Qlik Sense Reviews

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. 

Qlik is being used as a Business Intelligence and Data Analytics solution. It currently extracts the data from our database and online sources via a Rest API connector. The data is then transformed in the load script and stored in a .qvd file format.

Once this has been completed, applications use a combination of the .qvd files depending on their functionality to allow reporting on areas of the business. Any area with data can be reported on with graphics tailored to the needs of the business. 

Qlik Sense has allowed us to compile and analyze our data in real-time, thanks to the various and specific applications that have been designed and built. This has allowed the organization to make data-informed decisions and has also removed the need for manual tasks, checks, and calculations.

In turn, this has allowed the organization to better utilize time and resources, improving business efficiency and productivity. However, it is worth noting that this is only as good as your data. You must ensure your organization has clean data!

Qlik has a powerful load script that uses an enhanced SQL language which is excellent for loading and transforming the data. 

Qlik can also store data out into a .qvd file format which is very highly compressed. This file format can then be ready by Qlik extremely quickly, allowing it to rapidly process thousands of rows of data. Qlik also has a range of useful visualizations and also allows for custom visualizations to be created and added as an extension. These can be found online or created by yourself.

Qlik application automation needs additional work and features. However, it is still a fairly new development. It appears it has been brought on to replace many of the Qlik management console's functionality for on-premise Qlik solutions. However, it lacks a lot of the same functionality. It is worth noting that it does have additional functionality in some areas compared to the Qlik Management Console.

An interesting development to Qlik Application Automation would be the addition of functionality that allows writing to .qvd files.

I have been using Qlik sense for three years, however, I have only been using Qlik SaaS for the past year.

The solution is very stable.

The product is easily and effectively scalable.

So far, we have not had an issue that required support.

Neutral

We did not previously use a different solution. 

The setup is straightforward.

We handled the setup in-house.

ROI is hard to quantify, however, it has definitely earned its cost.

I'd advise users to negotiate directly with the sales team for the best deal.

The product was already in use at the organization.

Qlik Sense on-prem may be a better solution currently. However, Qlik Sense SaaS will overtake this product soon.

Using Qlik Sense, we created many CXO & Senior Leaders dashboards. Qlik Sense is really helpful to leaders to get insights on time, and they can see granular level data easily. UI is superb and easy to navigate from one sheet to another.

Our company has a plethora of source systems, and providing a single source of truth via a common platform was a challenge. There was also a need for a self-service analytics platform that allowed businesses to make decisions on time using any device.

We needed to build a Common Reporting Platform that talks to multiple source systems and are:

• Visually intuitive
• Integrate Analytics with Mobile App
• Set up Data Governance and create an enterprise data warehouse

Multiple products were considered, but we chose QlikSense.

Initially, data was kept in silos and business users were reporting at their business level. It was a really cumbersome process to collate data at the company level. After Qlik Sense, we prepared data in one place and transformed it to create Qlik UI. 

The company has a plethora of source systems, and providing a single source of truth via a common platform was a challenge. There was also a need for a self-service analytics platform that allowed businesses to make decisions on time using any device.

Proposed Solution

We worked to build a Common Reporting Platform that talks to multiple source systems and is visually intuitive, integrates analytics with mobile and has Data Governance.

The most valuable aspects of the solution include the :

• ETL and visualization, user stories, and insight advisor
• Self-Service - a clean and modern user experience with Global Smart Search, Associative Exploration, and Advanced Navigation
• Data Visualization  or rich charting, visual interactivity, and smart visualizations
• Data storytelling
• Rapid API development
• Embedded analytics
• Custom extensions
• Powerful, multi-source data integration
• Direct discovery
• Qlik admin  from the Qlik Management Console
• Qlik Sense Monitoring
• Deployment Console
• Data Governance

Qlik Sense brings in the concept of shared libraries where one user can create custom dimensions (even with drill-down functionality), measures, and even visualizations and save it to the "Master Items," from which the other users can simply drag and drop to use it for their analysis.

We are planning to move to Qlik SaaS to mitigate the below issues - 

• The app performance is a challenge for all users
• Section access and other security parameters are complex
• Managing the environment is a major task for company upgrades are not being leveraged to the recent releases
• Regularly maintaining all the environments with the same version and implementations
• Auto ML is a need as this will help businesses make data-driven decisions.
• Use cases about salesforce embedding is critical
• Real time data ingestion and automaton of the ETL are becoming important
• Alerting and reporting for the business users for their analytics requirements is needed

Previously We were using Qlik Enterprise onPem, but we moved to Qlik SaaS last year. 

The product is stable with very good features.

This is very easy to scale. 

Customer service support was good bit not extraordinary. 

Positive

It was complex migration process - Qlik Onprem to Qlik SaaS. 

Through Qlik Services, we migrated our dashboards to Qlik SaaS

We are able to save many manhours by automating the solution.

Qlik Sense is excellent for Leadership reporting purposes. Its specialty is quick data rendering, and data drill-down, which has been quite useful. The GUI is excellent.

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. 

Positive

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. 

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 built a reporting platform across the organization. The business needed people with Qlik knowledge to develop the solution. As Qlik is Self-Service oriented, even business people can create their own quick solutions. We are using a proper QDF structure and versioning system, which gives us many benefits such as reusability, backup availability, control versioning, etc. We created best practices for development purposes. Our community is comprised of several hundreds of users, and it works like a charm!

There have been always requirements for reporting. At the very beginning, the only way we could report the data was via SQL and Excel. Now, there is a robust but flexible reporting platform that gives lots of opportunities to the end users, and the solutions are still integrated with other systems like Collibra, SageMaker, Airflow, etc. 

We would like to start with big data processing and shift it a bit ahead. We have discovered it is possible to have a data-driven organization as almost all decisions are based on data from this platform.

It is mainly easy to use. It is simple to develop, which is good. However, on the other hand, there is a lack of functionality. 

The self-service capability allows even less IT-oriented people to build their solution as quickly as possible for their next meeting in several hours. The ETL is another benefit of this tool as it is not the standard functionality of reporting tools. You can manipulate and clean the data directly in the tool without dependency on a DB team.

They need to keep it as simple as possible but include as much advanced functionality as possible by positioning all the objects on the page, changing colors for all the objects, improving sheets actions, etc. 

I really like the new UI, which is sadly similar to Power BI. Why is there a simple mode for something that is simple at the beginning? I would add more capabilities first into advanced mode. Pixel-perfect solutions are still required, yet not possible in Qlik right now.

I've used the solution for five years.

We used QlikView, however, it was too old and unsupported.

We'd like it if they could provide a discount.

We looked into Spotfire, PowerBI, and Tableau.

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.

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 !!!