In the world of business intelligence, putting the right tools in the hands of the right people is critical to success. Two of the most popular tools in the industry today are Microsoft Power BI and QlikView. Both provide modeling capabilities and allow you to generate visualizations and dashboards, but there are key differences between the two products. Our BI experts at Optimus have conducted a side-by-side comparison.
Although both solutions offer extensive opportunities for data assessment and generation of screenshots and dashboards, a closer look shows that there are significant differences.
Simple and intuitive vs. versatile and complex
Moreover, QlikView Videos in particular offers advanced BI users (especially those with programming skills) all kinds of options with regard to scripting and data modelling, which Power BI does not. With the use of Qlik products, the user also benefits from a far larger variety of view and presentation options. But increased options also lead to an increased complexity of QlikView. While using the tool, users with little experience in working with business intelligence tools could sometimes be stretched to their limits with the creation of multi-layered analyses and assessments, despite the intuitive user interface and the high performance thanks to the in-memory technology. In contrast, Qlik Sense is a data analysis solution that is so intuitive that all employees of the company can create personalised reports and dynamic dashboards very easily. In the process, the user’s own screenshots can be generated conveniently via drag & drop and data can be analysed up to a high level of detail.
Easy integration into the Microsoft environment
One of Power BI’s biggest strengths is its easy integration with other Microsoft products such as Dynamics NAV, Office 365 or SQL Server. If a company already works in a Microsoft environment, the necessary data sources (e.g. Excel tables or NAV data) can be connected particularly quickly and easily. In case of QlikView or Qlik Sense, integration with a source system such as Dynamics NAV is just as simple. The products also assimilate seamlessly into the Microsoft product portfolio. A connector such as prisma’s NAVdiscovery Toolbox can provide particular comfort while performing the connection.
Benefits of Power BI And QlikView
Power BI Benefits
As tends to be the case with the majority of Microsoft products, the greatest strength of Power BI is its level of integration with other Microsoft products. If you’re already using Office 365 and SQL Server, you have a good chunk of the most common data sources for using Power BI already in place. It’s a fairly quick jump from entering data into an Excel spreadsheet to producing a visualization in Power BI.
Microsoft’s current commitment to cloud-based computing extends a lot of the advantages of Power BI further. For example, the Power BI mobile app can be fully connected to the rest of the software stack. If you want a sales person in the field to have access to real-time information that’s being updated on your SQL Server installation, the dashboards you create in the mobile app can stream that information live to a phone or tablet.
QlikView Benefits
QlikView is widely regarded as the more mature and robust of the two BI solutions. It’s built especially well for analytic purposes, and anyone who comes from a programming or data science background is likely to find it less limiting. QlikView allows you to get into the guts of its scripting system and tinker around with any models you create, and that can be very beneficial if you need low-level access. You can also produce a wider range of visualizations and presentations using QlikView.
One area where QlikView really excels is in raw speed. By keeping its analytics capabilities in-memory, it allows anyone with sufficient processing resources to crunch a ton of data and develop insights fast. The ability to use QlikView on locally based computers is also important to managed organizations that have strict requirements regarding the availability and storage of sensitive information.
