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Looker vs Qlik Sense comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 29, 2025

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
Ranking in Embedded BI
9th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Qlik Sense
Ranking in Embedded BI
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
125
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (4th), AI Data Analysis (16th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Embedded BI category, the mindshare of Looker is 6.4%, down from 9.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Qlik Sense is 10.4%, up from 10.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Embedded BI Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Qlik Sense10.4%
Looker6.4%
Other83.2%
Embedded BI
 

Featured Reviews

Kishore Jhunjhunwala - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Analytics Consultant at a outsourcing company 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.
reviewer2592669 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Software Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
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 stability of Looker has been good since I have been using it. However, it depends on what components are being used."
"It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product."
"The product is easy to use."
"I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I didn't face any issues with stability."
"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."
"We can centralize all our data models."
"It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time."
"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."
"The GeoAnalytics paints such a clear picture. It provides a visual of our patient volume, giving us opportunities to see how we are trending in the surrounding cities, and making us more aware of locations that we need to focus more on."
"It is very easy to use, and the Qlik data engine has been able to handle everything we have thrown at it."
"The Qlik Sense cloud insights advisor helps our business users to get the answers to their data questions so that they do not have to rely on IT/BI resources every time they have some data request."
"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."
"Reporting is a valuable feature of the solution."
"Qlik Sense makes it very easy to build interactive presentations for meetings."
"From siloed reports, we went to a centralized knowledge hub, combining cross-functional data, and helping decision-makers see the data as a whole, therefore making more informed decisions."
"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 UI 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."
 

Cons

"Stability needs improvement."
"The product does not have documented material."
"The visualization capability of the product is limited."
"The integration with different databases must be improved."
"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."
"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."
"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."
"It needs to be more user-friendly."
"It would be great if decentralized teams would have more features to manage the metadata on the dashboards, setup the specific user access rights and rules to govern incoming and outgoing data sets from/to other teams, and more features to separate the different data process layers (e.g. extraction, transformation [data quality, business rules])."
"As we are a very process-oriented company, we would like to see more extensions maintained from Qlik, because it's a huge budget problem to choose the right one."
"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."
"Some of the charts are still a bit basic and screen rendering on different sized monitors can be an issue."
"They should generally focus more on the evolution of current capabilities rather than doing everything but only at 50% effectiveness."
"The one thing I would probably try to add is some kind of tutorial since the tool has a lot of options to work with, and for someone who is just starting and does not have any prior experience, it can be a little overwhelming."
"Qlik Sense is working very well on going to low code and development. They are trying to make their environment more user-friendly. However, the training is not free. When you want to learn more about the tool, sometimes you need to pay for the training. This does not make sense to me because training should be free because the more you learn about the tool the more you use it and the more you are loyal to the company and want to continue usage."
"The SaaS offering is being enriched quickly in order to attract new customers to that space and encouraging existing customers to make the switch. The Enterprise solution is therefore lagging behind SaaS in features."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's not cheap, but it's not expensive for big companies."
"Looker is expensive and could be made better by reducing it."
"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."
"I do not have to make any payments to use the solution."
"It is cheap."
"The solution is worth it."
"I believe pricing is similar to other products in the same category, if you have it on-premise."
"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."
"You need to pay 5,000 Norwegian kroner per user. Microsoft Power BI is slightly more expensive than Qlik Sense."
"I would rate Qlik's pricing four out of five."
"The cost is not bad considering the flexibility and support you receive from Qlik. I believe it is worth the cost."
"Licensing is quite good, easy, but slightly expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
8%
Retailer
8%
Media Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise40
Large Enterprise87
 

Questions from the Community

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Earn 20 points
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

No data available
QlikSense, Qlik Analytics Platform
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Yahoo!, Etsy, Kohler, Hipcamp, Hubspot, Kickstarter, Venmo, Dollar Shave Club, 600+ customer
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 vs. Qlik Sense and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.