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 while successfully marketing the company’s beachhead platform called QlikView. The company is currently owned by the private equity firm Thoma Bravo after its acquisition in 2016. Qlik offers a compelling portfolio of end-to-end platform-based solutions for analytics and data management. Its extensive portfolio was formed by substantial internal development and multiple strategic acquisitions.
With its SaaS-centric portfolio, Qlik helps customers to bridge the gaps between their data, insights and actions to better inform decisions and drive actions based on solid evidence. Qlik delivers an end-to-end data integration and analytics platform to integrate and manage data, analyze and explore information, discover and share insights and make informed decisions that accelerate business value. This is what Qlik call ‘active intelligence’ and continuous intelligence from real-time, up-to-date information delivered through data pipelines, designed to trigger immediate actions plays a key role to achieve such a state.
Qlik Sense is the company’s enterprise-level analytics platform for modern analytics, supporting a broad spectrum of analytics use cases across organizations. It is powered by Qlik’s associative engine and offers flexible and fast access to analyzed data. Qlik focuses on business users as its target audience for all product features starting from data preparation to the creation of interactive applications. Data preparation, traditionally scripting-oriented in Qlik solutions, can now mostly be conducted in a visual environment. These improvements enhance the productivity of data preparation for developers and they also make data preparation accessible for business users. In case customers require advanced transformations, the product supports scripting for data preparation.
Augmenting the user experience with helpful and guiding functions is at the core of Qlik’s vision for analytics for business users. During data preparation, joins and default aggregations are suggested for measures. Qlik Sense offers further guidance and automation for data visualization to benefit data consumers by actively recommending suitable visualizations to users based on fields selected and their metadata. Additionally, ML powers the suggestion of insights for consumers in ‘Insight Advisor Chat’ and NLQ. ‘Insight Advisor Chat’ works in conjunction with the associative engine to provide augmented analytics capabilities including search, conversational and natural language analytics.
User & Use Cases
Customers use Qlik Sense quite broadly to satisfy many use cases. Most respondents (94 percent) use the software for its core strength: creating interactive dashboards. In addition, 90 percent of customers use it for enterprise reporting and 78 percent for ad hoc query. 75 percent use the solution for analysis.
Most users navigate and explore content provided by other users and analyze available data sets. A large share of business users (59 percent) creates reports and dashboards for others and 36 percent prepare data – just what you would expect of a successful self-service analytics and BI software. The solution’s characterization and positioning are also strengthened by the two most frequently evaluated competitors, both of whom follow similar approaches: Microsoft Power BI and Tableau.
Half of the users responding to this survey came from mid-sized companies while 41 percent came from large companies. With this distribution, the solution can clearly be used effectively in larger accounts. Qlik Sense has a mean of 1,765 users and a median of 100 users, both well above average.
Current vs. planned use
N=94
5 products most often evaluated in competition with Qlik Sense
N=92
Percentage of employees using Qlik Sense
N=94
Number of users using Qlik Sense
N=96
Tasks carried out with Qlik Sensel by business users
N=96
Company size (number of employees)
N=96
Summary of Qlik Sense highlights
Qlik Sense regularly achieves impressive results in The BI & Analytics Survey and this year is no exception. Six top rankings and a total of 45 leadership positions speak for themselves.
Qlik Sense offers customers fast query performance and innovative features to implement leading edge use cases. The modern platform with its strong query engine shines in many areas. Qlik Sense’s Analyses capabilities are top-ranked and Visual Analysis is highly rated across multiple peer groups, attesting to the tool’s ability to help users find what is most important in their data assets.
Qlik Sense’s versatility is the foundation for quick and successful implementations, leading to outstanding results in the Project Length and Business Value KPIs.
Business Value – Top-ranked
Peer Group: International BI Giants
Project Length – Top-ranked
Peer Group: Large/Enterprise-Wide Implementations
Analyses – Top-ranked
Peer Group: Large/Enterprise-Wide Implementations
Recommendation – Leader
Peer Group: International BI Giants
Customer Experience – Leader
Peer Group: International BI Giants
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