Qlik, originally founded in 1993 in Lund, Sweden, moved its headquarters to the United States in 2005 after raising funds from several venture capital firms. QlikView, the company’s virtually unknown product at the time, was very aggressively marketed after the VC investment. This created enormous attention and traction, and in 2010 Qlik went public on NASDAQ. In 2016, Qlik was acquired by the private equity company Thoma Bravo and delisted from the stock exchange.
Until the general availability of Qlik Sense in 2014, Qlik was a one-product company. Today, the vendor provides a portfolio of visual analytics offerings. With this stack, Qlik focuses on helping customers manage their data, providing analytics to analyze the data and providing features to transport insights to end users.
Qlik’s platform consists of several components including Qlik Sense, Qlik Core for developers, QlikView and Qlik NPrinting, acquired with Vizubi in 2015 for enhanced printing and page-based layout. Qlik DataMarket is a marketplace for sourcing external data for analyses such as weather and currency information. In 2017 Qlik acquired its Swedish partner Idevio (now Qlik GeoAnalytics) to provide advanced features in the area of spatial analysis. The vendor has recently strengthened its data management portfolio. Podium Data (Qlik Data Catalyst) was acquired to broaden its feature set in the area of data preparation and data catalogs. This was followed in 2019 by the acquisition of Attunity, a data integration specialist.
The main front-end products are Qlik Sense, QlikView and Qlik NPrinting. Qlik Sense is a self-service data visualization and data discovery solution providing immediate analysis results. It is powered by QIX (Qlik’s associative engine) and gives flexible access to data sets stored in-memory. QlikView is a dashboard and analysis product based on the same in-memory technology. Qlik NPrinting is a report generation, distribution and scheduling application which can be used to create reports based on Qlik Sense or QlikView content.
User & Use Cases
Qlik Sense is used quite broadly by customers. Most respondents (91 percent) use the software for one of its strengths: creating dashboards. In addition, over 70 percent of customers use it for enterprise reporting and ad hoc query. Most users seem to navigate and explore content provided by other users because only half of the respondents to this year’s survey claim to create reports with the software. 66 percent of customers use the solution for analysis. Qlik Sense in particular offers functionality for visual analysis, location intelligence and set-oriented, so-called associative analysis. 28 percent of business users model/enrich data using Qlik Sense, which is just shy of the survey average of 31 percent. The solution’s characterization as an interactive visual analysis solution geared to business users is also highlighted by the two most frequently evaluated competitors: Tableau and Microsoft Power BI.
More than half of the Qlik Sense users in this year’s survey came from mid-sized companies. However, with 34 percent of responses coming from companies with more than 2,500 employees, as well as a mean of 606 users and a median of 187 users, it is clear that the solution can also be used in larger accounts and scenarios.
Current vs. planned use
N=89
5 products most often evaluated in competition with Qlik Sense
N=87
Percentage of employees using Qlik Sense
N=86
Number of users using Qlik Sense
N=86
Tasks carried out with Qlik Sense by business users
N=89
Company size (number of employees)
N=88
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