QlikView vs. Windward Core

Sales data validations have helped manage our justifications in the past, especially with regard to new product development and new business introduction. It has also been helpful in identifying trends with business impact and direction specific to quarter and monthly sales from ERP data as well as decisions to purchase equipment of staffing based on run rates and product demand.

One thing that can get out of hand is data output - if you aren't careful in your query, you may be overloaded with data dumps and drown in the amount of info you have to filter through. This is a user caution, not a comment on the software itself.

Incentivized

Great for Technical Users. It's great for people a bit more on the technical side. It allows developers to quickly create and modify reporting templates without having to modify source code or make updates to a repository. Potentially Difficult for Non-Technical Users. Making substantial changes to the data portions of reporting can be a bit difficult for non-technical users. While Windward's tools for this are great, it still requires an understanding of the database schema which not all users will have.

Incentivized

• QlikView has a simple, relational data model that's REALLY fast. Filtering and changing data is dead simple results are almost immediately available.
• The free version of Qlikview is almost completely featured, so you roll a pro-level product out to an entire department for really cheap.
• QlikView is really flexible--if you can imagine it, you can build it.

Incentivized

• Native Office output -- not nested tables and/or horrible RTF like other tools generate.
• Ease of use -- once the data sources are set up, creating tables is as simple as drag and drop (okay, maybe not exactly that simple, but you can certainly create a table of data using drag and drop, then format it and manipulate it as needed).
• Responsive developers and support -- when I've had questions, they've been addressed VERY quickly and professionally.

Incentivized

• We found that QlikView can be a bit slow in supporting some forms of encryption. It is web-based and we needed to upgrade all of our server to not support the older SSL and TLS 1 protocols, only support TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3. However, QlikView could not run with TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3. We had to wait over six months to get a version that would handle the newer TLS versions.
• There are so many options with QlikView that you can get lost when developing a visualization. There are still items I have not yet figured out, such as labeling a graph with the name of a selected detail item.
• QlikView works by pulling the data it is going to use for visualization into its database. I am a security reviewer and I need to make certain that PII and PHI is not pulled by QlikView for a visualization, otherwise this could become a reportable indecent.

Incentivized

• It is hard to pick out the tags if they are mixed in with a block of text.
• Using report variables in select statements causes the selection list of available fields to not show anything.
• The color themes do not match the office selection and it feels very disconnected.

Ease of use, ability to load from pretty much any data source. today I created an application that loaded time sheets from excel that are not in a table format. With Qlik's "enable transformation steps" I was able to automate loads of multiple spreadsheets and multiple tabs easily. Could not do that with any other tool.

Incentivized

QlikView is very easy to implement. The installation is very straight forward. QlikView has several different data connectors that can connect to different data sources very smoothly. The user interface to build the reports is very easy to understand. This helps to have a smaller learning curve. Something very helpful is that QlikView is a browser application for the end users. So, you don't need to install any applications on the user's computer.

Incentivized

For the most part, the Windward report designer is intuitive for our users; but there are a few areas where it is less intuitive. In these cases, our users need to search Windwards support wiki site, or even contact their support technicians. This can also be due to the short time we've had Windward and our lack of knowledge.

Incentivized

We have not had any downtime issues with the product nor uncovered any significant bugs

It is not a SAAS product.

My experience with the Qlik support team has been somewhat limited, but every interaction I have had with them has been very professional and I received a response quickly. Typically if there is a technical issue, our IT team will follow up. My inquiries are specific to product functionality, and Qlik has been very helpful in clarifying any questions I might have.

Incentivized

Support is something they take pride in. Once an issue is raised, they are quick to respond and provide details on a fix. No complaints on support here.

My team attended, but I cannot myself rate, but I think it was good as they've successfully launched a training program at our company themselves for users. It was 3-4 day training.

Training was as expected. The demo environments tend to be more fully featured that our own environment, but the training was clear and well delivered.

"Implementation" can mean a few things... so I'm not sure that this is the answer you want.... but here it goes: To me, implementation means: "Is the user interface intuitive and can I produce meaningful reports with ease?" On that score, I'd say YES. The amount of training required was minimal and the results were powerful. The desktop implementation is a simple, "blank" interface just waiting for your creativity. The pre-populated templates give you a reasonable start to any project -- and a good set of objects to "play around with" if you're just getting started. Finally, note that the "implementation" I used was baked into QuickBooks 2016 Enterprise -- called "Advanced Reporting"..... That integration makes it ultra useful and simple.

Incentivized

The only other vendor product that I have worked with that provides a similar experience to Qlikview is Tableau. I would recommend Tableau if your use case is to build a fixed dashboard. You can share reports for free without needing to buy additional licenses. I would recommend Qlikview if your users are looking for a more interactive experience. They can create new objects to represent the data which can't be accomplished as easily in Tableau

Incentivized

We evaluated several other products to integrate with our new software, but Windward Studios was an obvious standout above the majority. Other applications required some level of software development knowledge and experience to create templates and a much steeper learning curve. After consideration of ease of use, as well as a cost-comparison between different products, Windward Studios was the most suitable product to meet our needs.

Incentivized

• You can use the free desktop version to do a lot of reporting and analysis work more quickly so the ROI is huge
• QlikView is great at finding outliers such as data entry errors
• QlikView is great at helping you quickly discover new insights about your business that can prompt you to take action that can immediately affect your cash flow.

Incentivized

• As a fully integrated solution, the ROI is impacted when a client gets stickier with our solution because they see the benefit of Windward.
• Support has been fantastic for our development team so that as we integrate the solutions we have a clear and clean design.

Incentivized