I like it
Updated August 25, 2020
I like it
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Qlik Sense Enterprise
Overall Satisfaction with Qlik Sense
As a local government organization, we use Qlik Sense to serve public-facing dashboards and data reports to residents and service users. We're also transitioning from Qlik View to Qlik Sense for internal reporting in several service areas. We maintain a range of interactive reports to allow service managers to understand their data, and also use Qlik Sense as an ad hoc analysis tool within our Business Intelligence function.
- Data modeling is incorporated in the product, allowing for a "no warehouse" approach to smaller reporting solutions. This means we can get off the ground with new reporting projects (or replacements of currently manual processes) without cross-organization coordination, and our analysts don't have to become experts in multiple tools to deliver useful outputs.
- The Data > Analysis > Story workflow allows for precise analysis reports/commentaries on specific areas, with the ability to drill back to the analysis screens for broader exploration.
- Without much thought at all, simple data models just "happen". With proper design, complex data models function well, too. Data processing within Qlik Sense data files happens dramatically faster than the equivalent processing on our Oracle database servers, meaning we can pull raw data in bulk and process it more quickly in Qlik Sense, removing the need for a lengthy warehousing time slot in our nightly database schedule.
- Visualizations can be difficult to customize. For example, while it's possible to select specific colors for chart items, it's not immediately obvious how this works, so there's either a bit of a learning curve for what's a basic task in any other tool, or you end up with every report following the Qlik default scheme. This isn't just an aesthetic preference; color can be crucial in guiding a user through a series of complex reports, and Qlik makes this harder to manage than some other tools I've used (though not impossible).
- Selecting a reseller is more opaque than it needs to be. We happened to land on an excellent reseller when re-procuring our licenses, who brought with them a whole approach to modeling data in Qlik Sense which we otherwise wouldn't have known about, and which, despite the licenses costing about the same, has saved us months of development time. Other customers will presumably be less lucky.
- I'd really like it if my having purchased the QAP license for publishing dashboards externally meant I was also covered for my internal customers. As it is I still have to buy "viewer" licenses for internal users. If we weren't already locked into the Qlik Sense contract because we've already made the big payment and are now only paying maintenance, it would be hard to justify buying this product over cheaper competitors. I still think it's a good product, but in ways that it's hard to articulate in a local government procurement process.
- The biggest negative impact was in our purchasing fewer licenses than we ideally have users, which is our own fault.
- In positive terms, it's dramatically improved our open data offer, which is a core goal of our local government intelligence strategy—we can make data accessible to users who don't even know what "open data" is as a concept, let alone know how to work with a data file.
- We're modernizing internal reporting and saving time on data production while producing better reports. Arguably this would be the case no matter which equivalent tool we selected, but Qlik Sense does have advantages as noted in my review for the kind of team we are.
We selected Qlik Sense 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.