Qlik Sense - Intuitive Design for Analysts, Clean Web Reports for Users
Updated May 08, 2018

Qlik Sense - Intuitive Design for Analysts, Clean Web Reports for Users

Greg Anderson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Qlik Sense Cloud

Overall Satisfaction with Qlik Sense

Qlik Sense is currently in use, as a pilot program, within three discrete business units.

Our Enterprise Business Intelligence group is implementing Qlik Sense alongside QlikView (6+ years) to provide self-service BI analytic and visualization capabilities to our more advanced users with specific requirements and a solid understanding of the underlying data model and KPIs. These users are also guided to our published internal guidelines for Qlik Sense development and solution department.

The other two business units are large departments with advanced analytics staff, fluctuating reporting requirements, and security considerations beyond the norm (even for a finance company). These business units often consult with the EBI group for assistance.
  • Qlik Sense allows analysts to create their own polished dashboards, whether intended to stand on their alone or be presented alongside the more professional solutions produced in QlikView and Qlik Sense by our BI and visualization experts.
  • Qlik's Associate Model, which leads users through the data selection and modeling process, is much easier for most analysts to use to develop and tune their data models. At the same time, the availability of SQL within the script allows power users to create their own extract statements when desired.
  • Qlik Sense Enterprise and Qlik Sense Cloud both allow users to develop and share their analytic solutions while supporting a security frame that allows the architect and administrators full control over data availability.
  • Qlik's visualization tools and options are awesome across the entire application suite.
  • The Qlik Associate model is extremely powerful and very intuitive, especially for novice users. However, the restrictions inherent in the model (e.g., no more than one common field between joined tables) create extra steps for skilled data analysts and architect.
  • Qlik Sense Cloud provides a subset of the features of the Enterprise Suite. While the Cloud offering is sufficient for many business needs and use cases, the differences make it difficult to present "Qlik Sense" as a single product with variant offerings. The Cloud platform could be expanded to provide more Qlik Sense 'Desktop' capabilities in the Cloud environment.
  • Loading and display of Qlik solutions with extremely large data sets, often required to support dynamic filtering and comparative analysis, can lead to extremely slow performance from the user's perspective. Thankfully, Qlik has announced recent initiatives to ameliorate this issue.
Both Tableau and Power Bi provide direct, guided tools for data access for analysts and others with some knowledge of database design and report definition. Their visualization capabilities, while sufficient for most day-to-day business needs, do not allow the same flexibility and control that Qlik Sense supports.

Zoomdata is more difficult to use from data design through visualization. Its process is guided and controlled to the point of limiting the users' options.
Qlik Sense is best suited for an environment with a well-defined, shared data model that has been cleaned and prepared for consumption by analysts.

Qlik Sense can also be used against standard data warehouses, lakes, typhoons, and mudslides (including "big data" platforms), but extract performance suffers. And, through no fault of the software, inconsistent results often appear from similarly-designed dashboards and expressions if developers do not collaborate on expression definitions.

Qlik Sense Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
8
Customizable dashboards
10
Report Formatting Templates
7
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
8
Integration with R or other statistical packages
7
Report sharing and collaboration
10
Publish to Web
10
Publish to PDF
9
Report Versioning
8
Report Delivery Scheduling
10
Delivery to Remote Servers
9
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
10
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
8
Predictive Analytics
7
Multi-User Support (named login)
10
Role-Based Security Model
9
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
5
Single Sign-On (SSO)
9
Responsive Design for Web Access
10
Mobile Application
6
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
7
REST API
7
Javascript API
8
iFrames
8
Java API
8
Themeable User Interface (UI)
10
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
8