QlikView Reviews

The in-memory technology allows you to easily manipulate and analyze vast amounts of data with simple clicks. It allows for real-time analysis of data via visual representations, as well as data tables. It supports using variables in calculations, as well as their proprietary SET analysis, which allows for calculations based on calculated dimensions, aggregations, and other logic against real-time selection of data.

It is very flexible in terms of calculations and presentation of values and data. It makes very quick reporting and data analysis possible.

This product has allowed us to create several applications and dashboards for use by management and different business units to conduct self-service analysis, as well as built-in intelligence. This accelerates business decision-making. It avoids the lengthy delays involved in requesting the information from IT or having to deal with the disconnect between technology and the business side, both from an objective point of view, but also from the customer view.

It also enables management and the end user to change the criteria of the reports and data without having to go back to IT with changes. In other words, dynamic reporting.

There definitely needs to be an update in the number of chart types available and the options within each chart. There are various charts that could use more customizable options, as well as certain charts that are missing such as waterfall charts, histograms, etc.

One glaring omission is the lack of mapping technology in QlikView. Although they do offer solutions through third-party add-ons, other similar providers have this as a default feature in the app. I think currently, mapping technology should be standard with these applications given the competition and the capabilities it brings. It seems that because of their third-party developer relationships, they are holding back on adding features to the application, which would put those developers out of business.

The licensing scheme leaves a lot of room for improvement. I believe it is cumbersome and expensive to maintain. In order for a user to view a published application, they need to have a viewer license (approx. $350 the last I remember). However, if they need to view multiple applications, they need a viewer license per application. $350 X # of applications they need to view per user. This will get very expensive if a lot of users need to view the application. There are application licenses, there are named user licenses, there are session licenses, and developer licenses. There are way too many licenses of varying costs, none of which are very economical in my opinion. If you need to view more than three applications, the best alternative is to purchase a developer license, which allows for unlimited applications. However, that will set you back about $1400, even if the user is not a developer.

I have been using it for four years.

Licensing costs are a big one, see aforementioned point. Second would be the hardware requirements from a developer point of view. Because of the in-memory allocation of the application, really big data sets take a really, really long time to load, often times making the user wait quite a while for the loads to finish. If you are making changes to one dataset on an application that has multiple load statements, there isn’t an option to only reload the changed statement. Instead, the entire load has to be redone and thus the cycle begins again, as does the waiting.

I have not dealt with technical support or customer service. We have an implementation area that deals with technical support for server related matters, however, we got the installation and support through a reseller. In our case, internally for all technical support related matters we have to go through our internal channels and processes and in turn if it is something that they cannot handle, they go through the reseller for resolution.

The choice to use this product was an organizational decision.

Initial setup was straightforward.

We had a recommended vendor do the install on site. My only advice is to have users that are somewhat knowledgeable of the application to test. (It can be installed individually for testing.) Also, I recommend thorough testing of all aspects of loading data.

Try to speak with the vendor in terms of the best possible licensing scheme, keeping in mind scalability and future deployments. In the end, if this is not properly calculated, it could be very costly.

It is a great tool for analysis and dashboards. It is better complemented by bringing in data as complete as possible in terms of calculated fields, case statements, etc. QlikView syntax can take some time to learn and might not be as flexible as SQL or other similar languages, in terms of capability in manipulating data.

Loading data is the most valuable feature of this product to me, because we don’t have a data warehouse yet.

QlikView helps me to combine data from many data sources and represent it in the dashboards.

I think the visualization of the charts and the number of default charts provided by QlikView should be improved. QlikView only has limited chart options compared to its competitor. I think Map would be a great addition if QlikView can provide it as default chart. 

I think that the type of chart that is provided by QlikView must be added to capture the need of variety of visualization. Tableau has more charts compared to QlikView.

I have been using this solution for about three months.

I use it on my laptop with limited data. I've never used it for big data.

I chose QlikView because it provides flexible data loading that can help us present data without a data warehouse.

I implemented it by myself.

Pricing is higher compared to the competitor.

If you are looking for dashboards and do not have a data warehouse yet, QlikView is the best option.

In-memory processing and ETL function are the most valuable features of the product to me.

Because data is automatically extracted from the database, users can see the operating data and charts in real-time.

I would like to see them add a powerful map and improve statistic functions.

I have used this solution for three years.

I have encountered scalability issues. Users get slower report response time when there are a lot of chart expressions.

Technical support is OK.

Initial setup was straightforward. QlikView is an excellent product.

We implemented using a vendor team.

The license price is expensive for us.

Generally speaking, QlikView is suitable for under mid-range scale company.

The strongest characteristics of the product are its ease of use and its data discovery and exploration capabilities:

• Ease of use, as it is very intuitive, as long as its back end data model is well designed, providing its end users with a high level of autonomy and the developers with a very intuitive and complete set of tools.
• Data discovery and exploration, thanks to its in-memory data association capabilities that provide a fast and easy way to relate and explore data.

As a consultant, QlikView has helped me deliver high-value BI solutions to my customers, consistently exceeding their expectations and creating new opportunities for my firm.

It could be more mobile friendly, as some of its features don’t work properly on mobile devices or do not provide the best user experience to our customers who would like to extend their access to data. A Cortana/Siri-like feature or advanced analytical capabilities for users with advanced scripting and statistical skills would also extend its usage in the organizations where I operate.

I have been working with QlikView for about 4 years.

I still find some fine tuning issues when scaling up in concurrent usage or data volumes.

Strong customer service, not as strong on the technical part, and the community is still a bit underdeveloped.

I’ve also worked with other main market solutions like Microsoft, or Tableau, but over the last few years, QlikView has evolved considerably, especially when they completed it’s offering with Qlik Sense 2. Although it is not as versatile as the Microsoft solutions, it is stronger in ease of use and development when compared to Power BI for example. It’s licensing costs when compared to Tableau are also a differentiating factor.

It was extremely simple and straightforward to implement.

We do our own implementations without the need for a high level of involvement from the QlikTech vendor team. Our main advice is that a good understanding of how tabular models work when designing the data model, and a good understanding of the full QlikView offering specifically in terms of ETL, are fundamental for a good QlikView implementation project.

BI implementation projects using QlikView are normally faster to execute and faster to get the customer to perceive its value. However, it makes sense to start with a smaller investment specifically on QlikView licensing, as modeling the data and implementing the ETL part is still the biggest bottleneck. It doesn’t make any sense doing a big investment in user licensing, when the real use of QlikView still depends on getting the data to make sense.

Make sure you have your data straight - think like Kimball, but act like Inmon - before moving to QlikView.

It is possible to work with a large amount of data without affecting the performance.

It improved development, because we could just put our data into it and start working, even with datasets with millions of records. Its high speed has also improved my organization.

It would be great if this software had better transforming tools. We can do a lot of heavy work with scripts, but sometimes that gets really messy.

I mean that it would be very good to have a graphic tool to manipulate the data.
I work with IBM Modeler, and I love how easy it is to transform data in it. I think QlikView could implement a graphical interface to manipulate date, just like Modeler. I also think thats way off the scope of QlikView, but I am just thinking how great it would be to have such tool built in.

I have used it for four years.

I haven’t found any problem with deployment, stability or scalability yet.

Technical support is very good. Every question I had, there was someone to help me.

I started working in my actual job because of this software, so I didn´t have the opportunity to choose it. However, I can see it´s great software, and I´d surely choose it.

There wasn´t any problem with the setup, it was very easy (much easier then Oracle OBIEE).

When I got access to it, it was already implemented. I just upgraded one time, without any kind of problem.

It works as a complete BI software solution for us. We can do complex scripting to build data models. We can make somewhat complex reports, even though it does not have the best capabilities as an ETL tool. It is not the best tool for complex reports. It also does not have the best visualizations, but it has a lot of features in one package, and that is its biggest selling point for us.

Performance is very fast. You can create dashboards for large sets of data and the dashboards are still quite responsive.

Creating dashboards takes a lot less time compared to other big vendor solutions.

In my current organization, we use QlikView and we love it. We feel that for us it still does the best job possible. We want to be able to create
beautiful visualizations like we could with Tableau, but we also know that the flexibility we have in QlikView is not possible in Tableau.

Also, as of now, we have IT-driven BI and self-service is not what we are focusing on. We don’t have separate tools for ETL jobs. We think for our purposes, QlikView is better.

In one word, QlikView has become dated now. Other vendors are providing equal or better solutions, especially for self-service, on-the-fly beautiful visualizations and ease of use.

QlikView is not moving as fast as the market trend. There are no big updates in their product that could make our life easier. As far as the useful functionalities, QlikView is the same as it was five years ago.

They did launch a new tool to compete with Tableau, Qlik Sense, which they are trying to push to customers, but it actually falls behind QlikView. (They know that, but they don’t want us to compare Qlik Sense to QlikView, saying they are two entirely different tools.) We still prefer QlikView compared to Qlik Sense. Qlik Sense is incomplete at best.

QlikView is your one-stop shop for all of your BI needs, and it performs well enough. With one tool, you can take raw data from your database/files and develop the complex analytic apps, which I think is the best thing going for QlikView. It’s very flexible and has matured itself well enough to be deployed organization-wide. The learning curve is definitely higher and you might need your apps developed by IT.

It is good for organizations that don't want to invest in multiple products.

The in-memory architecture and ETL function are the most valuable features of this product to us.

Data is automatically extracted from the database. Users can see the operating data and chart in real-time.

I would like to see them add powerful map and statistical functions.

We have used this solution for three years (starting with the BI project kick-off).

Dashboards’ response time is slow when the logic behind them are complex or when there are many dashboards in one QVD file.

It’s quite good and their response time is quick.

Districom, a QlikView partner and reseller, implemented the BI solution for us. Districom’s business consultancy is very strong but their technical support is somewhat in need of improvement.

The license cost is very high.

• The associative indexing engine that does away with the need to design and build OLAP cubes. Instead, it can integrate information from multiple sources in one data model that is easy to maintain, expand, and completely flexible to navigate (no pre-defined query paths).
• The out-of-the-box ETL capability that takes care of the necessary data transformations without having to rely on a separate product.

All information analysis, from casual one-shots to continuous tracking reports, is done with QlikView. This lets us see new patterns as they develop, enabling us to react quickly.

Currently, there is no SaaS licensing model.

The ETL tool could use some visual aids in addition to the wizards that help to build the code.

Visualization design is not drag-and-drop.

I have used it for 6.5 years.

I have not experienced any deployment, stability or scalability issues, except when the workload load exceeds the hardware capabilities, which is the result of poor sizing, poor development practices, or unanticipated growth.

Customer service is almost always spotless.

Tech support is efficient, but seldom necessary due to the very large and dynamic user community.

We did not previously use a different solution. Choosing it comes naturally because we resell Qlik.

Initial setup is as straightforward as client/server installations go. Complexity can arise when getting access to data sources or integrating with third-party security, for example.

We implemented it in house, because we have a Qlik consulting practice. My advice is to not overcomplicate the implementation with excessive design, because the data model can grow organically over time.

Historically, ROI is best-in class for this kind of solution. My advice is: If you have many users, use the large deal size to your advantage.

Join the Qlik Community, ask around if you have any questions, and hire certified consultants.

Take my rating in the context of a complete Business Intelligence platform: data acquisition, transformation, reporting, dashboards, visualization, analytics, collaboration, mobility, and so on.