Free data visualization and business intelligence tool that is easy to sue if you are OK with the limitations
December 20, 2018
Free data visualization and business intelligence tool that is easy to sue if you are OK with the limitations
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Qlik Sense Desktop
Overall Satisfaction with Qlik Sense
The Jessie Ball duPont Fund uses Qlik Sense Desktop to do more advanced visualizations and reporting from a secondary database of its primary business software, Fluxx Grantmaker. Fluxx has excellent reporting options with dashboards, ad-hoc reports and even an excel plugin to build excel reports, but sometimes our leadership wants a little more and that is where Qlik comes in for us. The desktop version is free as well, which has some limitations, but has worked well for us.
- The desktop version is FREE
- Very easy to configure detailed visualizations, lots of drag and drop functionality
- Once apps are developed (apps are what QlikSense calls its reports) just about anyone can filter and run them.
- Great for storytelling with data
- It takes someone with at least SQL and basic programming knowledge for the initial setup and configuration of the platform. Qlik Sense uses its own scripting language, but it isn't too different from other languages.
- You need to remember to reload the data using the data load so you have the most up to date tables when using a secondary database like we do.
- Qlik Sense works with data in real time, so if you need to create a point in time snapshot, you need to build and copy a specific app you build for that purpose so you have that data frozen into a report.
So, I also use and like Microsoft Power BI, but most of my non-technical staff prefers Qlik Sense when they need to run visualizations based on setup applications. It is just a bit more user friendly for those without a lot of technical skills.
Tableau is great too and is something we continue to evaluate and consider. I think all three tools bring something unique to the table and are worth serious evaluation for data visualizations and business intelligence use cases.
Tableau is great too and is something we continue to evaluate and consider. I think all three tools bring something unique to the table and are worth serious evaluation for data visualizations and business intelligence use cases.