Qlik Sense

Puntos a favor

What I like most about Qliksense is the ease in which you can portray the information, also the duplicate function helps you to customise your sheet until you like it over and over again.
Also it's really easy to convert an information table into a pivot, graph (any kind), filter, etc.
Also the export feature as well as the filter can help you greatly to get just the information you want in the format you want.

Puntos en contra

Sadly when you work with a lot of information lines or put to much formulas into a report it will limit how you can export it (you have to filter by parts to get the full report) or it will not show the information and you will have to filter the overall report to just visualise the information you need.

Puntos a favor

Qlik Sense is very well suited for companies without a proper data warehouse.

- It is fairing very well in sales analysis and KPI management.

- Mini QVDs can act like a mini data warehouse.

- It builds mini data warehouses.

- It's good for the merging of data.

- It connects well with other systems.

Puntos en contra

Qlik Sense is good for simple analytics. However, it is not that easy to set up "what if" scenarios, more advanced statistical analysis, and custom stuff.

- The coding of equations is quite complicated.

- Better customer service from sales.

- Better customer service help with solving problems with the tool and upgrades.

- Better user-friendliness for writing equations by the end-user.

Puntos a favor

Qlik Sense is a self-service analytical tool based on the same in-memory technology as QlikView. It's associative engine allows for snappy selections, filtering and prompt re-calculation of all charts and aggregations on the fly as the user navigates throughout the dashboard, even on datasets of over 100 million rows.
Qlik Sense focuses more on the self-service aspects of BI, where users are encouraged to build their own Adhoc visualisations without the use of keyboards simply by drag & dropping various elements, making the technology utmost business friendly. Also, as the whole technology is fully web-based, it embeds the latest visualisation libraries (D3, Raphael etc.) and allows for a seamless integration of customised extended JS charts (so-called extensions). The latter enables for unlimited possibilities when it comes to visualisations (http://d3js.org/) and further integration with web-services (R servers, real-time analytics, Hadoop etc.). Also, the Qlik Sense Server deployment is tailored to facilitate a multi-node deployment, allowing for a very scalable enterprise solution, even cloud-based.
The data security technology (Section Access) is the same one as in QlikView and is customisable, secure and robust.

All in all, when it comes to deploying a scalable and business-friendly BI solution, which has very presentable dashboards, a fast and robust aggregation engine with extended self-service capabilities, Qlik Sense is currently the best product of its kind on the market.

Puntos en contra

Qlik Sense is still a new product and not very mature yet, as it has only been released a year and a half ago. The review is based on Qlik Sens version 2.1 which is important to emphasise, because QlikTech is constantly updating the software and publishing releases with enhancements and bugfixes.
Qlik Sense is not the right tool, if you requirement is:
1. To have a guided analytics dashboard, where the user is constraint in the way he views his data.
-> This can be overcome by creating mashup websites, however you will need a web developer to do this.
2. Standardised reporting via Qlik Sense and production of pdf files is not possible (yet).
-> An integration with nPrinting, QlikTech's latest acquisition, could change this and it's on Qlik's roadmap for the next year.
3. Your BI solution needs to accommodate flexible data extraction capabilities (e.g. to Excel).

General current disadvantages:
1. The story telling functionality is not mature yet - users have more benefit using PowerPoint directly. In my opinion it's missing a live connection of the snapshots used in the story to the underlying chart objects.
2. Security settings (NOT on data level) are governed centrally via the management console and are complicated to comprehend.
3. No guided analytics aspects, even navigation between sheets can't be controlled.
4. No supported data extraction capabilities. It's almost impossible to get comprehensive extract of it's underlying data, something that was possible with QlikView (Export functionality e.g.)
5. The vendor has little practical knowledge on how Qlik Sense is deployed enterprise wide within a business and is not really able to support.
6. The vendor is focusing more on the data story telling and collaboration aspects of the Qlik technologies and almost imposes those on the business. Personally, I would prefer if QlikTech listened to its customers a little bit more.

Puntos a favor

We have been using Qlik for more than 2 years now and I would say that the transition has been smooth though there was a learning curve involved which is there with any tool. Some of the features which we like are the on demand app generation and mash ups.

Puntos en contra

Since the software is an in memory tool i.e. it uses physical memory (RAM), as and when the data volume increases it tends to slow down. You have to get a machine with higher configuration to support data volume.

Puntos a favor

Qlik Sense have enabled us to use more of our data and bring the data together in Dashboards that were a very difficult task to achieve in the past using spreadsheets. Using spreadsheets made it difficult to analyse tracking data where you ran out of space before you really got started.

Puntos en contra

After initial setup we got in creating connections to uncommon databases that proved very difficult to get setup in Qlik.