QlikView Reviews

As a BI professional sometimes you have to tackle projects with poor or no documentation at all, just the datasources and some vague requirements. In QlikView it is quite easy build up a first data model (dimensional or not) and use the first stage to understand the entities and relations between it and the business. From there you can explore the business, understand the users real requirements and needs and improve the model with a few changes, without much effort. This is because Qlikview has a very flexible and short cycle of development in each iteration.

For the user QlikView is a wonderful tool of data discovery, providing powerful tools to navigate easily between a sea of data in an intuitive, easy, and clear way, allowing them to go from facts to KPI and vice versa.

Qlikview can be used both as an advanced reporting tool as well as an BI KPI tool, becoming the base for continuous process improvements. In general the benefits of the tool become clear at the early development stage when the user is challenged to input clearly his ideas, problems and needs and that will affect the process in which he participates. Typically in a second iteration the key user will ask for a new release more oriented to advanced KPIs rather than just reports. This is a direct consequence of the process making things clearer and evolving. So the main value supplied by Qlikview is to reduce uncertainty, make the participants question, discover, interact with each other, and eventually improve the process. Properly used should function as an improvement catalyst for the processes involved.

It is well know that the ETL is quite far away from leading products like Data Stagem Informatica and others. Currently Qliktech is working on this problem with Expressor, a powerful graphic dataflow tool. Another area is the licensing scheme, which leaves out many SMO. To remedy this and try to stop the eruption of third parties (e.g: Tableau), QlikTech launched Qlik Sense, although the future is unclear and there may be a possible merge of the two branches (Qlik Sense + QlikView). Finally QlikTech, since release 10/11, leaves the development of new graphic charts to the community with mixed results.

I have using it for the last five years, since 2010 at least.

The deployment of the dashbords, in the simplest scenario, is so easy you just drop a unique file (qvw extension) in the published folder and the solution appears into the main web page that works like an index of all solutions: the access point.

The product has great stability although in some circumstances, especially if it is low in resources or the reload process encounters some kind of dead lock while extracting the data from the DB, it could/will result in the shutdown of the service. The good news is the automatic behavior: I never saw corrupted data or unstable behavior, just restart the service / reload and all works well again.

The product is designed to scale both horizontally and vertically. Some organizatations which have servers and dashboards that handle until 30 Tb of data have had some issues that finally have been addressed by the support service of QlikTech.

The customer service is provided by the local reseller and is fine. We have mainly used it to get the new releases and some support during the installation.

The technical support in my country is provided by the master reseller and it looks good even when they have to pass the case to Qliktech to figure-out the problem and find a solution. In this last case it can be somewhat delayed because these cases needed to reach the top levels of the service.

I have used (and still use) Microsoft BI: SSISm SSAS and SSRS. The productivity level of QlikView is quite superior, whilst Microsoft licensing scheme is really better, specially when there are large number of users and a lot of SQL licences deployed making it (MS) much cheaper.

The initial setup was absolutely seamless and the only requirement for a successful deploy is a little training to the users, not only about how to use QlikView, but what can be done with QlikView, giving them the initial spark.

In general the vendors which I have worked with were very well qualified, although not very inclined to share information easily.

This question is hard to answer because except for a few cases its impossible to measure how the project (not the tool) improves the results of the organization. Such measures are available at the organizational level, but it is difficult to quantify the proportion of the contribution from one tool to a whole process.

The start cost is around of US $25.000 and the annual royalties are around 20% that includes customer and technical support and upgrades.

I have evaluated Tableau and Microstrategy. The first one is too basic (wonderful if you are a final user). The second one: extremely complex, just for very large organizations and large IT teams.

Think seriously about the possible population of users, how it will grow-up, and check the licensing cost and its limitations.

• Ease of use
• Implementation
• Processing speed

• Trends
• Opportunities
• Automated reporting

• More graphics
• Dashboard support

I've used QlikSense for six months.

Not really.

No issues encountered.

It's very good.

I haven't had a need to contact them.

We used Cognos BI which was fast but a bit complex.

We used an in-house team.

It's taken six months to get an ROI.

It was free to download.

We also evaluated Tableau, which we also use, and Cognos BI.

Try it alongside Tableau as depending on user preferences and other requirements, either product will do the job.

Amazing performance

Easy to use self service

Extremely powerful for data analysis

It has dramatically improved development time for BI reports.

Using traditional tools like OBIEE or SAP BO, BI was more like an IT dependent work stream. Now it has reached the business side, who can do their own analysis. Users can drill data without much IT help.

More flexibility to alter auto association in the data model.

Support for collaboration.

3 years

No issues with deployment, except a few hurdles for single sign on integration.

No, CPU and memory usage are not clearly presented.

Good, they need more proactive support.

Good

Yes, from SAP BO for ease of use and less time for development.

• Relationship based data modelling
• Flexible charting

It speeds up my clients capability to prepare various non-standard management reports.

• Macro Editing
• It should have an HTML text box control
• Presentation on smart device 
• The performance of the Qlikview website is poor as it takes three minutes to open a page
• The SME server edition does not include a deploy tool, and we have to copy updated document to the server manually which seems ridiculous

I've used it for two years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It was quite straightforward.

We involved a local vendor, Shanghai EBI Strategy, and they helped us develop the solution based on our design, however, the result is not as good as expected.  In the local Chinese market, there is a lack of experienced consultants. I searched on the Qlikview forum for many tricks and solutions by myself and improved the overall data modelling structure.

It's not bad.

Yes, we also looked at BO and Microstrategy.  As Microstrategy is also a good package, we are exploring it further.

It is a really good package for your management reporting purpose, as you do not rely on IT support to add/revise any reports.

• Integrated ETL
• In-memory data
• QlikView Management Console
• Front-end design.

Implemented some visualizations for:

• Orders Management
• Sales Dashboard
• Contribution Margin Dashboard
• Budget x Real Expenses Management

So now we have better control in some areas, like Sales, Logistics and Financials.

Sales, Marketing, Internal Controls, Factory, HR, Logistics, etc. all still have room for improvement.

Over two years.

No.

Yes, because at the beginning I didn't have the appropriate hardware in our servers. After an upgrade, there were no problems at all.

Upgrading server hardware.

9/10.

8/10.

No previous solution used.

It was complex because we didn't have the correct person (resource) to build the right queries. We then got someone with the right competency and things have been going well.

In-house one.

Not too many developers available in our market (Brazil).

• Fast access to data
• Rapid development
• Rich graphic interface

• Licensing costs

• Cloud solution
• Less monolithic approach

Six years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Yes we did.

8 out of 10

8 out of 10

We previously used SAP BW, and we changed because it had very complex development, and long development times.

It was straightforward.

We used a mix of an in-house team and a vendor team.

Six months.

We looked at doing either an in-house development or an ad-hoc solution from a software provide.

You should perform a good sizing of the server, and develop a simple data model.

Dynamic dashboards is definitely the most valuable feature. You select your filters and all your graphs and tables are automatically updated; it really saves time when doing analysis! 

Thanks to Qlikview we have been able to set up and share dashboards across our services. We can monitor our internal productivity and revenue, but as well our client’s activity and be proactive if we see a sudden change in volumes. We also monitor our service levels.
Qlikview is giving visibility to our directors and VP , accounts department, as well as operational managers who can follow on their teams productivity. 

Qlikview is very intuitive and user friendly compared to other solutions, however I regret that some of their features are not available for Mac users.

A build your own report feature on standard .qvw would be great. Qlik has recently launched Qliksense, it answers this need but we cannot use the Qliksense feature on Qlikview reports. An all-in-one solution would be perfect.

Since 2008

Initial database set up was the main concern.

Customer Service is good, however we mainly use the Qlikview community. We can reach out to other users / developers who are always available to help.

Before Qlikview we had 2 BI solutions : Cognos and Hummingbird. Hummingbird was more a database extraction tool available for our clients. We then developed our own operational web-based database for our clients to check their transportation invoices and extract instantly the data they needed for reporting purposes. When this solution was live and operational we stopped Hummingbird as it did not make any sense to maintain both solutions.

In parallel, Cognos was our BI tool for dashboards/ graphs. We decided to change to Qlikview since Cognos was more complex in terms of development and less user friendly. 

I would say straightforward. Training was provided by our supplier, and our developers already had BI knowledge . 

Our vendor (Decideis) helped us with the initial set up and training; we then deployed the solution ourselves.

We are really happy with their knowledge of Qlikview. 

Cognos was evaluated and Qlikview was highly recommended by one of our customers.

Define precisely your needs, your budget and the resources available to set-up, deploy and maintain the solution. There are different solutions on the market, choose the one that will answer your needs. 

Memory data management, quick analysis and reporting.

We can collect and analyze information; until now information was spread across different sites, databases and spread sheets, managed by people belonging to different organizations. Now reports are available in short time in a single source.

Graphic User Interface, the product could be improved by a smarter, more intuitive and friendly interface for graphs or reports.

2 months.

No issues with deployment. 

No problems with stability. 

Yes, we had issues with scalability. 

Not enough data to give an opinion. 

Very easy setup.

We have not yet quoted a ROI, we expect a valuable saving of time and resource by cutting manual reporting, better decision making processes, and on time strategic management alignment.

We are in early evaluation phase.