Qlik Sense Vs Tableau – Which Is Better?

For any business manager, a key performance indicator (KPI) dashboard and business intelligence tool are irreplaceable. Such tools collect, group, organize, and visualize the company’s important metrics, thereby providing a quick overview of its performance, well-being, and expected growth.

Organizations using KPI dashboards can access their success metrics and indicators in real-time, which helps them make informed decisions and ultimately achieve their long-term goals.

There are several KPI dashboards and business intelligence tools on the market. In this comparison review, we’ll take a look at Qlik Sense and Tableau, which are two of the largest and most popular on the market.

To help you find the right tool to use between the two, Qlik Sense vs Tableau, we’ll look at what they are and how they work, their benefits, features, pricing, and recommend our favorite one.

Qlik Sense Vs Tableau: What Are They & How Do They Work?

Qlik Sense

Qlik Sense is a modern data analytics platform that allows you to create visualizations, interactive dashboards, charts, and analytics apps for offline and local usage. Its one-of-a-kind Artificial Intelligence and analytics engine empower you to find hidden insights that other query-based business intelligence tools miss.

The software turns raw data into actionable data that you can easily find, is current, and immediately available on any cloud of your choice. Plus, Qlik Sense helps you build a data-driven culture through a holistic approach to customer success so you can maximize on the investments you put in people, processes, and technology.

Tableau

Tableau is a visual analytics platform that helps the world’s largest organizations unleash the power of their people and data by transforming how you use data to solve problems. The software helps you be more data-driven and is a leading choice for modern business intelligence.

Plus, Tableau is powerful, secure, and has a flexible end to end analytics platform that makes it easier for you to explore and manage data, discover and share insights faster, and change businesses and the world.

The software is easy to use, gets you up and running in minutes, and you can add users as your needs grow. It’s also ideal for companies with clients who have few users and just need to deploy solutions in multiple organizations but lack the infrastructure to create their own server installation.

Tableau’s platform can be deployed on-premises and in the cloud, or you can natively integrate it with Salesforce CRM.

Whether you’re a creator, explorer, viewer, or administrator, you can use Tableau to build a data culture, accelerate innovation, improve operations, and serve your customers better.

Interesting Comparison: Tableau Vs Power BI

Tableau Vs Qlik Sense: Features

Qlik Sense

Insights

Qlik Sense ingests huge amounts of data fast and gathers it from multiple different sources so that you get complete and instant answers. The platform also edits, adds, or removes records to help keep your data updated.

Deployment Options

Qlik Sense lets you deploy on-premise, in a public or private cloud, or in any combination of your choice. The software can adapt, without you having to change your cloud analytics strategy, lock in your data, or build new infrastructure.

Self-service Visualization and Discovery

With Qlik Sense, you can easily combine, load, visualize, and explore data no matter its size. You can ask questions and follow your curiosity, search, choose, drill down, or zoom in and out to find the answer. Alternatively, you can shift your focus towards something more interesting for you.

Every table, chart, and object in Qlik Sense is interactive and instantly updates with each action to its current context. This way, you can see the shape of your data using smart visualizations, and pinpoint outliers. The Insight Advisor included in the tool helps you get faster time to insight for creating charts, association recommendations, and preparing data.

Also Read: Bad Data Visualization Examples

Interactive dashboards

If you want to support your top executives and managers, you can create, share and distribute powerful dashboards using Qlik Sense. Each element in the dashboard is interactive, and you can easily dive in to explore whatever is happening. The tool also has powerful global search and selections so you can hone in quickly on the data you need to understand the scenarios and act on them.

Search and conversational analytics

Qlik Sense offers search-based analysis, an AI assistant, and Insight Advisor, all of which generate relevant and impactful analyses and visualizations automatically.

The process uses natural language processing to deliver a series of prioritized, auto-generated charts that are not only editable but can be adjusted and added to interactive dashboards for further exploration. You also get a faster and easier way to ask questions and discover insights even when you don’t know where to look.

Custom and embedded analytics

One of the benefits of using Qlik Sense is that you can tackle even the most complex analytics challenges. Its complete set of open APIs helps you customize your analytics solutions fully, develop custom apps, extensions, visualizations or embed fully interactive analytics in the processes or apps used daily.

Catalog

The Qlik Sense catalog is a secure, enterprise-scale feature that holds all the data your organization has available for analytics regardless of where it is. This way, you can simplify and accelerate the organization and delivery of data that’s ready to be used in your business to Qlik Sense.

Reporting and alerting

Qlik Sense also lets you build, publish, and share beautiful reports in common formats including PDF and Microsoft Office. You can create reports in the software using highly flexible designs and formatting control, and schedule them to be distributed, customized for their recipients, and delivered via email, a shared folder, or centralized hub.

Sophisticated and data-driven alerts are also included so you can help users monitor their business and take action based on insights.

Mobile

Qlik Sense has a responsive design and touch interaction that’s built into the platform. The tool is built for mobility so you can create and explore your analytics on any device, through native mobile apps for Android and iOS. You can build apps once and they’ll work any and everywhere, plus get fully interactive offline support and analysis for leading EMM platforms.

Explore: Misleading Data Visualization Examples

GeoAnalytics

GeoAnalytics is a mapping and location-based analytics feature that allows you to add multi-layer maps easily to your apps, and include automatic geo-data lookup. Once you add the maps, you can overlay them with multiple visualization layers, and even go beyond to understand geospatial insights using powerful calculations based on different geographies.

The feature can be used to find potential store locations, supply chain delivery times, and customer distributions.

Tableau

Insights

Tableau offers live visual analytics that help fuel unlimited exploration of your data. You can use its interactive dashboards to uncover hidden insights as the tool harnesses your ability to spot visual patterns quickly, thus uncovering everyday opportunities for your company.

Deployment Options

With Tableau, you can connect to data in the cloud or on-premises, whether it is big data, spreadsheets, SQL databases, or cloud apps like Salesforce and Google Analytics. This way, you can access and combine data without writing code, pivot, split, and manage metadata for data source optimization.

Tableau Desktop

Tableau Desktop helps you answer deeper questions by building powerful calculations from existing data, dragging and dropping forecasts and reference lines, and reviewing statistical summaries. You can make your point using regressions, trend analyses, and correlations for statistical understanding. You can also ask questions, find trends, opportunities, and confidently make data-driven decisions.

Also Read: Best Tableau Retail Dashboard Examples

Intuitive products

Tableau also offers intuitive products with native visual best practices and limitless data exploration that won’t interrupt the flow of analysis.

Einstein Discovery

With this new Tableau feature, you get trusted, intuitive predictions and recommendations that you can use across your company’s departments and teams. The feature comes with smart, guided decisions that can help your teams with augmented, cutting-edge analytics in a rapid iteration, no-code required environment.

You get predictive capabilities that work with your already existing dashboard inventory and when you combine that with auto-generated machine learning models, you can explore trends, patterns and correlations in your historical data without writing any code.

Quick LODs

With Tableau, you can easily create level of detail expressions and drag and drop a measure onto a dimension or use context menus to create LODs automatically with the default aggregation of your data.

In-product extension gallery

The in-product extension gallery puts all your extensions and connectors a click away so you can discover them in an enhanced browsing experience. You also get better search and filter options and you can complete your installations without having to leave the Tableau workflow.

Customer 360 Audiences Connector

This feature helps you natively connect Tableau to discover insights from your detailed customer data. Whether your data is behavioral, transactional, or customer engagement information housed in Customer 360 Audiences, you can create custom visualizations and drill down to multiple customer dimensions, campaigns, or channels.

This way, you get to understand the why and the who behind all the cross-channel engagement results you receive.

Check Out: Best Tableau Sales Dashboard Examples

Tableau Server

Tableau Server brings data to you so you can extend the value of your data across your company and empower your team with the freedom to explore data in a trusted environment. This also gives you peace of mind that your analytics and data are secure, governed, and accurate. For IT teams, Tableau is easy to deploy, simple to scale, and offers excellent reliability and robust integration.

Tableau Online

This Tableau product brings data from anywhere so that you can empower your teams anywhere. You can share and collaborate in the cloud, and because it’s fully hosted in the cloud, you can publish your dashboards and share insights with anyone. Data is easily accessible from a browser or using the Tableau mobile apps.

Tableau Prep

Tableau Prep changes how you perform data preparation in your company. It provides a direct and visual way of combining, shaping, and cleaning data, which makes it easy for business users and analysts to start analyzing data faster.

Prep is made of the Prep Builder and Prep Conductor, which are used to build data flows and schedule, monitor, and manage flows across the company respectively.

Automated data quality warnings

In Tableau, you can receive data quality warnings that are created automatically based on extract refresh and flow run failures in Tableau Prep.

This way, the data freshness, or lack of the same, is communicated without your manual input. You can combine these with existing data quality warnings that are manually set or via an API to add an extra layer of data quality information to your environment.

Tableau CRM

Tableau CRM helps you spot opportunities and predict outcomes. You can discover the story your data tells and empower your Salesforce CRM users with AI-driven analytics and actionable insights in their workflow.

Tableau Public

This feature is a free platform where you can explore, create, and share data visualizations publicly online. It also makes it easy to develop data skills and you can advance your analytics career by learning from limitless data inspiration and creating your own online work portfolio.

Tableau Blueprint

With this tool, you can zoom out to see the bigger picture in your data and what’s ahead or zoom in on specific areas to fine tune and improve them.

Qlik Sense Vs Tableau: Integrations

Qlik Sense

Qlik Sense allows you to pull data together in various different ways and access all of it through an in-depth web-based platform. Through its App Integration API, you get parameters you can use to create an URL that returns complete HTML pages containing embedded apps.

You can then embed the URL in a web page and pass parameters to an app to open it with one or several applied selections. You can embed them in portals, web apps, intranet, and extranet sites.

Tableau

Tableau offers native data connectors to apps like Microsoft Excel, SQL Server, Amazon Redshift, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Google Sheets, SAP Hana, Hive, Vertica, Amazon Athena, Presto, Salesforce, Netezza, Splunk, Google Analytics, and more. It also has a partner ecosystem with AWS, Azure, Alibaba, Google Cloud, Informatica, Alteryx, Collibra, Alation, DataRobot, and Databricks.

You can connect to all your data no matter where it resides, and the native connectors are built and optimized for many files and databases including PDFs, big data, relational databases in the cloud or on-premises, and application data or data on the web.

Tableau Vs Qlik Sense: Pricing

Qlik Sense

Qlik Sense offers different pricing packages based on data analytics as follows:

• Qlik Sense Business $30/user/month with best-in-class modern analytics, an associative engine, augmented analytics, and group collaboration. This cloud solution helps operationalize analytics across teams and groups.
• Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS (custom pricing). The plan offers all the features in the Business plan, plus Enterprise governance, increased capacity, and multiple user types. The cloud solution helps you scale and extend your analytics across organizations and departments.
• Qlik Sense Enterprise client-managed (custom pricing). This plan offers best-in-class analytics for scaling your analytics across departments and organizations that you manage. It also offers Windows server deployment, enterprise governance, and multiple user types.

For more details, visit the Qlik Sense pricing page.

Tableau

Tableau offers options fit for people and organizations with different data needs i.e. individuals, teams, and organizations.

• Tableau Creator $70/user/month. This plan includes Tableau Desktop, Prep Builder, and one creator license of Tableau Online and Server. You can discover insights faster through a combination of powerful products with best-in-class analytics, visual data prep, and secure collaboration. The package is for power users and analysts who ask deep questions about their data and discover insights.
• Tableau Explorer $35 per user, per month that includes one license of Tableau Server. You can use the full self-service analytics to explore trusted data and answer your own questions faster.
• Tableau Viewer $12 per user, per month with one viewer license of Tableau Server. You can view and interact with visualizations and dashboards in an easy-to-use, secure platform.

Visit the Tableau pricing page for more information.

Qlik Sense Vs Tableau: Similarities & Differences

	Qlik Sense	Tableau
Platform	Analytics	Analytics
Unique features	Associative engine for free-form exploration Augmented analytics Blends traditional reporting and embedded analytics Complete data freedom, no lock-ins	Multiple integrations with popular apps Pricing tailored to user needs
Deployment options	Cloud, on-premises, or anywhere you want	Cloud, on-premises
Mobile app	✅	✅
API	✅	✅ Server rest API
Integration	Via the Qlik Sense API	Microsoft Excel, SQL Server, Amazon Redshift, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Google Sheets, SAP Hana, Hive, Vertica, Amazon Athena, Presto, Salesforce, Netezza, Splunk, Google Analytics, and more. It also has a partner ecosystem with AWS, Azure, Alibaba, Google Cloud, Informatica, Alteryx, Collibra, Alation, DataRobot, and Databricks.
Pricing	Qlik Sense Business $30 per user, per month Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS (custom pricing). Qlik Sense Enterprise client-managed (custom pricing).	Tableau Creator $70 per user, per month Tableau Explorer $35 per user, per month Tableau Viewer $12 per user, per month

Tableau Vs Qlik Sense: Pros and Cons

Qlik Sense

Pros

• Multiple deployment options
• Powerful insights
• Helpful and responsive support community
• Can manipulate data fairly easily
• Easy, flexible, and complete
• Huge velocity to develop
• Alternatives are prebuilt in the platform
• Scripting is powerful and easy to master
• Intuitive user experience

Cons

• Limited creation of visualizations
• Apps cannot be larger than 5Gb
• Hard timeout limit of 2 hours on the back end which users can’t change
• Management console pales in comparison to Qlik Sense Enterprise
• No security policies, no roles, and a confusing amalgam of app management features
• You have to keep switching back and forth to do basic tasks
• Only one identity provider can use it at a time
• No ability to track usage by individual users or with individual apps or audit which apps can be deprecated for lack of use

Tableau

Pros

• Powerful visualization
• Basic data exploration
• Multiple data connectors to more than 45 sources
• Easy data sharing via dashboards
• Native data engine processes large data sets quickly
• Professional dashboards
• Easy to use
• Can be synced with other tools
• Useful for forecasting purposes
• Strong geospatial capabilities
• Flexible deployment
• Good documentation support
• Basic trend analysis of time series data

Cons

• Lacks more sophisticated statistical tools
• Expensive packages and licenses
• Difficult to integrate with code environments
• Performance is poor in large datasets
• Needs more advanced analytics capabilities
• Not all data sources are natively supported
• Heavy software and takes up lots of space
• You can’t host all features online as it’s a desktop tool
• Could use more drag and drop functionality
• Doesn’t connect to enterprise software like SharePoint documents
• Tutorial videos could be improved

Qlik Sense Vs Tableau: Which One Is Better?

Qlik Sense and Tableau are both powerful analytical tools but when deciding between the two, you need to consider your immediate needs and the larger role that analytics and business intelligence can play across your teams, with partners and customers. You also need to look at both in the context of the Internet of Things.

The key difference when choosing between the two is that you’re not only investing in analytics technology, but also infrastructure, employee expertise, and more, so you need a tool that can scale and evolve with your business.

For this comparison guide, we recommend Qlik Sense. It’s a complete data analytics platform that delivers interactive visualizations and dashboards, can be deployed anywhere, and is affordably priced with multiple powerful features.