Qlik Sense Pros and Cons

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.

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.

The drag and drop UI has been the most useful to me.

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.

Unique data visualizations created based on - among others - customer reviews and hands-on experience. Qlik is an experienced company in the Business Intelligence / Data visualization area, that doesn't necessarily mean it is the best solution, however, based on my personal experience it is much more complex than Power BI and Tableau as I've had some things to do with these two concurrent softwares.

The number of visualizations that are present in Qlik is very useful for our developers to help our business partners tell stories with their data. Qlik continues to add to and enhance these visualizations with each release. We are also very excited to leverage the integration between Qlik Sense and Qlik Catalog as we roll that out soon.

Set analysis is great for its power user capabilities such as performing an IF on an aggregated column. The ability to create custom coloring expressions based on values is also a good idea although not as easy as I wished it was.

Obviously and considering that Qlik Sense is a data visualization application, the most attractive feature is the fast handling of large amounts of data and the attractive visualization of the same.

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

The flexibility of Qlik Sense and the addition of 3rd party extensions allow us to extend the use of Qlik Sense beyond analytics and bring the platform to the core of our digital workplace, augmenting analytics with workflow, and team collaboration.

The solution needs to make improvements to the licensing model. They need to make it more affordable at scale, and to make it more affordable for those companies at the low end of the market as well.

Reload failure alerts on the application within the Qlik Management Console without any use of extensions. QlikView is able to handle these alerts directly through the QlikView Management Console. We would appreciate a similar solution that is easy to set up and use. Simple formatting options in the pivot and straight tables such as adjusting line thickness and font selection and size.

The only thing I would say that comes up is that sometimes it can be a bit buggy.

There is an inability to effectively manage (pre)caching (scheduling, assigning for respective user groups, etc), especially without community extensions or uour own development.

Even though a huge set of learning material is available, anyone starting his/her journey on learning the software doesn't even know where to start it. The so-called Continous Classroom service is not cheap, but there are many free tutorials, they are not sorted or enlisted adequately though.

I would like to see Qlik add more DevOps functionality to their product. Currently, we have to turn to 3rd party products to handle things like Source Control, Code Deployment through environments, etc.

The QMC needs more work. Some of the features should be available directly from the hub. Too many duplicates/publish. Intelli-sense when loading a stored qvd would help so much with remembering column names. The pop-up windows are too small when working in the QMC.

If a team wants to keep track of source code changes, there is not an out-of-the-box solution for it.

There is a direction currently with feature releases within QLik Sense which are focused towards the SaaS or Cloud offerings of Qlik Sense. This leaves those who have invested heavily in on-premise enterprise deployments in a difficult position to gain the benefits of some powerful new features they have to look to reinvest further towards these SaaS or Cloud deployments or bring in a hybrid model. Qlik provides no real split between what features are available in each of the deployment options.

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.