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Choosing the Right BI Reporting Platform
Updated November 11, 2015

Choosing the Right BI Reporting Platform

Michael Lam | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with QlikView

QlikView is our companies go-to reporting solution. It is our frontend BI tool and is generally used to pull information out of our database. We provide a flexible "report builder" which is valuable to our end users who build reports off QlikView reports. This reporting tool is used across many departments: SEM | BD | Partners | SplitTest | Finance
  • Fast - everything is in memory so it moves away from the traditional logistics of reading data from disc.
  • Interface is fast to develop. Once a thoughtful data model is setup. The frontend development is fast and allows a RAD environment.
  • The server itself is easy to maintain. Maintenance is low and does not need a typical "sys admin" to manage this reporting server
  • Visualization - Graphically beautiful and provides that "bells and whistle" factor
  • The relationship of how data models are put together in QlikView - it requires good level of technical understanding how models are put together. If they had an ERD like framework when opening up an existing dashboard it would be helpful.
  • The licensing model QlikView employs financially does not make sense for growing small companies.
  • The support of AJAX technology is not up to par with its predecessor, IE plugin. They could do much better job implementing the same features in IE plugin over to AJAX users. The migration will be much simpler since AJAX will be the standard under Qlikview's new future versions.
I have used CrystalReports XI, and SSRS 2005. Both are similar to one another but uniquely different from Qlikview. QlikView provides unique way of taking a subset of a filtered data model and creating another model in memory and comparing it to one another. I don't know of any other tools that allows this powerful type of analysis.

Also the speed of QlikView is much faster. The amount of data I'm dealing with is close to 100M records. We have one dashboard as large as 2GB fully compressed and is very fast in pulling detailed information.
The main reason why I don't give this a 10 vs 8 is because of Qlikview's licensing model. They charge you one license per document. So if you have a user that accesses 3 QlikView files, it will cost you 3 document licenses. Instead I do hope Qlikview eventually moves towards a single user license. They already have something like this but its much more expensive +3x more than document license. For smaller companies they should consider lowering their price so it's more favorable.

Choosing a BI reporting platform is a huge decision and will affect the future reporting capabilities of the company. A company rarely sets on one tool and then migrates to another tool. Its a huge effort to do this. With that in mind, getting more companies to choose Qlikview with a low price point will allow the entire Qlikview community to grow as a whole.
For a long term solution it is best to hire someone full time to manage this reporting project. Vendors are useful if you need to get something quick out the door. For a long term solution that is financially beneficial it's important to hire someone with key skills that will enable him/her to be successful.

QlikView Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
9.0
Pixel Perfect reports
9
Customizable dashboards
10
Report Formatting Templates
8
9.0
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
9
Integration with R or other statistical packages
7
Report sharing and collaboration
10
10.0
Publish to Web
10
Publish to PDF
10
Report Delivery Scheduling
10
8.0
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
8
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
8
6.7
Multi-User Support (named login)
10
Role-Based Security Model
7
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
3
9.5
Responsive Design for Web Access
10
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
9
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding ()
Not Rated

Using QlikView

QlikView Implementation

  • Vendor implemented
  • Professional services company
We were early adopters. Don't remember who but it was 3rfs party help.
Change management was a major issue with the implementation

QlikView Support

Using QlikView

QlikView Reliability