To me Qlik Sense products make a lot of "sense" for optimizing business insights...One Qlik, Two Qlik - Analytics Done!!
July 20, 2021
To me Qlik Sense products make a lot of "sense" for optimizing business insights...One Qlik, Two Qlik - Analytics Done!!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Qlik Sense Enterprise
Overall Satisfaction with Qlik Sense
Qlik Sense Enterprise is used by two divisions of our corporation and is used by the majority of the departments within those organizational entities and in a very self-empowered way.
We have other business intelligence applications (from other vendors) as well that allow MS Excel Add-in functionality to review enterprise performance results, but for visualizations and dashboards, we selected Qlik Sense as the preferred tool in that domain.
We segregate the creation of enterprise quality transactional system sources of data so that the QVD files (i.e. data warehouse) is one layer managed by IT Support staff (including myself) but once the datasets of the correct data quality are made available as QVD files then the business staff in any of the departments has the access to build visualizations and dashboards from the data contained in those files in any way they see fit (including the blending of datasets as appropriate with either other enterprise-quality data or with their own spreadsheets).
We have other business intelligence applications (from other vendors) as well that allow MS Excel Add-in functionality to review enterprise performance results, but for visualizations and dashboards, we selected Qlik Sense as the preferred tool in that domain.
We segregate the creation of enterprise quality transactional system sources of data so that the QVD files (i.e. data warehouse) is one layer managed by IT Support staff (including myself) but once the datasets of the correct data quality are made available as QVD files then the business staff in any of the departments has the access to build visualizations and dashboards from the data contained in those files in any way they see fit (including the blending of datasets as appropriate with either other enterprise-quality data or with their own spreadsheets).
- Qlik Sense reports the data from the QVD files really well so the end-user experience is always optimum. Hardly any wait time is ever noticed at all which is magnificent compared to some other products in this space.
- The fact that Qlik Sense is also already fully mobile device-ready is a big bonus. Other applications have to have different variations either declared upfront or at least tested but Qlik Sense works really well whether via the designated proprietary Qlik Sense Mobile App (from the App store) or just in a standard browser like Safari.
- Data ingestion times are really optimum too since millions of records can be added to a QVD file in only a few minutes. This helps our organization with optimizing the overnight loading window.
- The background loading tasks scheduling is also user-friendly and robust with good error logging and failure/success monitoring available.
- We use SAP for transactions and SAP BI for data warehousing so it is very useful to also use Qlik Sense along with the proprietary Qlik Sense SAP Connector so that data can be retrieved as datasets from BW Query results. This helps leverage all our investment in the BW modeling including the full SAP BW query catalog when ingesting data into the QVD files. At the same time, the SQL connector can retrieve data from our SAP HANA database with ease too.
- The ability to develop on the iPad is also a bonus that is often not available in other tools in this domain.
- The security modeling is relatively easy to maintain and integrates well with our Azure identity management system. This all makes user management tasks very seamless and robust, ensuring that only those that really need access to the Qlik Sense system are granted hat access and if they leave their access is quickly revoked.
- The PDF printing of dashboards is part of a secondary product called NPrinting and we did not choose to additionally purchase this product. This means that broadcasting the results of a dashboard (in the enterprise on-premise product) is not really available to us, but I guess that was the trade-off. It would be great if that functionality was at some point built into the design/licensing of the main Qlik Sense Enterprise product.
- The fact that all loading is via proprietary syntax scripting is a little cumbersome and has a reasonably high learning curve. SQL is the standard and while some SQL statements can be used in the data ingestion process it is also then the mix of two syntaxes in one script.
- Some of the design concepts (such as table concatenation) in the scripting syntax are a little non-intuitive. I prefer to not have things happening in an automated way (others may disagree since it means less coding rather than more) but it just adds to the learning curve when things are automatically occurring in the background (which might come as unexpected outcomes to a developer that is new to the Qlik Sense product).
Do you think Qlik Sense delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Qlik Sense's feature set?
Yes
Did Qlik Sense live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Qlik Sense go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Qlik Sense again?
Yes
- A lot of value generation for the business is in having happy users and low entry parameters when it comes to end-user training. Qlik Sense ticks the boxes in this regard.
- It is slightly an intangible benefit that is hard to measure statistically but the ability to capitalize on the available datasets to generate meaningful insights that lead to actionable outcomes is the promise of all BI systems. In the main part, Qlik Sense delivers on this promise, especially when it comes to self-service aspects or joining almost disparate datasets into one dashboard design.
- The price is high compared to other products and one other downside is that it must use (in the most part although there are some exceptions if the developer knows what they are doing) the proprietary Qlik Sense QVD files as the data warehouse that all reporting is done from. Other tools in the market better allow for leaving the data where it is and then simply being the visualization tools across the remote dataset. Qlik is beginning to rectify this in later editions and in making more real-time datasets become part of the overall ETL model.
- As usual, governance is critical with Qlik Sense since it is a self-service environment so quite quickly if the governance checks are not in place there can be a proliferation of very similar reports, however, the features about published versus un-published dashboards go some way in terms of rectifying this. It could also benefit from a proper development lifecycle management tool that spans more than one instance (i.e. transporting of development artifacts with appropriate transport ap[proval process in-built).
- I think the development team at the vendor side (i.e. Qlik International) are very committed and listen to the business customers very well with new useful features being added all the time.
Other vendors products evaluated (in some cases used by other divisions within our corporation):
** SAP Analytics Cloud - stacks up quite well against Qlik Sense but the differences are subtle but important. Sometimes SAC has it over Qlik and sometimes Qlik has it over SAC so the evaluation is tricky. The licensing leads to SAC coming out on top and being an advantageous product if that is already stored in an SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW) environment (although SAC is not restricted to only that architecture and easily does non-SAP data ingestion too.
** MS Power BI - also stacks up quite well against Qlik Sense and especially on price, and especially as the natural extension to Office 365. Relies heavily on a desktop application (for development activities), whereas Qlik is a browser-based environment for both outputs of dashboards as well as the development of artifacts.
We are aware of a lot of the Qlik Products, but at this point in our analytics maturity curve, we do not opt to extend our landscape to include them, such as:
NPrinting
Data Catalogue
Data Marketplace
Real-time connectivity and push-down of the indexing function.
Cloud-based options and collaboration options are available in the cloud tools.
** SAP Analytics Cloud - stacks up quite well against Qlik Sense but the differences are subtle but important. Sometimes SAC has it over Qlik and sometimes Qlik has it over SAC so the evaluation is tricky. The licensing leads to SAC coming out on top and being an advantageous product if that is already stored in an SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW) environment (although SAC is not restricted to only that architecture and easily does non-SAP data ingestion too.
** MS Power BI - also stacks up quite well against Qlik Sense and especially on price, and especially as the natural extension to Office 365. Relies heavily on a desktop application (for development activities), whereas Qlik is a browser-based environment for both outputs of dashboards as well as the development of artifacts.
We are aware of a lot of the Qlik Products, but at this point in our analytics maturity curve, we do not opt to extend our landscape to include them, such as:
NPrinting
Data Catalogue
Data Marketplace
Real-time connectivity and push-down of the indexing function.
Cloud-based options and collaboration options are available in the cloud tools.