Business Intelligence (BI) Tools

Qlik’s data engine is "associative" in that it lets users explore all data freely, on the fly, and from any angle. Plus, machine learning allows Qlik’s cognitive engine to get smarter over time – giving you ideas of where to explore.

Power BI works on a SQL database that restricts users to linear, predetermined query paths within a narrow slice of data. In any given query, only part of your data is analyzed, leaving key patterns and connections undiscovered.

Tableau also operates over an old school query-based approach which restricts users to follow specific paths and limited data. And in Tableau, exploration only happens in the beginning of the process, before the final dashboard, so end users are not explorers.

Qlik offers you a full range of interactive visualizations and makes them uniquely powerful by compressing large data sets, revealing the shape of your data and pinpointing outliers, and providing AI assistance for chart creation, association recommendations, and data preparation.

Power BI offers a full range of visualizations. While these visualizations are interactive, you will be limited in your filtering and exploration by preselected query paths.

Tableau also offers a full range of visualizations. In fact, this is what Tableau is best known for. But as with their dashboards, you’ll be limited in your filtering and exploration by query paths that the author selected.

Qlik includes a full range of AI capabilities across different users and use cases which are built into the platform at a foundational level. Qlik's approach to AI is to have an always-on engine within the context of the analysis that the user is performing to suggest insights and new connections as you explore your data.

Power BI added Microsoft AI which brings two features, Quick Insights and Q&A. These are objects on a dashboard and need to be included by the user. As usual, accessing these features requires you to purchase the whole Microsoft stack.

Tableau’s Ask Data feature is also a “bolt on” in that it’s not core to the platform. This means it doesn’t work with the business logic built into workbooks because it can’t access workbooks. It connects only to data sources, which means it can’t leverage the insight your analysts have built.

All content creation on Qlik happens in the cloud, where it’s governed and controlled at every step. Qlik centralizes and unifies your data, creating governed data models with robust data security. Plus, governed libraries provide reuse and standardization for analytics.

With Power BI’s decentralized approach, your data is spread across people’s desktops and the cloud. Managing data properly when it’s all over the place can be expensive and time-consuming.

Tableau allows for multiple copies of content with only minor iterations to please each individual. Managing these different copies requires work, which means cost.

Qlik’s unique associative engine provides instant calculation performance, even with massive data sets, real-time data and high numbers of users. And thanks to Qlik’s ability to add, modify and remove records, you can keep data fresher in a much smaller build window.

Power BI makes you spend for scale. Once you hit the cheaper Power BI Pro’s shockingly low data limits (1GB per data set), you’ll need to switch to Premium. Or live query, which will slow your work (and everyone else’s) to a crawl.

Tableau’s engine slows dramatically in attempts to handle large volumes of disparate data, especially when paired with complex analytics. And you cannot increment data and keep it fresh in small build windows.

Qlik Sense is built for mobility. Responsive design and touch are native to the platform. Qlik offers a full-native mobile app with fully interactive online and offline exploration and integrated alerting with push notifications.

The Power BI mobile app only allows for viewing, not creating and Power BI’s cloud is mainly used for uploading reports. Because on the Power BI platform, desktops reign supreme – and you’ll need different desktop software for different tasks.

On mobile, Tableau allows you to download one sheet from a broader workbook. You can’t filter; you can only highlight one value at a time and scroll to see where that value shows up in related charts.

With Qlik, you can embed a dashboard – and individual numbers, values, and metrics. So, you can embed analytics in your products, workflows, portals, and edge devices. Qlik’s API-first platform was built using modern standards to work with the latest web and application technologies, allowing you to extend functionality wherever you need.

Power BI allows for embedding dashboards and objects. But despite Microsoft being a very developer friendly company, Power BI is not API-first and a lot of capabilities are not available in their SDKs.

Tableau can embed a dashboard, but that’s all. Its APIs are notoriously limited, which means your options for embedding and extending your analytics are seriously limited, too. Without these essential capabilities, it is becoming increasingly difficult to meet the massive rise in demand for insights across most organizations today.

Qlik has no hidden or additional costs and your total cost of ownership is lower than Power BI or Tableau.

Power BI may seem low-cost on the surface. But to work at enterprise scale, you have to pay for an upgrade. Learn more.

As you scale, Tableau will require additional investments.

Qlik provides a full enterprise SaaS environment as well as on-premise or private cloud options. And, Qlik is independent, offering you total freedom and control of your data.

With Power BI, you’re required to use Azure – and only Azure. It simply won’t work with other cloud providers. But you will get some (unwelcome) variety: Power BI's on-premise functionality is different from their cloud experience.

Now that Tableau answers to Salesforce, what does that mean for their customers’ data? Great question. If you’re evaluating Tableau, it’s time to start asking where your data could end up and whether it could get locked in.

Qlik Sense has best-in-class Data Integration capabilities for combining and transforming data as well as data cataloging. Qlik also offers an enterprise class Data Integration platform which provides a seamless analytics data pipeline.

Power BI is built on a patchwork platform designed to get you to keep adding Microsoft stack products. These additional products will cost you more.

Tableau has data prep capabilities in Tableau Desktop and in Tableau Prep. But they solve different problems (although neither can solve all). So which do you use? And what do you use for the data problems Tableau can’t solve?

Data democracy: Qlik believes in true self-service. Our platform lets anyone, at any skill level, explore their data.

Data dictatorship: With Power BI, only authors have self-service access. And once they’ve published content, it’s available only with very limited interactivity. If users want to explore deeper, they have to go back to the author for a new report.

Tableau’s idea of discovery requires you to be an author. So their data literacy initiative is focused on authors only. That’s data literacy for data dictators that leaves the masses behind.