Microsoft Power BI vs Qlik Sense comparison

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33,848 views|28,652 comparisons
92% willing to recommend
Qlik Logo
5,426 views|3,310 comparisons
96% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Microsoft Power BI and Qlik Sense based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Power BI vs. Qlik Sense Report (Updated: January 2023).
770,458 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The solution overall is very useful. The reports that are generated and the reporting functionality management are beneficial.""We like the drag and drop interactability visualization. We really like that. It's user-friendly.""It is quite easy to use and it helps me to achieve the projects that I've been assigned.""One of the most valuable aspects of this tool is its ease of use and the ability to easily share information with others.""The solution is very easy to use.""PowerBI – Self-service BI.""What I have found valuable about Microsoft BI is its performance and ease of use. The interface is very simple and it is accessible to everyone. If someone is new to this type of solution it is straightforward to understand.""The use of graphics to show and view the data indicators is the most valuable feature. It is also very stable."

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"Set analysis is great for its power user capabilities such as performing an IF on an aggregated column. The ability to create custom coloring expressions based on values is also a good idea although not as easy as I wished it was.""Takes the super features of QlikView ETL capabilities to a whole new level with its new drag and drop feature, and extension capabilities derived from the robust Qlik API.""Qlik DataMarket""Qlik Sense helps us increase our organization's customer relationships and brings in more projects.""Placing buttons on my sheets creates a unique user experience and clears up clutter at the same time.""For a deployment scenario, Qlik Sense is also very easy to use. I can start development from any platform, on-premise or cloud, and continue from where I left off.""From siloed reports, we went to a centralized knowledge hub, combining cross-functional data, and helping decision-makers see the data as a whole, therefore making more informed decisions.""We have had an easy time supplying content to our customers."

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Cons
"Its performance and stability can be improved. It takes time to load, and sometimes, it also breaks down for the whole region. Its usability could also be better, and it could also have more connections with different data sources.""The licensing needs improvement. There needs to be a middle option between Pro and Premium versions.""Better mapping capabilities and easier administration access would be beneficial, especially for understanding who has viewed reports.""The on-premises version lacks some technical features that are available with the Cloud version.""The look is simple, and could be a little more professional.""Microsoft BI can improve some of the visual level filters or visual functionality, that are available in other BI tools, such as Tableau or Qlik Sense.""Power BI's drillthrough feature could be improved. I didn't like drillthrough and those options much, but I did like it in MicroStrategy.""Microsoft has got a very large repository of all change suggestions which have been raised by the BI community. They keep on adding features that are very widely sought after by the community. We don't focus on product features. We focus on business requirements. To use the solution, we find that existing features are good enough and offer us a very effective solution."

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"There is no downside.""Better searching capabilities would be a nice addition.""My advice to others is to make sure they have a good technical team. We have found that a lot of the consultants go in and out of the business and sometimes you are left alone without assistance.""I wish the product had the ability for slightly more customization. The out-of-the box charts and visualizations are fantastic, but I want to be able to tweak it without having to add outside extensions and widgets.""Possibly offering some more basic, simpler templates.""It would be nice to have more native features from QlikView built into Qlik Sense.""I am starting to work with Qlik Sense SaaS these days. This environment has its own reporting service, however, one of the things that could be better for the people that are already using Nprinting, is to have a Nprinting in SaaS.""There is room for improvement in the learning curve when getting started, but training resources have been growing."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "There is room for at least 45% discount as compared to the initial price."
  • "MS BI comes with all the tools and it is, to the best of my knowledge, the most affordable solution."
  • "All in all, for the price, this is an excellent tool for helping your organization turn mounds of data into useful insights."
  • "I would advise that Microsoft BI products are rightly priced and the licensing is easy to follow and to fulfill."
  • "Remove the cost of a licence to show a dashboard within SharePoint. Why should readers of a dashboard have to pay to view? ​"
  • "Make it low in cost. It is a no-brainer!"
  • "Globally, we evaluated a number of products, including Salesforce's product, Microsoft won on the ground of simple functionally and cost."
  • "Paid for itself in the first month."
  • More Microsoft Power BI Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The solution is worth it."
  • "Understand the break over price point for switching to the Enterprise license."
  • "Licensing could be cheaper."
  • "Licensing: Review the named model and move towards a usage model (e.g., cores, memory, computers, API calls, etc.)."
  • "The cost is not bad considering the flexibility and support you receive from Qlik. I believe it is worth the cost."
  • "Start small with tokens. You can always buy more."
  • "Currently, our ROI is clear and concise decision-making. This timely addition will easily add $15 million to our bottom line in 2017."
  • "You will spend more time on educating your staff than licensing the product."
  • More Qlik Sense Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows:  1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle  - look for SAP… more »
    Top Answer:Power BI is an advanced visualization tool oriented to big data with a very complete set of widgets to visualize information, control users accessing information, the configuration of governance… more »
    Top Answer:Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are fully customizable and very user-friendly. This solution is very stable. Oracle… more »
    Top Answer:It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement Some great tools in the market are Qlik Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos… more »
    Top Answer:The most valuable features of Qlik Sense are its speed and seamless development of web technologies.
    Top Answer:Qlik Sense is pricier than other BI tools, with various licensing models, including potentially expensive token-based licenses. Organizations should carefully assess their budget and licensing… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    33,848
    Comparisons
    28,652
    Reviews
    27
    Average Words per Review
    619
    Rating
    7.9
    2nd
    out of 71 in Data Visualization
    Views
    5,426
    Comparisons
    3,310
    Reviews
    22
    Average Words per Review
    567
    Rating
    8.6
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI
    QlikSense
    Learn More
    Overview

    Microsoft Power BI is a powerful tool for data analysis and visualization. This tool stands out for its ability to merge and analyze data from various sources. Widely adopted across different industries and departments, Power BI is instrumental in creating visually appealing dashboards and generating insightful business intelligence reports. Its intuitive interface, robust visualization capabilities, and seamless integration with other Microsoft applications empower users to easily create interactive reports and gain valuable insights.

    Qlik Sense is a visual analytics and business intelligence (BI) platform that gives users full control over their system’s data. From this platform they can control every aspect of their system data. It maximizes an organization’s ability to make decisions driven by their data.

    Benefits of Qlik Sense

    Some of the benefits of using Qlik Sense include:

    • Easily manipulate data: Qlik Sense allows users to easily combine and otherwise manipulate their system’s data. It allows them to create interactive visual representations of your datasets. The many different ways that the data can be represented offer many potential options for how to analyze the data. These choices enable users to easily gain critical insights.
    • Easily automate alerts and routine actions: Qlik Sense enables users to keep a close eye on their data. Automatic alerts that will notify them if their data changes in any way. Users don’t need expert knowledge of coding to create automated data-driven events. Users of all experience levels can take advantage of this benefit. Qlik Sense enables routine actions to be automated when necessary data insights will spur the system to take action. This combination of analytics and other tools empower users to take charge of their data.
    • Customize reporting: Users can set Qlik Sense to generate custom reports. These reports can also be customized to be shared by way of one of several methods, allowing users to control who sees their data and what they see.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Qlik Sense stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its associative analytics technology and its remote access capability. Qlik Sense employs an associative analytics engine that gives users the ability to take their data analytics to the next level. Users can create visual connections between different datasets spread across their network, creating deep insights that enable users to gain a full understanding of their data. This engine is easily scaled up to allow a large number of users to benefit from the deep insights that it provides. Users can access Qlik Sense from anywhere in the world. Qlik Sense has an online portal that can be used consistently from anywhere at all. Having the ability to remotely analyze data gives users flexibility when it comes to choosing how to deploy their manpower.

    Jarno L., the managing director of B2IT, writes, “The associative technology features are the solution's most valuable aspects. Qlik was the first company to implement an in-memory associative analytics engine. This basically means that all data is loaded into memory, but it also means that instead of joining data together, the data is associated together. From the front end, from the user interface point of view, data can be joined or included or excluded on the fly. It can be drilled down and drilled through and users can slice and dice it and that type of thing can be done from anywhere in the data to any other place in the data. It doesn't have to be predefined. It doesn't have to have hierarchies or anything like that.”

    Tami S., the senior business intelligence analyst at the La Jolla Group, writes, “With the changing business landscape, it is nice to access Qlik Sense through an external website. As an organization when we use QlikView Desktop, we need to connect to our internal network. We can access QlikView through the QlikView access point but the website has a little different look and feel than the desktop application. We appreciate that Qlik Sense is browser-based and the user experience is the same whether at home, in the office or on a boat. As long as the user has internet access, performance is the same.”

    Sample Customers
    Accenture Adidas Aetna AIG Airbus Alibaba Allstate Amazon American Express Aon AT&T Audi Bank of America BASF Bayer Berkshire Hathaway Boeing Coca-Cola Comcast Cisco Coca-Cola Dell Disney Emirates Equinix FedEx Ford GE Google H&M Home Depot Honda IBM Intel JPMorgan Chase Kellogg's Kroger L'Oréal McDonald's Merck MetLife Microsoft Nike Oracle P&G PepsiCo Procter & Gamble Prudential Financial SAP Siemens Snapchat Spotify Starbucks Target Toyota T-Mobile Unilever Visa Walmart WeWork World Bank Xerox
    Abbvie, Airbus, Barclays, BT Openreach, BMW, Daimler AG, HSBC, IKEA, Nationwide Building Society, Royal Mail Group, Sanofi, Siemens, Wendy'', Vodafone, Volvo
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Manufacturing Company13%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Energy/Utilities Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization35%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Computer Software Company8%
    Government5%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Retailer10%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Healthcare Company10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization50%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Computer Software Company6%
    Manufacturing Company5%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business39%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise45%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise42%
    Large Enterprise45%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise26%
    Large Enterprise54%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business10%
    Midsize Enterprise54%
    Large Enterprise36%
    Buyer's Guide
    Microsoft Power BI vs. Qlik Sense
    January 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Power BI vs. Qlik Sense and other solutions. Updated: January 2023.
    770,458 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 297 reviews while Qlik Sense is ranked 2nd in Data Visualization with 112 reviews. Microsoft Power BI is rated 8.0, while Qlik Sense is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Microsoft Power BI writes "A complete ecosystem with an builtin ETL tool, good integrations with python and R, and support of DAX and Power Query (M languages)". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Qlik Sense writes "Customizable with good ROI and a quick learning curve". Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, KNIME, Domo and Salesforce Einstein Analytics, whereas Qlik Sense is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, Apache Superset, Alteryx and IBM Cognos. See our Microsoft Power BI vs. Qlik Sense report.

    We monitor all BI (Business Intelligence) Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.