Qlik Analytics Platform for public-facing analysis
August 28, 2020

Qlik Analytics Platform for public-facing analysis

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Qlik Analytics Platform

As a local government organization, we use Qlik Analytics Platform to serve public-facing dashboards and data reports to residents and service users, alongside our internal Qlik Sense and Qlik View use. We use Qlik Analytics Platform to manage interactive "dashboard" components within public-facing websites, integrating user-driven data analysis with our corporate messages and offers of support to customers. While it's technically a whole-organization product, development and deployment are managed by one team, and most users of the end products are external customers.
  • It's flexible in allowing the development of fully-fledged analysis tools and dashboards, but also smaller "widgets" to embed in our websites to bring stories to life, and enables us to develop things once and then re-use them in different contexts.
  • The development platform and management console are both easy to use, and, with proper data development by our expert developers, can be used by relatively junior colleagues to produce great-looking and very useful products.
  • The way the platform handles a mix of data sources from different APIs and internal data stores is good.
  • We like the visualizations and from a corporate perspective find it easy to develop one-size-fits-all visualizations that present a wide range of data items well in a responsive way.
  • Some of our team feel that the licensing model was really too restrictive for us when we made the purchase and that given the same choice again, we might think twice about jumping in, but because we've already made that initial investment it's worth sticking with it. We don't think we get great value out of it because we only use it for a relatively small number of deployments. With that said, Qlik's licensing model is changing/has changed, so that might not be as much of an issue for new customers.
  • The Qlik Sense engine which powers the visualizations is in constant development, which is good, but in our current installation still lacks some capabilities -- for example, it only recently got the ability to change the thickness of lines in line graphs! The default options look good but more presentational flexibility obviously will help us tailor and align our public offerings to our corporate brand and presentation.
  • I'd really like them to look again at how they segment their product licenses to make the basic tools more appealing to low-complexity/low volume users like our local government setting.
  • Relatively high additional cost to our BI team's budget compared to other areas of spend (though some colleagues believe this is because we underspend in other areas)
  • Greater transparency as a publicly accountable organization, with data accessible to non-experts
  • Integration with internal corporate reporting framework leading to better challenge of leaders around stated corporate goals, and demonstrably improved performance in some areas as a result
We selected Qlik Analytics Platform when other public-facing tools were either prohibitively expensive for our uses (BusinessObjects) or still not quite mature (Power BI). Now we're in the maintenance contract, it's cost-effective for us to remain. Qlik feels like an excellent interactive analysis platform, and is less strong at flat report outputs, though this has improved.
Customer support is provided through resellers, and finding the right reseller for your context can be a challenge. However our support from our last two resellers/partners has been largely very good. The online community is strong, though obviously doesn't replace having local technical experts working with the product and managing it.

Do you think Qlik Analytics Platform delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Qlik Analytics Platform's feature set?

Yes

Did Qlik Analytics Platform live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Qlik Analytics Platform go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Qlik Analytics Platform again?

No

Our best example is our "corporate performance dashboard," which is a website providing an overview of our organization's goals and strategic priorities, interwoven with Qlik elements allowing users to see at a glance how well we're performing, what we're measuring, and slice-and-dice between different service areas, levels of performance, or other themes, as well as seeing trends, comparators, and targets for individual performance measures. The platform allows a really nice interface for users and a nice interweaving of messages and data.

The way we understand the licensing, it's not suitable for handling sensitive data or producing reports for internal audiences only.