Great promise, too difficult/time consuming to use to deliver on it.
April 23, 2020

Great promise, too difficult/time consuming to use to deliver on it.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Qlik Sense Enterprise

Overall Satisfaction with Qlik Sense

We utilize Qlik Sense as our principal BI solution for the entire company. We serve visualizations of our data to users in every department for any reason they might need automatically updating data resources. We purchased Qlik due to its ability to load relatively large volumes of data for analysis by the end user through the in-app selections tool, a job at which it performs fairly well.
  • End-user driven analysis
  • Multi-table data structures
  • Data Manager is almost completely non-performant with large data volumes or complex queries, wasting large amounts of analyst time waiting around for the necessary synchronize tables step, which can take *actual hours* and doesn't even actually load the data! We elected not to utilize Qlik as our embedded BI tool for this reason: I couldn't imagine putting my own users through what I deal with on a regular basis. I also have several apps which appear to have developed some sort of bug which prevents me from
  • Many common analytics questions are not really possible to perform in the front end and must be pre-calculated either in the load script or your data warehouse: rolling averages, period over period calculations, and several other common transformations are not really possible without (exceedingly complicated and unintuitive) "set analysis" scripts, and some are just best handled in
  • Adding multiple event streams from different tables to a single graph is essentially impossible; you must instead redesign your data model to allow for a single data field to refer to all the relevant events. There is no internal feature to help you do this.
  • Overall, Qlik is a system which serves end users reasonably well, and the data model combined with the selections feature *should* free up Analyst hours due to enabling end-user driven analytics, but that opportunity is lost due to how difficult it is to use and maintain apps in the back end.
  • I don't know if this is a "room for improvement" but Qlik's model is to internalize all data to disk on your Qlik server, which means if you are looking for a tool to make best use of a high-powered big data warehouse with excellent OLAP processing times, Qlik is not the tool for you.
  • + Users are able to answer many common business questions without help from an analyst
  • - Many slightly more complex questions require intervention from an analyst or technical contributor which requires significant time investment
  • - Data Manger has wasted easily over 100 hours of analyst time over the last two years for one contributor
We evaluated over a dozen vendors when we selected Qlik; among them I felt it had the best internal data model philosophy leading to much more powerful self-service analytics and apps which are easily extensible to include other visualizations. I think it was a reasonable choice at the time but as our analytics needs have changed over the last two years I've begun thinking about other options with a little more focus on rapid development and more visualization and customization options when creating dashboards, and if we must sacrifice some end-user versatility in exchange then we'd probably make that choice.
Qlik Sense Enterprise is best when:
  • You have a highly data literate team of stakeholders who will benefit from being able to do their own analysis.
  • You have an IT team familiar with Windows Server. (Not relevant to Cloud offering)
  • You have ample analyst resources and training time.

Qlik Sense Enterprise is problematic when:
  • You have limited analyst resources.
  • You have a broad array of data literacy among your end users, requiring more explicit graphs to be designed by your analysts.
  • You want to take advantage of a powerful big data warehouse with good on-demand OLAP performance.
I think there's a balance here that we've caught the wrong end of: Qlik is fine to serve as a BI tool to take you from relatively small firm to enterprise scale, but you need to be able to continually re-invest in analytics in order to make it work at larger scales, and if your org doesn't have the capacity to maintain a non-trivial team of experts to maintain the system, they may easily become overwhelmed. Training users in the tools they need to be really successful (Data Load scripting, set expressions, chart scripting) is time consuming and expensive.

Qlik Sense Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
4
Customizable dashboards
6
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
4
Report sharing and collaboration
8
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
7
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
6
Multi-User Support (named login)
1
Role-Based Security Model
10
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
10
Single Sign-On (SSO)
10
Responsive Design for Web Access
10
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
10
REST API
Not Rated
Javascript API
Not Rated
iFrames
Not Rated
Java API
Not Rated
Themeable User Interface (UI)
Not Rated
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
Not Rated