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Qlik Compose vs dbt comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

dbt
Ranking in Data Integration
9th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Data Quality (5th)
Qlik Compose
Ranking in Data Integration
50th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of dbt is 1.4%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Qlik Compose is 0.9%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Integration Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
dbt1.4%
Qlik Compose0.9%
Other97.7%
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

Harshwardhan Gullapalli - PeerSpot reviewer
AI Engineer at a educational organization with 51-200 employees
Data pipelines have improved financial accuracy and now build transparent audit-ready reports
As for something I wish we had, dbt's native support for Python transformations came later, and we did some complex financial classification calculations that felt clunky in pure SQL. We ended up writing Python in our n8n workflows and then fed the results back into dbt, which created a bit of a split-brain situation. If we would have had dbt Python models earlier, we could have kept that logic unified. Managing multiple reporting standards was our biggest operational pain point with dbt. We were running UAE corporate tax compliance and IFRS disclosure workflows simultaneously for different clients, and dbt does not have a native concept of multi-tenant or multi-standard project organization. Everything lives in one flat structure, so we had to build more conventions: separate schema folders for IFRS models versus UACT models, custom macros to tag models by compliance regime, and environment variables to control which set of transformations run for which client.
Sahil Taneja - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Consultant/Manager at Tenzing
Easy matching and reconciliation of data
The initial setup was easy for the data warehousing concept. But for a person who is new to ETL and warehousing concepts, it may take some time. If someone is familiar with these concepts, they could understand and learn the tool quickly. However, compared to other tools, the UI is complex. It would be helpful to have a better UI and documentation for new users. As of now, there is a challenge in learning the Compose tool for new users altogether. Qlik Compose was deployed on-premises. But the servers, like the SQL servers were maintained on the cloud—the managed instances.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Since we migrated from SSIS to dbt model architecture, it takes around four hours only to complete a full refresh, and the client is now happy because our downtime was drastically reduced when we perform a complete refresh of the data."
"The most concrete outcome was a significant reduction in data errors reaching our downstream AI models, and after implementing dbt's testing layer, we caught roughly 70% of those issues at the transformation stage itself, before they ever touched the model."
"There is operational efficiency achieved, and data quality and governance have also been achieved with modular SQL and version controlling, which reduced duplication of data and data errors."
"I would say the best feature or the most desirable feature for dbt is the ability to write everything in code."
"From a developer point of view, I find the ease of development and the code to be the most useful capabilities of dbt."
"Overall, I find dbt to be optimized compared to other tools."
"It is very convenient because at the end, I have the opportunity to orchestrate all my transformations in just one single place, rather than having them spread out."
"dbt has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to create our data pipelines much faster, going from ingestion of data to creating a data product in weeks instead of months, and we can do it in-house with the skillset we already have."
"One of the most valuable features of this tool is its automation capabilities, allowing us to design the warehouse in an automated manner. Additionally, we can generate Data Lifecycle Policies (DLP) reports and efficiently implement updates and best practices based on proven design patterns."
"Qlik Compose is good enough. It is user-friendly and intuitive."
"As long as you pick the solution that best fits with your requirements, you won't find that performance is a problem."
"I have found it to be a very good, stable, and strong product."
"I have found it to be a very good, stable, and strong product."
"Qlik Compose is good enough; it is user-friendly and intuitive."
"There were many valuable features, such as extracting any data to put in the cloud. For example, Qlik was able to gather data from SAP and extract SAP data from the platforms."
"The most valuable is its excellence as a graphical data representation tool and the versatility it offers, especially with drill-down capabilities."
 

Cons

"Managing multiple reporting standards was our biggest operational pain point with dbt."
"If I needed to name a few areas for improvement, I would mention the migration of code to Git and GitHub, which sometimes fails and can be confusing for developers during handover."
"dbt can be improved as I find the co-pilot in dbt is not very good, and my team has tried using it but opted to move off it and use other co-pilots such as GitHub."
"The initial setup of dbt is somewhat complex."
"Every upgrade is a little bit of a risk for us because we do not know if the workarounds that we developed will be available for the next version."
"The solution must add more Python-based implementations."
"If you compare the cost of those packages with dbt alone, it is more expensive to use dbt alone."
"Dbt is not as stable as preferred, as it has had a few outages in the current year itself, so improvement should be made in the outages section as it is not stable."
"It would be better if the first level of technical support were a bit more technically knowledgeable to solve the problem. I think they could also improve the injection of custom scripts. It is pretty difficult to add additional scripts. If the modeling doesn't give you what you want, and you want to change the script generated by the modeling, it is a bit more challenging than in most other products. It is very good with standard form type systems, but if you get a more complicated data paradigm, it tends to struggle with transforming that into a model."
"My issues with the solution's stability are owing to the fact that it has certain bugs causing issues in some functionalities that should be working."
"Qlik's ETL and data transformation could be better."
"For more complex work, we are not using Qlik Compose because it cannot handle very high volumes at the moment. It needs the same batching capabilities that other ETL tools have. We can't batch the data into small chunks when transforming large amounts of data. It tries to do everything in one shot and that's where it fails."
"There is some scope for improvement around the documentation, and a better UI would definitely help."
"I don't think Qlik can be used in a high-volume scenario. It didn't work for us."
"When processing data from certain tables with a large volume of data, we encounter significant delays. For instance, when dealing with around one million records, it typically takes three to four hours. To address this, I aim to implement performance improvements across all tables, ensuring swift processing similar to those that are currently complete within seconds. The performance issue primarily arises when we analyze the inserts and updates from the source, subsequently dropping the table. While new insertions are handled promptly, updates are processed slowly, leading to performance issues. Despite consulting our Qlik vendors, they were unable to pinpoint the exact cause of this occurrence. Consequently, I am seeking ways to optimize performance within Qlik Compose, specifically concerning updates."
"The solution has room for improvement in the ETL. They have an ETL, but when it comes to the monitoring portion, Qlik Compose doesn't provide a feature for monitoring."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution’s pricing is affordable."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is very expensive, I rate the solution a six."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"While they outperform Tableau, there's room for improvement in Qlik's pricing structures, especially for corporate clients like us."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Insurance Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for dbt?
I mentioned the cost as one of the advantages, specifically the license cost.
What needs improvement with dbt?
With AI, everything is advancing so fast, so I would say that the most important thing is to try to integrate with more platforms. As of now, dbt has a strong integration with AWS and with Snowflak...
What is your primary use case for dbt?
I am currently working with dbt and use dbt's modular SQL models.
Which ETL tool would you recommend to populate data from OLTP to OLAP?
There are two products I know about * TimeXtender : Microsoft based, Transformation logic is quiet good and can easily be extended with T-SQL , Has a semantic layer that generates metat data for cu...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Compose, Attunity Compose
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Poly-Wood
Find out what your peers are saying about Qlik Compose vs. dbt and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.