, we have around 10 to 12 users internally and externally. Some are internal, and some are external clients. We do have plans to increase the usage because we're trying to sell and market the product to other clients as well. So, we do have plans to increase the number of users. One of the benefits is that it doesn't matter if we have 10, 20, or 50 users. It doesn't inflict any costs on us because they go directly to the cloud. They don't come to us. It is very indirect, but we do plan to extend the usage of that system. We might also extend it internally.

Their technical support is absolutely magnificent. A week ago, we had an issue related to permissions, and we couldn't find out how to do that. My colleague contacted the support of Power BI. They not only answered us by mail; they also had a half an hour session with us on Teams to better understand what our issues were. They wanted us to send them the files. They reviewed them and told us that there were still some limitations, but they were working on them, and they will let us know.

We were stunned that someone from Microsoft is interested in what we're doing and someone is willing to go online and have a half an hour session with us so that we can explain what we're doing and what is our issue, and they can think about how to resolve it. We're a small client. We're not a big company. So, we were stunned by their support. Their support is amazing.

A few years ago, we've tested QlikView and Qlik Sense. Their deployment costs were rather high, so we decided to use Power BI.

It was very easy and straightforward. It was rather quick because you can launch it. It is very easy to publish. They give you direct access to their cloud. For small solutions or datasets like ours, the initial setup was a matter of days. We started with the desktop on-premise, and then we published it to the cloud. It was rather easy. It was a matter of days to a week or two.

We used our own team. Its deployment and maintenance are taken care of by a PM and a colleague of mine. It is very easy. You just press publish, and it's off to the cloud.

In terms of ROI, it is a 10 out of 10.

Its price is very low. It is like $10 per user, per month. The clients pay for their own licenses. It is not on us. 

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. That's the beauty. With other systems, you need to spend a couple of thousand dollars just to get started, and then you need to spend $500 per year for the license, which becomes much more costly. You have a system here where for $120 to $140 a year, you can start with two people and start developing and deploying. You can see why the cost difference is huge, especially when you are on a low scale, like us, and you're not building something very huge.

We didn't evaluate other options because we have had some past experience with other solutions. We knew that QlikView might be good, but you need to spend a couple of thousand dollars just to get started if you want to do something. We knew the costs, and the entry cost was much higher. So, we decided to go with Power BI. It is also integrated with Office and Excel, so it's very easy to go along and do some of the things that you can do in Excel. It is very easy to transition between them.

If you are looking for a good BI solution for a small business that is very easy to deploy and not costly and that can use the cloud in terms of security, Power BI is probably the best solution in the market.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. There are other solutions that might be better than this, but they're more costly. It is the cheapest BI solution in the market. It is not the best in terms of features, but it is the best in terms of value for money. For the volume of work that we have, there is absolutely no competition.

I collated all the reports that we got from Domo's APIs, then performed some ETLs and processing so we could build a final output from which the dashboard would get powered. Then, we created all types of stuff in Domo. At that point, the license let us use all the available jobs in Domo. Therefore, we were using tables and pie charts. For demographics, we are using the geographical charts for Australia and the USA, as the brands we deal with are mainly from Australia and the USA. 

31 million rows of data are getting processed every hour within Domo.

Domo has their own internal servers and phone apps.

I was using Domo comprehensively and exclusively in my previous organization. In this organization, the visualization has been improved. There were glitches when you went from one page to another, but that lag has been corrected. 

The basic levels of Domo were not made for developers. It was made for anyone who is coming from a nontechnical background. They can utilize Domo on the fly, e.g., if you have data and want to see a type of visualization on the fly, then you can use Domo to quickly examine your data. 

Domo is a comprehensive tool in ETL, visualization, and the media features that we use for the direct connection to all the digital marketing platforms. For the database, we had two to three types of ETL that we could use. It comprehensiveness was major for us. 

The API systems are very good. They were an attractive feature of Domo at the time of  purchased.

The new feature data is pretty amazing that they are providing for insights on the side of charts. If you don't even want to be in the dashboard, then there is a quick dashboard that they are creating based on the data you are uploading. You don't have to write a single piece of the code. You just have to upload your data, then you can use all of the visualizations, which is a new feature that I really like. A person who doesn't know much about programming or SQL can see his numbers on a graph, pie charts, and bar charts.

Domo is not a difficult tool to learn. All you need to know is the SQL for the ETL part. You don't need to write much code. That's the great part. It uses legacy languages, like SQL, which is very common among developers who then don't have to go and learn Domo's own syntax. Therefore, you don't have to learn another hard language to use Domo.

The ETL way of storing is not up to mark. You have to rely on the naming convention that you're using in Domo because there are no folder systems where you can collate all your workflows and put them into separate folders. A folder system should be there so you can easily identify how you are working. Once you want to make some changes to your ETL, then you can see the whole lineage, identifying what is there and not there. I felt that this could be drastically improved. 

The utilization part: We cannot play much with the UX/UI.

While they have APIs, they kept on failing if the data volume was too large. There was a 10 to 20 percent chances that it would fail. I don't know what improvements they have done in the past year since I have used it, but previously the failures were quite consistent in the API stuff. I would like to see them work on that.

When you are looking at a full-fledged product, you want pretty dashboards or storyboarding. In these cases, you cannot use Domo. That's the drawback. It's exclusively for exploratory data analysis (EDA).

I worked in Domo from 2018 to late 2019. I am going through some migrations from Domo to some other tool. Before that, for about a year and a half, I was developing the deal and visualizations, then getting connections between the API data in Domo to extract all the digital marketing data. Mainly, I was laying in the digital marketing domain, like Facebook, Amazon, and Google ads. These were being heavily used as KPIs in my organization. Right now, I am in the touch with the tool for the visualization and deal part, but not for the API connection.

The product is quite stable. From my point of view, it's quite a good tool to use if you need all types of analysis.  Stability-wise, it's doing well. I don't see any lag or other glitches apart from ones that I mentioned for improvement. 

Not many people are needed for the maintenance of this solution. Management of Domo is very easy. Apart from developer access, we can keep it to limited people. Normal users looking at visualization are given read-only access.  Therefore, in terms of access, you can define the roles of the users. That's easy to manage. 

They are doing well with scalability where other companies are struggling with it. Domo is providing a cool feature that other companies struggle to work on, which is something amazing to see. Innovation-wise, Domo is doing well.

In my organization, there are four users who use the Domo license. Two of them are managers, another is the group head, and the fourth is an analyst.

The technical support is very responsive. They are ready to reply, always having a solution ready. They are good at their work and what they do.

We previously used Tableau. We shifted to Domo because Tableau was getting expensive and the features that we get in Domo are what you get in Tableau. 

The deployment was very easy. You don't have to buy your own server. These visualizations are nice because they have their own structure to handle these things, which is a good feature. 

There was another company who was entrusted with Domo's setup.

My previous organization is still using Domo and are happy with what Domo is giving them.

The price that they offered was around $200 per user license. It was pretty cheap at that time compared to other companies. I think they have revamped their pricing structure since then. 

Our company purchased a private license for approximately 20 users.

With Domo's competitors, you have to go in separately, buying your own server. The drawback with Domo is it doesn't allow us to work on the UX/UI much because of the layout. You cannot go around doing a full comprehensive view with Domo. If you have seen Tableau or QlikView, they provide very good UX/UI in their products. This makes their dashboard appealing to see. Domo lacks that and was not a product created for storyboarding. It is more for analysis.

The advanced analytic charts are easy to create. If you compare it with other tools in the market, it's very easy to check your data and build charts.

Go for it. The product is quite good. I would rate it as a seven and a half (out of 10).

It makes things more attractive and simpler. When you come to the analytics part, you want things to be simpler because there are other areas that you want to focus on than just creating a dashboard.

I work in the hospitality industry and I use Tableau Online and Tableau Bridge with our food ordering company. In our specific uses, I have found that Tableau is very good for extracting data, rather than for working live on the data.

Although the process of transferring data to Tableau isn't the best, once the data is already on Tableau, it works completely fine. I will typically make use of layer aggregation and other operations such as slicing and analyzing it by getting right inside the data in various ways.

Due to the demands of our industry, we always have things that we would like to see more in-depth over different dimensions, such as restaurants, branches, cities, and so on. With Tableau's help, our company can aggregate all the raw data and then analyze by rows, to see, for instance, which restaurant is doing the best by comparing them with one another. It also enables us to easily split areas into zones and use the data to test for not only which restaurants are doing the best, but also where (i.e. in which cities and branches). 

Although Tableau isn't the best for us when it comes to processing and working on live data, it is very good at extracting data for analysis. Once you have extracted the data, the aggregate layers you can create, along with slicing and other operations, are very handy. It allows us to really get inside the data, and it is, in my opinion, better than any other tool I have used with the same pricing model.

Of the best analysis features, multi-aggregation layers come out on top for me, because they let you extract raw details while making multiple aggregations on different time levels and different dimensions, and you still manage to get your work done quickly without having to load a lot of data grouped over different dimensions.

Tableau Bridge is also a very good tool, however I can tell that it does need a few fixes and some maintenance. That said, it's still good for its first few years since release.

Most of the problems in Tableau Online that I have noticed have to do with performance or weird, inexplicable bugs that I can't pin down. For example, you might try unloading some data, and you'll be waiting for a long time without anything happening.

These bugs always seem to happen when we perform big upgrades or do maintenance work, and we have had to send a lot of tickets for unexplained issues during these times. It doesn't seem to be a problem only for us, but also for customers all over the world, such as in Ireland, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the US, too.

As for future features, I would like to see major upgrades in Bridge and the Flow Tool, allowing us to do more data engineering work. I think it would give Tableau a big edge in the market to look into how to incorporate more data engineering tools into their product. 

Besides that, I would also like the charts to be more realistic and easier on the eyes.

I have been using Tableau Online for three years now.

The stability is okay. It's not 24/7, but you can say it's stable enough. In the start, it's more stable, especially compared to our OBIEE problems, which have taken two or three days to solve in the past.

It's easy to contact Tableau and ask to increase users or resources. They'll do it in the blink of an eye.

At present, we have 20 users, 12 of which are shift users. The majority of our users in total are board members or high-level managers. 

I wouldn't give their support more than a seven out of ten rating.

I have previously used Power BI, Qlik Sense, and Qlikview. I switched because Tableau was better in working with different sources compared to Power BI which was the only one that was truly on par. Qlik Sense and QlikView were easy to use but didn't have most of the features that Tableau and Power BI offered. Then there's OBIEE which I have used for the past two years, but it is quite difficult for non-technical users.

I also didn't like that Power BI is typically coupled with Microsoft Azure, whereas Tableau works well with AWS and Google which are a lot easier. 

The setup is straightforward. I mean, there's not much setup at all. It's easy for any mid-level user to do it. For example, I just used the documentation they provided and did everything myself. The documentation was sufficient
and the implementation strategy doesn't take more than 20 days.

I implemented Tableau by myself using the documentation they have made available. And for maintenance on one single node, you might need only two to three people involved.

For data extraction and analysis, Tableau is better than any other tool I have used with the same pricing model.

My ultimate advice is that you should know what the tool is capable of first and what your needs are. I think it's better to use the Server edition, and not Cloud, because there are a lot of problems in the Cloud version that don't seem to be present in the Server version. As for myself, I will likely switch to Tableau Server next year after doing a bit more research on how to do the changeover.

I would rate Tableau an eight out of ten.

I work in the Data Solutions team at Marsh (Insurance company). We build Qlik Sense dashboards for Client Executives in the Specialties team, tailored to their requirements.

The Client Executives can view their client's portfolio over several years and also see how Marsh is performing in the space. These visualizations help them with client and insurer meetings.

Currently, it is being used for new client wins, client retention, negotiating with insurers, providing time efficiencies, and providing consistency in presentations.

Qlik Sense has a modern look and feel and a very intuitive UI, so non-technical users find it very user friendly.

Our team has been able to deliver some very complex analytics that was possible only due to the powerful back-end functionalities and availability of extensions.

The NPrinting functionality has also been very helpful for us, as it can deliver canned reports. It has saved a lot of hours for our business users.

Dashboards we built on Qlik Sense have helped with new client wins, client retention, negotiating with insurers, providing time efficiencies, and providing consistency in presentations.

The time required to build a dashboard is very good, as it only takes a couple of hours to build a basic dashboard. We use this basic dashboard in our Client Executive meetings where we then start the ideation process and consolidate requirements for the final dashboard. We are able to show the Client Executives the art of possible, which helps them understand what can be done.

It has helped us immensely with Data and Digital Literacy. Business users now understand the importance of data and data of good quality!

Several things can be improved, including:

1. Ability to add and customize reference lines (average, linear regression, etc.) on all charts.
2. There are features of QlikView that have still not come to Qlik Sense. These include "Always one value selected", option buttons, and checkboxes with extended functionalities in the Qlik bundle. I am currently using an external plug-in for this, but its performance is poor.
3. Legends for charts that are being colored using a formula.
4. Ease to add company color palette to Qlik Sense dashboard.
5. The on-demand report generation button in Qlik Sense currently doesn't work if NPrinting requires Okta verification, which our company uses. So, we are not able to deliver this to our business users. This is a very powerful functionality and we want to use it!

I have been using Qlik Sense for more than two years. Prior to that, I have also used QlikView for one year.