Power BI vs Qlik Sense
Last Updated:Our analysts compared Power BI against Qlik Sense based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Business Intelligence Tools, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.
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- Live 360-Degree View of Data: Stay in the loop about crucial business insights. Power BI's dashboards update in real time from all data sources.
- Visualize Data Trends: Create intuitive visualizations to present data after it is parsed, structured and analyzed. This can be in the form of graphs, charts, maps or other graphic depictions that make interpreting data quicker, easier and more impactful.
- Make Data-Driven Decisions: Put the data visualizations to work — analyze not only what happened, but also why, how and where. Use data to improve business processes and customer interactions, adjust business plans and make forecasts.
- Ease of Use: Encourages user adoption towards a data driven culture. Power BI simplifies self-service BI with built-in features similar to Excel and other Microsoft technologies — feel right at home with functionalities like drag-and-drop design, resizing and copy-and-paste.
- Collaborate Across Organization: Share reports and collaborate on decisions quickly; save time otherwise spent on inefficient meetings or jumping from one platform to another. Integrates seamlessly with many commonly used business tools to promote teamwork throughout departments.
- On-the-Go Access: Access visual analytics on the go with Power BI. Stay connected to and share insights from any device, with mobile-optimized reports and a mobile app.
- Secure Insights: As one of the largest, most well-known names in the software industry, Microsoft backs up their reputation with security and protection for businesses’ sensitive information in Power BI. Visit the Trust Center to learn more about exactly how all of Microsoft’s solutions — including Power BI — meet industry security standards and ensure regulatory compliance. Keeps information secure from the original data source all the way up through the report sharing and collaboration features.
- Free Version: Power BI goes beyond a free trial with a perpetually free Desktop version, suitable for creating reports and data visualizations on an individual basis.
- Scalability and Affordability: Power BI can scale from the individual to the enterprise level as a whole, while only paying for exactly what’s necessary — choose the right option from versions varying in capabilities and pricing.
- Stay Competitive: Get insights into internal operations, processes and profits, and monitor market trends. Build and publish apps; customize tables and charts as necessary without needing additional developmental work. Set benchmarks to track performance metrics across the organization. Choose where to direct resources and where to capitalize on profits by analyzing changes in empirical data.
- Find Answers Independently: Glean data results with an intuitive, self-service interface and code-free visual tools. Take in information at-a-glance and probe insights on the fly with data updated instantly with every click. Foster a data-driven culture to empower all employees to build collective knowledge. Share insights directly, both within and outside of the platform.
- Get Automated Visualization Recommendations: Leverages machine learning (ML) to gather information from customer insights and industry knowledge for a smarter, accelerated analytics experience. Receive automated context-aware insight suggestions, prioritized based on personalized criteria, as well as recommendations on visualization types.
- Deploy Flexibly: Deploy it anywhere — on-premise, in a single private cloud or across multiple clouds and everything in between — with the ongoing freedom to modify the infrastructure as business requirements change. Deploy seamlessly on the Kubernetes cluster running in the public or private cloud.
- Scale As Business Grows: Scale while maintaining consistent performance, fast response times, reliability and security. Deploy consistent, predictable self-service BI at scale — start with Business and seamlessly upgrade to Enterprise as business needs evolve. Test performance and scalability with free tools available on the Community webpage.
- Get Insights On the Go: Access all features anywhere on any device, with the same functionality, either through a responsive HTML5 based client that adapts to web and mobile browsers or the native mobile app. Ensure a consistent, unrestricted experience of self-service BI on the go, enhanced by native mobile push notifications.
- Upgrade from QlikView: Unlock significant business value, gain more control over the platform and future-proof for the digital age through self-paced adoption. Seamlessly upgrade from QlikView to Qlik Sense at a fraction of the cost. Opt for a subscription or perpetual licensing model with SaaS or client-managed on-premises deployment.
- Globalization Support: Supports fifteen languages and currency conversions natively and detects which language to use based on the operating system and browser.
- Security: Secure proprietary information through data encryption at rest, with the industry-standard AES-256 GCM as the encryption algorithm. Generates periodic reports on CPU and RAM usage metrics. View necessary data with row and column-level permissions through login-specific section access.
- Value-Added Products: Add extra features such as conversational analytics, data indexing, location-based analytics and more through value-added products like Qlik NPrinting, Qlik Big Data Index, Qlik Insight Bot, Qlik DataMarket and Qlik GeoAnalytics.
- Regular Updates: The vendor releases updates five times a year.
- Data Source Connectivity: Draw data from hundreds of supported sources both on-premises and cloud-based, including web APIs, Salesforce, Dynamics 365, Excel, Google Analytics, JSON and text/CSV files, Oracle, SQL and more.
- Data Preparation: A self-service Power Query process ingests, transforms, integrates and enriches data while preparing it for analysis in Power BI. Organize unstructured data into interpretable data sets to highlight trends. Approach analysis from different angles with intuitive filters and data manipulation features.
- Data Visualization: Power BI creates a range of visualizations from data that conceptualize trends and patterns. These can be a range of different graphics including bar graphs, line graphs, pie charts, scattergrams, maps, etc. Power BI transforms abstract concepts and hard numbers into easy-to-interpret charts.
- Pre-Built or Custom Dashboards/Reports: Choose from a range of pre-built templates optimized for most industries to generate visualizations of KPIs in seconds. Or, if out-of-the-box reports don’t cut it, design customized data stories with a drag-and-drop canvas and hundreds of interactive visualization options in Power BI.
- Natural Language Processing: Explore data through conversational language with the built-in Q&A tool; find meaningful answers to data-related questions.
- Secure Data Governance: Prevent data loss with role-specific data protection and row-level security. Safeguards data so that Power BI meets industry-level compliance standards and certifications. Allows administrators to centralize data governance, security and management across the organization.
- Collaboration: Power BI fosters collaboration through a data-driven culture of business intelligence with features like team commenting, alerts and content subscriptions. Publish and share permissions-adjustable reports and dashboards, both internally and externally.
- Mobile Compatibility: All reports in Power BI are optimized for mobile and can be published to the cloud or on-premises, or embedded into existing apps or websites. Receive personal data alerts, quickly view and share insights and stay in the know from any mobile device on Android or iOS, or any PC or tablet or phone with access to the Windows Store.
- Embedded Analytics: Brand and customize custom analytics offerings for end-users with white label capabilities and a plethora of visualization options. Develop and test custom modules to embed Power BI's analytics capabilities into other applications.
- Seamless Integration: Power BI seamlessly integrates with everything in the Microsoft Office 365 Suite, as well as a range of other software and BI solutions. This includes third-party data sources like Spark, Google Analytics and more.
- On-Premises or Cloud Server: As part of the Premium plan, Power BI's Report Server provides a hybrid, comprehensive solution by building a BI environment on-premises, keeping it safe behind the intranet firewall. Allows the flexibility to move the server to the cloud as per requirements, protecting the business’ investment and data for the future.
- Multi-Node Architecture: Deploys a modular architecture ubiquitously – on physical hardware, virtual platforms and cloud environments with horizontal and vertical scaling. Scales linearly with the addition of every extra node, thanks to in-memory processing, to accommodate twice the number of users. Ensures efficient load-balancing by distributing applications onto specific nodes.
- Data Connectivity: Pull and combine data from all sources, including databases, files, spreadsheets, websites, sources that connect through standard ODBC, OLE DB or REST APIs, big data lakes, cloud-based and on-premise applications and custom sources. Supports native integrations with popular technology partners, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon Web Services, Snowflake Salesforce and SAP.
- In-Memory Storage: Leverages columnar storage to provide significant data compression, more data in RAM and faster response times. Stores unique entries only once and presents data relationships as pointers.
- Data Mining: Identify hidden patterns in vast data sets and detect outliers through exploration, statistical analysis and ML-based algorithms. Get interactive, self-service visualizations, and search and calculation results at runtime with its associative, in-memory data indexing engine.
- Self-Service Data Preparation: Get AI-powered recommendations to combine, visually transform and ingest data from multiple sources. Surface complex data relationships through techniques like associative indexing. Organize and enrich data to make it more suitable for analysis.
- User Environment: Develop applications, create content through easy drag-and-drop and consume data insights with the Hub, its web browser interface. The Qlik Sense Management Console enables administrators to manage data connectivity, application and task management, security administration, monitoring and auditing.
- Responsive Design: Build and deploy to any platform, thanks to current standards of HTML5, CSS3, Javascript and web sockets. Automatically display and resize visualizations to fit any device, be it a browser, laptop, desktop, tablet or smartphone.
- Data Visualizations: Create smart visualizations based on chart suggestions, allowing for search, drill-down, zoom out and filter actions. Transform information from complex data sets into beautiful, digestible dashboards and charts. Present data in the form of bar and area charts, grid charts, heat maps, multi KPI charts, Sankey charts, Word Cloud charts and more.
- Interactive Dashboards: Design and distribute dashboards on which every element is interactive, encouraging viewers to dive in and explore data for themselves. Enhance interactivity with drill-down, tooltip, filtering, lasso selection, range selection and more visualization capabilities.
- Reporting: Drag and drop line items from a basic report view into custom visualizations on the fly without needing extra development work.
- Qlik NPrinting: Build canned reports using QlikView documents and Qlik Sense apps in Microsoft Office, PDF and web formats.
- Shared Insights: Share reports on-demand or set the delivery frequency through an email client. Subscribe to receive specific reports or access them from a specified folder location or the Qlik Sense Hub.
- Predictive Analysis: Predict what is likely to happen and decide what to do in the future with scenario and what-if analysis. Integrates with the KNIME Analytics platform to import data and export reports in a variety of formats that include CSV, XML, XLSX, JSON and more.
- Embedded Analytics: Add custom visualizations, data sources and reports into portals, applications, intranet and extranet sites through API integration. Or embed the platform into users’ workflows in the host applications. Integrates with edge-computing devices to analyze data where it lives. Supports embedded multi-tenancy with row-level security (RLS) to isolate tenant data.
- Streaming Analytics: Automatically integrates streaming data in real time across a wide range of databases, data warehouses and big data platforms through Qlik Replicate.
- IoT Analytics: Analyze data collected by IoT devices such as sensors on manufacturing equipment, trucks, pipelines, weather stations, smart meters and more.
- Collaborative Storytelling: Share interactive data stories that leverage live data, time-based snapshots and engaging visual effects. Interact on data insights with others by adding snapshots, narrative and context into analytics workflows, and tag and invite team members to discussions. Capture and share data dashboards within the enterprise community, contributing to the organization’s collective intelligence.
- Insights as a Service (IaaS): Query business data and discover insights through natural language processing and conversational analytics. Identify spike anomalies by analyzing patterns in historic data.
- Ask the Insight Bot a question and instantly receive relevant visualizations, insights, recommendations and links. Integrates seamlessly with many favorite messaging and collaboration tools like Slack, Salesforce, Skype and Microsoft Teams.
- Smart Search helps search across the entire data set within an application.
- Forecasting: Leverage advanced calculation and machine learning through engine-level sharing with third-party tools such as R. Make predictions using time series analysis of historical and near real-time data through an extension, Vizlib Line Chart.
- Animations: View changes in datasets over a range of values through animation. Display specific values by picking them manually on a progress slider on the sheet.
- Hub Spaces: Develop apps collaboratively and share them with others in the same space. Store and reuse data files and connections across various spaces and control access through strict permissions.
- Built-In Data Alerts: Get alerts for outliers and data anomalies based on advanced statistical calculations and complex logic. Request context-aware alerts for data that matters through self-service configuration, or get data-related broadcasts at the enterprise level.
- Web Connectors: Extract all data that includes a specific search term from Twitter. Get content metrics — likes and shares for comments and posts in the page feed — for multiple Facebook pages. Track statistics for YouTube videos that include channel comments, shares and downloads.
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#5
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Analyst Rating Summary
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User Sentiment Summary
4795 reviews
2754 reviews
Power BI has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 88% when considering 4795 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.
Qlik Sense has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 85% when considering 2754 user reviews from 6 recognized software review sites.
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Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews
Microsoft Power BI is no doubt a powerful business intelligence platform, from one of the leaders in the technology field, with some users even saying that its potential seems to be limitless due to its extensibility and scalability. Power BI has resounding success with its intuitive interface, robust data visualization capabilities and interactive features that make analytics accessible to all users. Power users say that its support for DAX, R, Python and other query languages give them access to even more complex calculations, data querying, data preparation and data modeling, making Power BI a strong solution for technical and non-technical users alike. However, many customers say that while Power BI may have a user-friendly GUI, it’s not necessarily a user-friendly system, with many users saying that they required heavy training or preexisting knowledge to really understand how to work with the system. While many users cite its seamless Microsoft and Windows integration as a pro, especially for those companies that have already invested in Microsoft-based solutions, others say that Power BI’s incompatibility with non-Windows systems and weaker integrations with non-Microsoft solutions are a point of frustration for them. The cloud-based platform offers responsive mobile and web access to dashboards, but several users note that browser functionality is limited. Power BI reviews seemed to be mixed as to Power BI's sharing capabilities, with about 65% of users satisfied that Power BI helps them in making presentations and catering to different audiences, with the other approximately 35% expressing dissatisfaction with its limited display and export options, as well as restrictions on non-subscribers not being able to view dashboards. Another pain point for Power BI seems to be its operating speed, particularly when working with large datasets. In summary, Microsoft Power BI is a strong contender in the business intelligence field, earning mostly positive reviews for its boost to productivity and efficiency, and an especially good choice for customers already using Microsoft technologies like Excel, but may be difficult for new users to adopt.
Qlik Sense is a powerful cloud-based BI application that performs quick and insightful analytics. Its associative engine and in-memory processing enable remarkably fast queries and analyses. Most users are satisfied with its data analysis and data visualization functions. They cite the tool’s ability to unearth deep connections between data points and display them in interactive, responsive visualizations, accessible from all devices. It excels in connecting to large data sets, as several reviewers note. Featuring drag-and-drop functionality, the platform is user-friendly; though some reviewers note it’s still less simple to use than some competitors’ solutions, and writing scripts and queries can be difficult. While it’s a strong analysis tool overall, it has a high learning curve to unlock its more powerful features; users can find this difficult to overcome due to lack of good training material, especially videos. As such, businesses with IT resources might find this tool more useful. On the flip side, many users say customizing visualizations is difficult or impossible. The solution lacks a number of desired features, and depends on plug-ins from the older QlikView offering to add functionality. However, these plug-ins can incur additional costs or sometimes lack compatibility with Qlik Sense. Additionally, small to medium-sized businesses might find the pricing models to be restrictive. Some users find it difficult to configure security capabilities, and version control isn’t available. Users mention it’s difficult to export information to share with others or use in presentations. Overall, even with its drawbacks, Qlik Sense is an extremely capable platform that offers a myriad of fast and powerful data analysis and visualization capabilities worth consideration.
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