Qlik Sense - valuable sense in every click
October 07, 2016
Qlik Sense - valuable sense in every click
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Qlik Sense Enterprise
Overall Satisfaction with Qlik Sense
Qlik Sense is actively selling as a completely self-service BI solution and you know it's really easy to start with, especially with latest (so far) version 3.1. I can share an example of using this solution across a large international organization with 5000+ employees. Using Qlik Sense in a pair of Qlik Deployment Frameworks gives analysts an opportunity to connect data which they've never ever thought to connect and find valuable insights. There are several branches of applications which solve different kinds of business problems for specific departments and across them. For instance: customer support analysis, IT support analysis, customer relationships analysis, financial analysis, sales analysis, various HR analysis, technical info analysis, and many others. And now more and more business users on different levels are starting to use Qlik Sense for reporting and especially for presentations with "data story telling". But as usual the more you want to achieve in your application than deeper you need to dive into a product and in its back-end part with technical details which is not so simple and requires additional knowledge in data modeling theory, web-development and Qlik scripting.
- Simple to start. Very quick first outcome - you can get first results in a couple of minutes after the start of using the product.
- Associative data model which works in the same way as a human's brain works. User just selects an item and sees all possible relationships of this item with other elements of a data model.
- High ratio of data compression and fast processing a huge amount of data (assuming you have a good data model).
- Easy integration with corporate portal.
- Huge amount of possibilities to create custom objects (Extended visualizations, Mashups, Widgets).
- Open API - you can automate a lot of maintenance processes if in-box functionality is not enough for you.
- Free Desktop version which has the same functionality for business user or developer.
- Truly in-memory technology and doesn't have real-time connection to data source (whether it database, file, web-page etc).
- Fast QIX engine which is responsible for calculations and a very effective method of storing data in memory using bit-stuffed pointers.
- Effective cache (calculations and RAM usage).
- Active community and huge amount of custom visualizations available.
- Powerful set analysis in expressions which helps to calculate very complicated things in a quite easy and understandable way.
- Very flexible security rules for access to various components of applications, sheets, visualizations, data stories etc.
- Requires huge amount of physical RAM memory for enterprise as soon as all data in applications are stored in RAM.
- Limited amount of default visualizations and possibilities to tune charts.
- Requires a lot of technical knowledge from different areas to create a complex solution - which is definitely not a self-service for the typical business user.
The associative data model made an unexpected effect when in a pilot application that allowed users to find new and non-trivial patterns in supplied data sets. Surely TIBCO Spotfire is a great tool with incredible statistical and forecasting possibilities but everything is for data analysts or very powered users - it couldn't be sold as a self-service BI solution. Tableau on the other hand is a great self-service platform with huge possibilities of visualizing data but only when you know exactly what you are looking for.
- Fast reports delivery
- Automation reporting process
- Reducing time on decision making process