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Looker Studio vs Qlik Sense comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Looker Studio
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (9th)
Qlik Sense
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
119
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (4th), Embedded BI (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. Looker Studio is designed for Reporting and holds a mindshare of 2.9%, up 2.6% compared to last year.
Qlik Sense, on the other hand, focuses on Data Visualization, holds 7.0% mindshare, down 9.4% since last year.
Reporting
Data Visualization
 

Featured Reviews

Vijay Subramanyam - PeerSpot reviewer
The ability to perform aggregation before visualization allows for effective data slicing and dicing
Looker's ability to perform aggregation before visualization allows for effective data slicing and dicing. The seamless integration with Excel and Google Sheets and custom filter creation features facilitate detailed trend reports and analysis. Looker has significantly improved productivity by reducing the time spent on creating summary reports from weeks to a day.
Vishal_Goyal - PeerSpot reviewer
In-memory data storage boosts performance
The advantages compared to other BI tools show architectural differences. The main feature is that it keeps all the data in memory. It doesn't retrieve the data from data sources when I need it on the dashboard; instead, it quickly provides the desired data, making it very fast compared to other BI tools. The ROI is very high using Qlik Sense. It offers many benefits of BI. It is flexible from a developer's point of view, allowing me to accomplish many tasks compared to other BI tools. From an end-user perspective, it's convenient and performance-oriented, providing something meaningful from all the organization's data.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The ability to design complex data models and equations."
"The ability to integrate with a great variety of data sources."
"Data Studio integrates seamlessly with other Google products, and we can use it with other APIs if we like."
"The best thing about the tool is that it allows you to share information easily and dashboards with colleagues and teammates because it's all online. No matter where you are, as long as you have the Internet, you can connect and use these dashboards. Google made good documentation for this tool. There are many examples of how to use and create dashboards and videos on YouTube. So, I think it's easy to learn."
"The integration with Excel and Google Sheets is a valuable feature, making it easy to access and visualize data."
"I am impressed with the tool's scheduling mechanism, refresh mechanism, and different types of charts."
"I find it favorable regarding speed of development, ease of building, and flexibility."
"The company dashboard is useful because we could share it via a link as a reminder for everyone to check it weekly. We observed the progress of our portfolio from last week to the current week, allowing us to compare revenues."
"The product responds fast for data analysis."
"The most valuable features of Qlik Sense are its speed and seamless development of web technologies."
"The product is reasonably priced."
"This solution has improved our organization by making our analysis results available to customers."
"We began to see how our processes and other team's processes were negatively affecting the bottom line. We were able to provide tips to other teams to help improve their processes."
"The product has many great features like easy and fast implementation, flexible data loading, and in-memory processing, but the Set Analysis is what I think is the most valuable. It makes the product very powerful."
"The changes in a dashboard are very easy."
"The extensibility of the Platform with either internally created extensions or the use of third-party provided items really opens the platform up."
 

Cons

"The tool has a lot of room for improvement. It's not very professional and allows for only simple tasks like indicating KPIs or quick calculations. It lacks a good calculation-based language like Power BI's DAX, making it less suitable for professional use. Additionally, the variety of visualization tools is limited, and customization options are restricted."
"Stability and scalability an be improved for a full ten."
"It's not yet a replacement for a complete BI tool."
"From the perspective of infrastructure, I cannot provide a valuable opinion on the ease of use and customization options of Looker Studio."
"The tool should improve on live data integration for quicker data reflection."
"The tool should come up with data modeling layer features that are present in other products like Power BI."
"The performance of Looker needs improvement, particularly the report loading time, which is critical for business users."
"Insisting on forums, blogs and community outreach in communications, and posting videos on an established calendar would be useful."
"They should generally focus more on the evolution of current capabilities rather than doing everything but only at 50% effectiveness."
"I would like to have the ability to better customize the visuals including changing fonts, sizing, colors, axes, and titles."
"Some of the charts are still a bit basic and screen rendering on different sized monitors can be an issue."
"The current visualization features feel incomplete compared to what's available with scripting tools."
"Error handling is an area that needs to be improved."
"Ability for the administrator to approve Community Sheets in the QMC and then move them into base sheets."
"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."
"Report generation without the need for NPrinting, which has limited capabilities anyway, would be an improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is available for free."
"I think the tool is cheap because you don't need to pay anything for using the tool. However, when connecting and analyzing other data sources, you should consider where to analyze this information because Google Data Studio doesn't handle much data well. You must also consider how you will connect this data to it. In this case, you might need to hire DevOps or a data team to help with these issues."
"The cost is quite affordable based on feature analysis."
"The solution is free but the Google Looker is expensive."
"The tool is free."
"We have 20 licenses for Qlik Sense, and it is a special license that allows people in the whole company to use it over time. You buy this license and there are some minutes that can be used. For example, for the users that used only a few minutes in a month, we use this license. All the people have the ability to work with Qlik Sense. However, the number of licenses is not the number of users. The number of users that uses Qlik Sense is approximately 35 people."
"Know your needs when going into the purchasing decision."
"The costs can initially become quite high. Make sure you have a clear understanding of who will truly use the product as opposed to someone that will simply receive the end report."
"Qlik Sense is pretty good in terms of price."
"You will spend more time on educating your staff than licensing the product."
"Ultimately, the cost is low, and it implements fast. The limiting factor is how quickly your staff can keep up."
"I'm not able to reveal the licensing cost for Qlik Sense, but because it was a huge deal, the cost was less than the usual cost. The license wasn't that costly. It was the infrastructure that was very costly."
"Start small with tokens. You can always buy more."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
7%
Educational Organization
31%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Google Data Studio?
The company dashboard is useful because we could share it via a link as a reminder for everyone to check it weekly. We observed the progress of our portfolio from last week to the current week, all...
What needs improvement with Google Data Studio?
From the perspective of infrastructure, I cannot provide a valuable opinion on the ease of use and customization options of Looker Studio. I can ask our designers how they feel since they have expe...
What is your primary use case for Google Data Studio?
We use Looker and Looker Studio, as Looker licenses Looker Studio for data presentation and reporting. With GCP, we use Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, Kubernetes, and we utilize BigQuery extensively. ...
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 Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos Enter...
Seeking lightweight open source BI software
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...
What do you like most about Qlik Sense?
The most valuable features of Qlik Sense are its speed and seamless development of web technologies.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Data Studio
QlikSense
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Genesys, Shueisha
Abbvie, Airbus, Barclays, BT Openreach, BMW, Daimler AG, HSBC, IKEA, Nationwide Building Society, Royal Mail Group, Sanofi, Siemens, Wendy'', Vodafone, Volvo
Find out what your peers are saying about Looker Studio vs. Qlik Sense and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.