Qlik Sense Reviews

I was working for a power utility company, so our primary use case for Qlik Sense was consumption data and customer billing.

Qlik Sense is essentially a web-based tool even though it's on-prem – you're working off an HTML page – so it's pretty quick. Your processing speed does not matter because you're using a lot of stuff through the web. That's great because it brings down the cost in regards to hardware.

At the same time, learning the language is quite easy. It's not SQL, it's not Python, it's natural database language, so you can pick up the usage pretty easily.

There is room for improvement in the storytelling mode and the report sharing. Qlik Sense also does not have a subscription base like Power BI. So a lot of the analysis is housed in community pages that are managed by either the author or a database administrator, or whoever the Qlik Sense manager is there. It doesn't lend itself to being shared quite easily, because it requires licensing for viewers to consume.

I would also like to see a PowerPoint integration introduced. Power BI, for example, offers a slide deck that can be downloaded and inserted it into your deck. I'm referring to Power BI because that's what I use the most and that's the standard for me. Tableau has this integration in addition to a superior visualization tool. I think Qlik Sense has a better engine than all the three that I've mentioned, but in regards to sharing the analysis, it's clunky; it's not as good.

I have five years of experience with Qlik Sense. 

The stability of a solution depends on the process that brings in the data. We had a strong Qlik Sense production data pipeline that is always firing and we didn't have any resource issues where we were running out of space or anything like that. I think that for the most part, any tool will work well if the environment that it's set up on is well prepared.

Qlik Sense does have a lot of connection APIs that you could do. However, I think Microsoft Enterprise customers can run into challenges with it. We were Microsoft Enterprise, so eventually there was going to be some issues in regards to just how this tool was going to be able to grow with the company. I think it really depends on how many systems you have and how ingrained you are with those systems.

The solution does replace a lot of legacy products, which helps reduce costs, but you really do need somebody that knows what they're doing to get all the integrations done right.

The tech support we received was great. They were very knowledgeable and explained things quite well. They were very gracious with their time. Obviously, they were charging us, but they were well trained. We received tech support through our vendor. 

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. However, a lot of expertise from the backend was required from the vendor to get the solution running. So even after Qlik Sense had been deployed, we still had a lot of issues with development and it wasn't very self-service.

As far as maintenance went, from my standpoint, it didn't really feel like there was a big team working on Qlik Sense. I'm sure there was probably scheduled maintenance that was done during off-peak hours and it didn't really disrupt any of the daily production; reports were still running as planned. There was maybe one or two hiccups towards the end before I left, but again, that was during the pandemic, so a lot of things were probably falling behind. 

The deployment was done through a vendor, which was a problem. The vendor was ingrained into a lot of the deployment of our analysis and trying to get things off the ground from a proof of concept to production and the expertise was not shared very well with the in-house talent. We were always having to go back to them. That created a revenue stream for them, which became very expensive for us. 

Anytime somebody wanted to develop something, we were having to buy hours (paying consultancy charges), and ultimately, it was not sustainable. This model ends up being so much more expensive than deploying something that is a little bit more self-serving and can be deployed across your admin user rates.

It's not a tool that can be the one-all because the license does not cover all the services that a small business or even an enterprise needs to lean on because it requires too much from the vendor to support it.

Qlik Sense is a middle of the road solution in terms of price; just average in regards to pricing. It has a great following because of QlikView and an organization can save money if it goes through Qlik Sense as opposed to doing the full deployment of QlikView. Qlik Sense is a robust solution tool, but it's hard keeping up with the big guys now. 

At my company, the licensing had to do more so with having other users, like non-technical users and business users, and enabling them to view the reports and the analysis. So I don't know if they've changed the licensing to a read-only or reader, but at the time when I was there, it was all or nothing. So you basically were a power user or you were just not going to get it.

My organization might have had a deal for 200 seats. I don't know how much a seat cost us though. 

We are in the affiliate marketing industry. We are using the Qlik Sense Cloud to visualize our marketing-related data. Qlik Sense allows us to visualize the complete funnel from the customer visiting the Google/Bing ads to the product sale. 

We are also using Qlik Sense as a platform where we integrate the data from other data sources and make the insights from it which otherwise would have been quite a difficult task. 

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.

Qlik sense is considered the single source of truth for our organization's operational data. 

Users do not need to switch to different data sources because Qlik Sense has various data connectors that allow us to integrate the data from the various sources into one platform. 

The platform has helped us to analyze our data in a more systematic manner, and make informed decisions from it. 

The solution increased the operational efficiency of our team members and allowed them to leverage the data and get the most out of it.

I found "Qlik application Automation" most interesting. It allows us to create automated analytics and data workflows. This helped us to create an end-to-end pipeline from raw data to Active intelligence. With Qlik Automation, we can reload multiple apps parallel and chain the app together to run one after another. 

Importing/exporting the app script to Github, sending automated emails/reports or chat messages on Teams/Slack based on condition. These are some amazing things we can do with the Qlik application automation feature.

In my opinion, collaborative development of the Qlik Apps is a bit tricky and difficult in the Qlik Sense Cloud. For example, the developer who is not an owner of the app cannot see the app script. The user needs to duplicate the app, and then he should be able to see the app script or make any changes in the app script. 

I see that two developers can not work collaboratively on one app. Moreover, Qlik sense cloud does not provide an option to create a folder on the platform to save the relevant Qvd's/files in one folder. I believe this is something the product should focus on.

I've used the solution for two years.

The solution is highly scalable.

The customer service is good, yet not the best. However, community forums help quite a lot in case of any Qlik-related technical queries.

Neutral

I have used Power BI, however, I did not use this platform intensively. I used it very rarely.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

We implemented this solution in-house.

The pricing of the product is very competitive. The licensing and the setup process is super smooth and easy.

We did evaluate Tableau.

The primary solution was to provide a centralized way to access siloed cross-functional reports. 

By using Qlik Sense, we were able to combine data from our BI solution, ERP, and other systems, to provide daily reports, plus analytics capabilities with high performance. 

As Qlik Sense is an in-memory solution, the performance is fast and provides real-time insights. 

Also, with their ETL capability, we were able to perform ETL without a true data warehouse. It saved us a lot of money by being able to postpone the DW project and gave us time to think of other solutions, like data lakes.

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. 

Also, the self-service capability allowed users to create their own reports on the fly. People from different departments were pulling their data from different sources and presenting their own truth. 

With Qlik Sense, and being able to provide a central data hub, we were able to recreate most of the siloed reports, present one truth on the data, and increase the trust of the organization in the data being presented, gaining leadership approval.

The ETL capability is great. It facilitated the integration of data from different sources without a true data warehouse. Being able to pull data directly from the ERP system and apply the business rules in Qlik, and combine it with the BI data, decreased the business process time. We had to send every request over to our overseas BI team. Being able to have at least one BI resource in-house who is an expert in Qlik, we decrease the development time and started delivering solutions in a much more timely manner. 

The ease of use, providing a self-service environment, and high performance when interacting with the dashboards and reports are all great.

Ad-hoc reporting capabilities would be ideal. Despite the solution being a self-service solution, many users still struggle to create their reports. With an easy drag-and-drop style report, it would make a huge difference. There are extensions for that, however, you have to pay them separately. 

Having a report publication feature is also very important, and it is not native to the on-prem version. However, Qlik has made huge advancements on the cloud version, and adding the hybrid capabilities, in which we can maintain the data in-house and just publish the dashboards to the cloud, will allow us to soon go to the cloud and have access to all those extra features we are missing on-prem. 

I've used the solution for seven years.

The product is very stable. They release three to four updates every year. That way, if bugs come up, they are fixing them in a timely manner. They always listen to the user community and tend to develop what is being requested.

The solution is very scalable, especially the cloud version. Their licensing agreement works really well for large organizations.

The initial support has to come from the vendors, which is something I don't like much, as it can be costly. However, I believe they are starting to provide direct support in certain cases. The use of the Qlik Community is fantastic, as they have experts providing solutions and fixes in a timely manner as well.

Positive

SAP Business Objects. They were very expensive and lacked the dashboard capability side of it. It was also very complex and needed more internal resources. Every request would take longer for it to be developed as well.

The setup was very straightforward. The setup is done through 3rd-party vendors, so you just need to make sure you spend a little more and hire an experienced consulting company for the work.

We implemented it via a vendor. Having the knowledge of experienced consultants doing the work is worth it and can prevent huge delays and problems.

I am not really sure about the full ROI numbers, however, compared to what we would have spent with the DW development, and increased headcount, we would have spent a lot more money. As I said, their licensing plan makes it very simple and cost-effective when we need to add more users.

I'd advise users to go to the cloud. If you can, go directly to the SaaS version. From a cost perspective, it was cheaper than other solutions - and better. Now it might seem more expensive, however, with all the features available, and being able to create a full data pipeline, it makes more sense using Qlik Sense.

We also looked into Power BI and Tableau.

Definitely go to the cloud. Use the SaaS solution as it offers more capabilities and you don't need to be concerned about the back-end management. If fully going to the cloud is not possible, think of a hybrid solution. 

We handle a large volume of data, and it is very challenging to get insight from it. By using Qlik and filling a dashboard on top of it, our ability to analyze and identify our strengths and weaknesses has improved.

The most valuable features are that Qlik has a very strong ATL available and the capacity to handle large volumes of data.

Areas for improvement include user-friendliness, self-service, and some of the visualization options for generating reports.

I've been using Qlik Sense for three to four years.

Qlik Sense's stability is good.

The scalability is good.

Qlik's technical support is great.

Previously, we used QlikView, but we upgraded to Qlik Sense based on an OEM suggestion that QlikView was about to shut down, so we should migrate in order to keep our support from the OEM and technical partners.

The initial setup is straightforward - I would rate it five out of five. We used an agile methodology to implement, starting with one module and then adding multiple modules and enhancements later on.

We used an in-house team for implementation.

We pay for our license on a one-year basis, and I would rate Qlik's pricing four out of five.

We evaluated Tableau and Power BI and chose Qlik Sense because it has an ETL capability.

I would recommend Qlik Sense for those dealing with large volumes of data. Qlik sense can give you complete end-to-end BI implementation. I would rate this solution as nine out of ten.

I've been an user for many years and also a developer that's working as a consultant. I use Qlik to develop apps to extract, load, and transform data from different sources and then use this data to make apps for different departments in my organization. 

I am a consumer of this data as well, as I work for the Controlling Department. We also use NPrinting to send reports to different people in the organization and this saves us a lot of time on manual tasks. 

We extract data from: SAP, SQL DB, Excels, Success Factors, Sharepoint, Oracle, and more. 

Qlik Sense is highly used in my organization as it helps our users to derive insights from the data accurately. 

The visualization objects in Qlik Sense are really good and interactive and help my users to get an understanding of the whole story behind the data. 

Unlike query-based BI tools, the associative model of Qlik Sense has helped them a lot in deriving insights and metrics for the business. Also, it has helped to reduce the time consumed in doing complex reports and sending them to different people.

Qlik Sense has a lot of features that I find valuable.

It's easy to use. As a user, you can learn the basics very quickly and they provide you with free material that makes it easy to learn.

As a developer the tool is easy to learn as well. They keep making improvements to make it easier for users to make their own reports without knowing too much about coding.

You can accurately manage a large volume of data in less time.

Qlik Sense uses an in-memory data model.

It can read a wide range of different sources.

The visualizations are good and keep improving.

The customer support is very good.

I would love to see some improvements in the following areas:

• They need to make it easy to generate documentation of apps, giving information about legacy.
• They need to make security rules to access applications and data security easier and customizable.
• I would love it if they could make a "recycle bin" as users sometimes may delete an app and then cannot recover it unless they have made a backup of the server recently.
• There needs to be better pricing options for on-premises clients Right now, they are focusing more on SaaS.
• NPrinting needs more enhancements in its configuration and error handling.

I've used the solution for more than five years.

We've never had problems with stability due to the fact that we use an on-premises deployment.

The scalability is very good.

Technical support is very good and quite fast; they have always provided help when I needed it.

We did not use a different solution previously.

It's really easy to install and they make it easier each year.

In some companies yes, we did get help and they were very capable.

We have not measured ROI.

I'd advise that users always try to have more RAM than they think they will need to make it easier to expand in the future. This also applies for CPU cores. 

We did look at Power BI.

Qlik Sense is used as a Business Intelligence and analysis tool as part of a dual BI tool strategy. The software is hosted on two multi-node environments; production and ad-hoc.  

The production environment hosts the main reporting suite of apps, while the ad-hoc environment is used for one-off or ad-hoc analysis as well as pre-development. A third environment is used for testing releases or developing extensions and features. 

NPrinting is also used to supplement the capability of Qlik Sense in cases where the users aren't able to access the environment. This happens, for example, with external or third-party reporting, etc. 

Qlik Sense has enabled the simplification of reporting and increased the efficiency of its production. Time-saving efficiencies have translated into genuine bottom-line improvements via the reduction in FTE.  

Its implementation has improved the ways of working in the BI teams and stakeholder engagement improvements have been noted. Moderate cost-saving efficiencies from decommissioning legacy software and recycling hardware have been recognised, as well as delivering a far better customer experience for users.

Qlik's comprehensive ETL capability makes it stand out from other vendors. The ability to connect to a wide variety of data sources and its ability to transform the data quickly and efficiently is extremely powerful; especially when speed to market is the priority for app development. 

The front end has more than enough capability and visualisation options available and rarely is there any limitation that cannot be surmounted quickly and efficiently.

A steady stream of updates ensures that the product keeps moving forward and the output looks great on mobile devices. 

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. As such, the user needs to invest additional expenditure to ensure that all the services are available for the Enterprise solution.  

A lot of the features available in QlikView have now been introduced to Qlik Sense so it would be good to see that effort continue to go into developing front-end capability further still.

We have been using Qlik Sense for seven years.

Support was extremely good in the early days of QlikView, possibly less so since Qlik has been sold.

We implemented it through the vendor. Excellent service and "aftercare".

We use Qlik Sense as a Corporate Analytical Tool. It is used by every functional group for creating their dashboards including but not limited to Supply Chain, Purchasing, Finance, Operations, Quality, Engineering, Warranty, Legal, etc.

We are using Qlik as a self-service analytics tool. We are using Qlik to implement some of the self-service processes, too.

We also use Qlik NPrinting to complement our Qlik Sense environment. This is mainly used for automated report bursting based on certain conditions. This takes away a lot of the manual process of creating Excel-based files on a recurring basis.

Qlik brought awareness to data-driven decision-making. More and more people in the organization are now motivated to use analytics (dashboards built-in to Qlik) for their data and reporting needs. We were able to eliminate lots of Excel files and lots of manual processes used for data acquisition and manipulation that were happening on a recurring basis.

The best impact was during COVID. We were very quickly able to create a COVID war room to keep a track of our customer and supplier operation and start our operation in a safe mode and then align it with customer and supplier Ops.

The most valuable feature is Qlik's data engine, as it is so much better than other tools. We can bring data from multiple sources and easily blend it in Qlik and create a data model (star schema). 

The insight adviser is another high point because it makes it so much easier to communicate with your data. Users are able to create their own sheets and do their own analysis without worrying about data acquisition and data quality. The addition of natural language search has made this a lot more user-friendly and has opened up a lot of use cases.

Error handling is an area that needs to be improved. There is not much help on that and some of the error messaging is not very helpful. On many occasions, we have struggled to figure out what's wrong, as the error message did not help and we had to go through the hoops of going to a Qlik partner and then going to the support.

Provide some built-in functionality to migrate apps from one environment to another and make it easy for organizations that are pushing for self-service analytics.

I would like to see them make the Hub better in terms of usability, like adding personal preferences, favorites, etc.

I have been using Qlik Sense for three years.

Yes, we used a different visualization tool before Qlik. At the time we made the switch, we did a comprehensive evaluation based on a list of our success criteria and Qlik scored more points compared to other tools. Some areas where Qlik scored more are data load, security and performance.

We evaluated Power BI and Tableau.

My advice is to just look for what your organization's needs are. Every org is different and may need different licensing and architecture.

Just go and use Qlik. You will never look back. Happy Dashboarding !!!

We are in the Pharma industry and we get a lot of patient-related data for our products. This data contains post-marketing cases and clinical cases that my organization conducts, and we use Qlik to analyze the data.

We also use Qlik in some of the reporting we do with health authorities with different affiliates. We track the information sent to affiliates, whether the reporting was done on time or not.

We use the GxP setup, so it is very controlled and split by three different environments: Dev, Val, and Production. 

It has improved the amount of time it takes to get information out to the business in a few ways. It gives a detailed and high-level overview on one single page. We can generate reports with a single click, which saves a lot of time.

It has also helped by providing cleansed data to analysts so that they can create their own analysis. It also created an associate model that connects different data and combines them into one single view. We have a complex setup for our patient-related data and Qlik has fixed it.

On one click, it filters out most of the information, which gives an opportunity to drill down into the data. The drag and drop functionality provides an easy and fast development approach.

The associative searching and filtering capability is a unique feature among other BI tools, and one does not need to deeply understand the underlying data.

The powerful data handling and preparation ability to transform data is very helpful.

The associative model that connects the relevant column by looking at the same column names is a good feature.

We have faced some issues with NPrinting, so I feel there is some improvement needed such that it would allow the use of variables and calculative fields from Qlik.

The reload error could be explained a bit more in detail, and if they can also include a debug mode in the load script while writing code, that could also advance the performance and minimize the effort.

Lastly, if the Qlik Continuous Classroom could be available for free for trained users, that would be great.

We have been using Qlik Sense for approximately the past five years.

Overall, the product is very good so far.

My company is a distributor.

We use Qlik to surface information regarding sales, inventory, ordering volumes, customer data, and other key pieces of information to decision-makers in our company. We primarily use Qlik internally.

To date, we have created more than 1300 dashboards for various business teams within the organization. We have five developers who help create and maintain the dashboards. Some of our advanced users have also contributed sheets to our user community to augment the existing dashboards.

Qlik has brought tremendous value to our organization in a few key ways.

One thing Qlik has done is to give us a consistent platform on which we can build analytical solutions. Another thing Qlik has enabled us to do is to move rapidly. Most dashboards are now completed in a few days to a few weeks versus a few months with our previous solutions.

Also, Qlik has enabled our organization to deliver data that was previously unavailable to our internal users. We can now surface that information and do so in a consistent and meaningful manner.

The fact that we can develop and deliver solutions through the browser really cuts down on the operations overhead of producing dashboards that our company finds relevant.

We can easily and quickly deploy new dashboards that reach a wide audience and any changes get reflected almost instantaneously for the users.

Qlik provides an abundance of tools to use for data visualization. We spend more time focusing on how the data is best displayed rather than developing controls to display the information. 

As a developer, the biggest area for improvement is in the realm of source control. If a team wants to keep track of source code changes, there is not an out-of-the-box solution for it. Doing manual version control is error-prone and does not lend itself to simple rollbacks in many cases.

One other area for improvement would be discoverability. There are a lot of advanced capabilities in Qlik that are not easily discovered. Even some of the more 'mundane' features are sometimes hard to find or require a fair amount of explanation before users can take full advantage of them.

My company has been using Qlik for about four years.

While we have been on Qlik there have not been any outages. I would say the up time for Qlik is impeccable. We do occasionally have to take the system down for upgrades and maintenance but those are easily scheduled to occur during off-peak hours and are typically done well before users expect the system to be available.

Qlik scales relatively well.

I use the product to teach data visualization at a university.

The product responds fast for data analysis.

The product could be less expensive.

It is a stable product. I rate its stability an eight out of ten.

I rate the product's scalability a five out of ten. It depends on the number of servers.

The technical support services are good.

Positive

I have worked with Palo Alto and Power BI.

The tool is very easy to set up. It took me nearly two hours to complete the proof of concept. It requires a couple of days to deploy it in a productive environment.

The product is expensive compared to Power BI. I rate its pricing a nine out of ten.

It is a very good tool for on-premise data analysis. I rate it a six out of ten.