All the best BI tools provide the ability to visualize data in charts, graphs, and maps. Both Qlik and Tableau offer a full range of visualizations. However, visualizing data is not just about creating a piece of art — it’s more about gaining insights. Key features assist with this, such as interactivity, responsive design that adapts to screen size and scale, as well as a scroll bar in bar charts that allows for viewing the overall shape of the data and discovering anomalies.
Qlik Sense: Qlik offers over 30 beautiful, fully responsive visualizations that automatically summarize data, highlight patterns, and identify anomalies. The associative engine underneath drives advanced geographical calculations and AI/ML, providing an interactive experience and powerful insights.
Tableau: Tableau is known for offering a full range of visualizations, the ability to format every part of a chart, and flexible layouts with layering. However, chart design is not the primary factor in helping your business users gain insights.
You and your stakeholders want to explore all your data in any direction directly from the dashboard. This allows you to discover relationships that you may not have considered when you or an analyst first created a query. Additionally, you should expect AI to help highlight anomalies, create charts, and suggest new visualizations.
Qlik Sense: Qlik's unique analytics engine is specifically designed for interactive, free-form exploration, enabling business users to explore and make discoveries without needing to create content. And AI and ML enhance dashboards even further by adding automated insights and interaction with natural language.
Tableau: Tableau allows you to combine charts to create dashboards. However, their SQL-based approach limits users to filtering and drilling down through predefined and linear paths in a narrow dataset. The only interactivity users have is the one explicitly defined by a content creator.
There is more to a BI platform investment than the initial purchase price. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) takes into account all costs associated with using a BI solution, from implementation to usability and scalability over time. Key cost factors include infrastructure, system setup, app development, cloud computing cost management, security, usability, system administration, and support.
Qlik Sense: Qlik's total costs are lower than Tableau's. And Qlik has no additional or hidden costs when the platform is scaled.
Tableau: Tableau requires additional investments in software and infrastructure when the platform is scaled.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are changing expectations for a modern BI tool. Augmented analytics suggest new insights and connections, helping you quickly analyze your data, increase your productivity, and make better data-driven decisions.
Qlik Sense: With AI and ML integrated into the platform at a fundamental level, Qlik supports a complete range of augmented analytics capabilities. This includes automatic insight generation, natural language analytics, and assistance in creating analyses. Overall, these features provide deeper insights, help more people become data-savvy, and accelerate value creation.
Tableau: While it includes storytelling, Tableau lacks a true form of automated insights. Tableau's NLQ, called Ask Data, can provide a simple answer to the questions users ask. However, it only supports English and works with a data source, not with the business logic embedded in workbooks, so it cannot leverage the insights your analysts have built.
Machine learning is the process of creating models from historical data to make predictions about the future. Automated machine learning enables the power of predictive analytics to be utilized in various use cases that are typically not handled by data scientists.
Qlik Sense: Qlik AutoML allows analysts to easily create ML models and generate predictive analytics, helping you move from historical analysis to predictive and prescriptive analysis. With full explainability, you can understand not only what might happen but also why, allowing you to take action. And you can do this as an analyst without being a data scientist.
Tableau: Salesforce offers Einstein Discovery, which provides key factor analysis but lacks true predictive capabilities. Einstein does not scale well due to its very small data limits. Additionally, it is a separate cloud service, not part of the Tableau experience, and only works with Salesforce data. This means you cannot analyze your HR, finance, or other separate data.
Your organization should be able to support all BI use cases using the same data and the same platform. This is because you can have many different types of users, such as analysts, engineers, and business professionals, performing a variety of tasks beyond just visualizing data — such as embedding analytics, business alerts, and collaborating on dashboards.
Qlik Sense: Users at all skill levels in your organization can engage in the way that suits them best — from data exploration to real-time analysis and interaction with natural language, all on the same platform with a shared analytics pipeline, analytics engine, and AI capabilities.
Tableau: Tableau is primarily a self-service tool for analysts to create data visualizations. While it excels at styling content, it lacks the flexibility to allow users to explore independently and lacks the scalability and analytical sophistication to handle more complex use cases.
It's not enough to create dashboards and visualizations. Your platform should have the capability to initiate action. This can happen in the form of promoting human action through sophisticated alerts or orchestrating events in downstream systems.
Qlik Sense: Qlik offers intelligent, fully data-driven alerts that are independent of specific visualizations, delivered via email and push notifications on mobile. With application automation, you can orchestrate events and actions in all kinds of downstream systems and workflows.
Tableau: Tableau allows authors to monitor the value of a point on a chart, but it lacks the ability to create complex rules that enable monitoring of data conditions. Without acquiring third-party software, automations are limited to Salesforce Flow.
You want everyone in your organization to trust their data, analyses, and insights. You also want everyone to work quickly without having to wait for IT or analysts. This means that your tool should enable you to manage your data and content with a centralized governance function that uses rule-based governance without restricting what users can achieve.
Qlik Sense: Qlik centralizes and consolidates your data and analytics in the cloud, where governed data models with robust data security are created. All content creation occurs in the cloud, where it is managed and controlled at every step. Additionally, governed libraries ensure the reuse and standardization of analyses.
Tableau: Tableau's primary environment for content creation is on the desktop, where governance is not possible. As a result, authors can create incorrect analyses without any form of control. Furthermore, you must create copies to customize content, even for minor changes, which leads to duplication and complexity in administration.
As workforces become more mobile, you need to ensure that you and your teams can explore and analyze data as well as share insights, regardless of where you are.
Qlik Sense: Qlik offers a fully native mobile app with its analytics engine running locally, as well as push alerts. With responsive design and touch interaction built into the Qlik platform, you get fully interactive online and offline exploration, as well as integrated alerts without needing to redesign apps for mobile access.
Tableau: Tableau is not responsive but allows you to define layouts for mobile use. However, they recommend disabling the feature for better performance. For the user, Tableau only allows you to download one sheet from a workbook to the mobile device. You cannot filter but can only highlight one value at a time and scroll to find that value in related charts.
You need a complete, up-to-date overview of all relevant data. Additionally, it may be necessary to support hundreds or thousands of users in your organization. This means you need a tool that can handle data at any scale without compromising performance or increasing costs, and that can integrate and combine data from any source as close to real-time as possible.
Qlik Sense: Qlik's associative engine delivers instant calculation performance, even with massive datasets, unexpected questions, and a high number of users. And with Qlik's robust features for incremental updates and partial reloads, you can keep data updated in a significantly smaller build window.
Tableau: Tableau's engine struggles to handle large data volumes and diverse data, especially with complex analyses. Performance deteriorates further when the platform is scaled to thousands of users.
Embedded analytics refers to integrating full analytics capabilities into other processes, applications, and portals across an organization. It enables your employees, partners, suppliers, and customers to make better, data-driven decisions directly in the systems they already use.
Qlik Sense: Qlik's platform is built with an API-first design using modern standards. This means you can embed a dashboard—as well as individual numbers, values, and metrics — into the latest web and application technologies.
Tableau: Tableau's APIs are limited, meaning you can only embed a complete dashboard and not individual values.
To gain a holistic overview of your business, your BI tool should easily be able to gather data from hundreds of data sources, such as apps, databases, and cloud services. Robust data preparation and combination capabilities are essential for applications that extend beyond just a single source. They should not be limited by the complexities of SQL.
Qlik Sense: Qlik's associative engine is key to combining many different types of data from a variety of sources at scale without the limitations of SQL joins. With both graphical data transformation and powerful scripting, you can handle even the most complex data preparation challenges.
Tableau: Tableau Prep and Tableau Desktop both offer data preparation options. However, they struggle in different ways to combine and prepare complex data at scale. For example, Tableau Prep creates a flat data table, while Tableau Desktop simply cannot scale. This forces you to seek alternative solutions for data preparation.
You should not be limited in your cloud strategy or where your data is stored. Your BI tool should have a platform-agnostic, multi-cloud architecture that allows you to implement in any environment, from on-premise to cloud to hybrid.
Qlik Sense: As an independent platform, Qlik provides you with full freedom and control over your data, whether it is stored in one or multiple cloud environments or on-premise. Qlik enables a fully enterprise SaaS environment as well as on-premise or private cloud implementation options. Read more about Qlik Cloud.
Tableau: With Tableau, you can self-host it or let them do it—there is no hybrid option. And since Salesforce owns Tableau, you might consider where your data could end up and whether it could become locked in, especially with the launch of Salesforce Data Cloud.
Most vendors will teach you how to use their tool. Today, you need more. You need people at all levels of your organization to become data literate. They must be able to ask the right questions of the data and machines, make data-driven decisions, and communicate the meaning to others.
Qlik Sense: Qlik makes it easy for anyone, regardless of skill level, to explore their data. Additionally, Qlik offers training programs in data literacy for every user.
Tableau: Tableau requires you to be an author to interact with data and benefit from Tableau's data literacy initiative. All other users must go back to the author for a new report when they want to dive deeper into the data.
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