Looker vs Qlik Sense comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Looker and Qlik Sense based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Embedded BI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Looker vs. Qlik Sense Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"We can centralize all our data models.""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.""The stability of Looker has been good since I have been using it. However, it depends on what components are being used.""With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability.""The product is easy to use.""It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time.""From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great.""It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product."

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"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.""This solution has improved our organization by making our analysis results available to customers.""It automates recurring processes to save time and money.""Qlik Sense is very stable. I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. Even for rare issues, we receive good support from Qlik. It's a very stable solution.""It connects very simply​ to data sources.""For a deployment scenario, Qlik Sense is also very easy to use. I can start development from any platform, on-premise or cloud, and continue from where I left off.""It allows you to create a new column using split on a current column, which we find very useful.""The product is very stable."

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Cons
"Stability needs improvement.""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.""The integration with different databases must be improved.""The product does not have documented material.""The visualization capability of the product is limited.""It needs to be more user-friendly.""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."

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"The navigation is quite clunky and outdated.""The product could be less expensive.""Reload time is a limit since everyone wants real-time data.""Ad-hoc reporting capabilities would be ideal.""It's going to take 20 to 30 minutes to refresh sometimes.""Right now, it is complex and you have to understand the data model prior to analyzing it, so basically I would like to see an integration with Excel in the future.""The current visualization features feel incomplete compared to what's available with scripting tools.""Moving forward I would like to see more features that are currently available in QlikView, such as being able to better customize coloring within charts. I would also like to see the ability to add calculated dimensions to the selections tool in the page."

More Qlik Sense Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Looker is expensive and could be made better by reducing it."
  • "It's not cheap, but it's not expensive for big companies."
  • "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."
  • "It is cheap."
  • "I do not have to make any payments to use the solution."
  • More Looker Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The solution is worth it."
  • "Understand the break over price point for switching to the Enterprise license."
  • "Licensing could be cheaper."
  • "Licensing: Review the named model and move towards a usage model (e.g., cores, memory, computers, API calls, etc.)."
  • "The cost is not bad considering the flexibility and support you receive from Qlik. I believe it is worth the cost."
  • "Start small with tokens. You can always buy more."
  • "Currently, our ROI is clear and concise decision-making. This timely addition will easily add $15 million to our bottom line in 2017."
  • "You will spend more time on educating your staff than licensing the product."
  • More Qlik Sense Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability.
    Top Answer:I do not have to make any payments to use the solution. In the beginning, Looker may work fine for its users. If advanced users who have experience with BI tools use Looker, then they may find it to… more »
    Top Answer:The visualization capability of the product is limited. From an improvement perspective, the product should have more visualization capability. I can't clean data in Looker, and if I try to do it… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer:The most valuable features of Qlik Sense are its speed and seamless development of web technologies.
    Ranking
    4th
    out of 31 in Embedded BI
    Views
    2,246
    Comparisons
    1,776
    Reviews
    11
    Average Words per Review
    608
    Rating
    7.9
    2nd
    out of 31 in Embedded BI
    Views
    4,262
    Comparisons
    2,624
    Reviews
    22
    Average Words per Review
    563
    Rating
    8.6
    Comparisons
    Tableau logo
    Compared 13% of the time.
    Amazon QuickSight logo
    Compared 12% of the time.
    Microsoft  Power BI logo
    Compared 10% of the time.
    Apache Superset logo
    Compared 10% of the time.
    MicroStrategy logo
    Compared 4% of the time.
    Also Known As
    QlikSense
    Learn More
    Overview

    Looker is a powerful data analytics platform that empowers businesses to explore and analyze their data in real time. 

    With its intuitive interface and robust features, Looker enables users to easily create and share interactive dashboards, reports, and visualizations. 

    The product's advanced data modeling capabilities and seamless integration with popular data sources make it a top choice for organizations looking to gain valuable insights from their data.

    Qlik Sense is a visual analytics and business intelligence (BI) platform that gives users full control over their system’s data. From this platform they can control every aspect of their system data. It maximizes an organization’s ability to make decisions driven by their data.

    Benefits of Qlik Sense

    Some of the benefits of using Qlik Sense include:

    • Easily manipulate data: Qlik Sense allows users to easily combine and otherwise manipulate their system’s data. It allows them to create interactive visual representations of your datasets. The many different ways that the data can be represented offer many potential options for how to analyze the data. These choices enable users to easily gain critical insights.
    • Easily automate alerts and routine actions: Qlik Sense enables users to keep a close eye on their data. Automatic alerts that will notify them if their data changes in any way. Users don’t need expert knowledge of coding to create automated data-driven events. Users of all experience levels can take advantage of this benefit. Qlik Sense enables routine actions to be automated when necessary data insights will spur the system to take action. This combination of analytics and other tools empower users to take charge of their data.
    • Customize reporting: Users can set Qlik Sense to generate custom reports. These reports can also be customized to be shared by way of one of several methods, allowing users to control who sees their data and what they see.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Qlik Sense stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its associative analytics technology and its remote access capability. Qlik Sense employs an associative analytics engine that gives users the ability to take their data analytics to the next level. Users can create visual connections between different datasets spread across their network, creating deep insights that enable users to gain a full understanding of their data. This engine is easily scaled up to allow a large number of users to benefit from the deep insights that it provides. Users can access Qlik Sense from anywhere in the world. Qlik Sense has an online portal that can be used consistently from anywhere at all. Having the ability to remotely analyze data gives users flexibility when it comes to choosing how to deploy their manpower.

    Jarno L., the managing director of B2IT, writes, “The associative technology features are the solution's most valuable aspects. 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 user interface 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.”

    Tami S., the senior business intelligence analyst at the La Jolla Group, writes, “With the changing business landscape, it is nice to access Qlik Sense through an external website. As an organization when we use QlikView Desktop, we need to connect to our internal network. We can access QlikView through the QlikView access point but the website has a little different look and feel than the desktop application. We appreciate that Qlik Sense is browser-based and the user experience is the same whether at home, in the office or on a boat. As long as the user has internet access, performance is the same.”

    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
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company25%
    Financial Services Firm17%
    Recruiting/Hr Firm8%
    Marketing Services Firm8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization33%
    Computer Software Company10%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm19%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Retailer10%
    Healthcare Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization49%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Computer Software Company6%
    Manufacturing Company5%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise42%
    Large Enterprise32%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise40%
    Large Enterprise46%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    Large Enterprise53%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business10%
    Midsize Enterprise53%
    Large Enterprise37%
    Buyer's Guide
    Looker vs. Qlik Sense
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Looker vs. Qlik Sense and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Looker is ranked 4th in Embedded BI with 19 reviews while Qlik Sense is ranked 2nd in Embedded BI with 112 reviews. Looker is rated 8.0, while Qlik Sense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Looker writes "The APIs are exposed at every level, so it's highly modular". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Qlik Sense writes "Customizable with good ROI and a quick learning curve". Looker is most compared with Amazon QuickSight, Tableau, Google Data Studio, Databricks and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, whereas Qlik Sense is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, Microsoft Power BI, Apache Superset and MicroStrategy. See our Looker vs. Qlik Sense report.

    See our list of best Embedded BI vendors.

    We monitor all Embedded BI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.