Tableau vs Qlikview: Which Data Visualization Tool Should You Choose in 2022?

November 8, 2022

Tableau vs QlikView: Data Visualization concept

Tableau and Qlik are two of the major most popular providers of data visualization tools. Are you wondering which of their leading tools, Tableau or QlikView, to choose? If so, this article is for you. Here you will find a comprehensive comparison of all key aspects of these tools. Check it out and see which solution will work best for your company.

What Is a Data Visualization Tool?

Data visualization tools (or business intelligence tools, BI tools) allow you to present data using visual elements such as interactive charts, graphs, and maps. They are used by people in business, science, technology, marketing, sales, and more. An effective analytics and visualization tool allows you to present raw data in a more readable and understandable way and draw significant conclusions.

Data visualization is an important term in the context of big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. It allows companies to manage data in the right way and extract many business benefits.

Top Data Visualization Tools

Among Gartner's Magic Quadrant Leaders, there were three top business intelligence platforms providers in 2021:

Tableau (Tableau Desktop, Tableau Desktop and Server, Tableau Online)
Qlik (Qlik Sense, QlikView)
Microsoft (Microsoft Power BI)

This popular market research report compares the vendors, analyzing the various aspects, such as completeness of vision or strengths. Then, they assign the tools to one of the four available quadrants:

Challengers
Leaders
Niche Players
Visionaries

Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms

We will compare two key apps among these in this article.

Why Is It Worth Implementing Data Visualization Tools?

Before we move on to the comparison of the two tools, let's answer the question: Why is it worth implementing them in your company at all? Data visualization systems significantly increase the competitiveness of the company. Insights drawn from data analysis help you find correlations between specific information, which ultimately results in better decisions. In short, knowing marketing or sales results and customers' behavior, we can create solutions that will help achieve better business results.

Modern data visualization tools allow us to present data in any form, such as a table or a chart. Plus, creating data visualizations doesn’t require specialized knowledge and technical skills. All you need to do is pick a specific source (e.g., an Excel sheet), and the program will process the information provided. In this simple way, you can obtain information on the functioning of any area of the company.

You can read more about data visualization and why it's an essential part of any business in this article: 5 Key Benefits of Using Processing in Data Visualization.

Tableau vs. Qlikview — Comparison of Two Popular BI Tools

1. Popularity and User Reviews

Tableau

According to Gartner, Tableau is currently the most popular vendor in the category Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms. It has over 3,000 ratings with an average of 4.4 out of 5 stars.

QlikView

Qlik is in the third place of popularity, just behind Microsoft. Its rating is 4.3 out of 5 stars.

As you can see, both tools are very popular in the market, and their users rate them well. Tableau has a slight advantage.

Moreover, each tool has a large, engaged community that’s open to helping new users in case of any problems.

2. Data Visualization

Tableau

Tableau is considered one of the best tools for data visualization. Users appreciate its user-friendly interface and ease of use, so even beginners can create dashboards tailored to their needs. Visualizations created in Tableau are flexible and transparent, and most importantly, easily configurable and formatted.

Tableau has introduced new features that provide a self-service analytics solution. It allows users to create statistical summaries to help them make decisions more easily. Moreover, the tool will enable users to present data analysis in the form of stories. Users can create presentations using the data-driven storytelling feature. It allows them to create exciting narratives that will interest their audience.

A strength of Tableau is the built-in extension to support geospatial and geographic visualization. With this feature, creating and displaying maps is intuitive and straightforward, and works much better than QlikView. Features such as web clients and dashboard support also work better here compared to the competitor.

So, are there any shortcomings? Tableau does not have 3D graphs and gauge chart creation features, while QlikView does.‍

QlikView

QlikView provides a wide selection of objects and visualization tools such as tables, box plots, images, 3D visuals, various charts, and many more. As with Tableau, the tool is easy to use and configure, allowing users to edit graphics and visuals as they like.

QlikView has an in-memory engine with which we can visualize patterns and create advanced data analytics. Moreover, it can be integrated with other data sources to create a consistent dashboard that shows all metrics of interest in one place.

The Qlik product provides broad insights into data analysis. It helps users see and understand correlations and hidden patterns. Moreover, it even offers self-service analytics to support the ability to discover insights from data.

Its strengths include massive capabilities to create interactive visualizations, visual drill down, and support for mobile clients.

Tableau vs QlikView: Qlik Visual Vocabulary

As for shortcomings, unlike Tableau, there is no geospatial visualization capability here. To do this, you need external tools.

3. Integration

Tableau

Both solutions have extensive integration options with other systems. In the case of Tableau, these are tools and files such as:

SQL databases
MySQL
MS SQL Server
PostgreSQL
Google BigQuery
Google Analytics
Salesforce
Firebird
Cloudera Hadoop
Hortonworks Hadoop
HP Vertica
Teradata
Spreadsheets (such as Excel files)
CSV files
Oracle
Windows Azure Marketplace
Pivotal Greenplum
OData
Teradata
R programming language

It is worth mentioning that Tableau also allows you to extract and analyze data offline.

QlikView

On the Qlik DataMarket, you can find a lot of ready-to-use data from external sources. The list of tools you can integrate QlikView with is just as extensive. Among other things, you can combine it with:

Amazon EC2
Redshift
Amazon Vectorwise
Hortonworks Hadoop
Cloudera Hadoop
DataStax
Impala
HP Vertica
EMC Green Plum
Epicor Scala
IBM Netezza
IBM DB2
MicroStrategy
ParAccel
Salesforce
Sage 500
Teradata
MS SQL Server
MySQL
Infor Lawson
Informatica Powercenter
ODBC
SAP
SAP Hana
Teradata
CSV files
R programming language

4. Ease of Use

Tableau

Using Tableau doesn't require technical knowledge. A simple drag-and-drop interface makes it possible. It has a very simple and interactive user interface with a clear menu. This BI solution allows you to use your own graphics and create custom views to personalize your message. It doesn't provide the search feature that QlikView offers. Still, its flexibility and simplicity make it easier to use than its competitor.

What's more, there are plenty of ready-made resources and tutorials online to help you learn how to use the tool.

QlikView

QlikView's strength is its data search feature. It allows you to quickly and easily find the data set you are interested in and the connections between the data. Moreover, the tool has an association engine that allows you to build interactive visualizations by sorting helpful information. However, it has a complicated menu and a less user-friendly UI, making QlikView more challenging to use than Tableau.

As with Tableau, if you have any trouble using this tool, there are many tutorials and help for QlikView online.

5. Deployment

Tableau

Tableau is very easy to deploy. This tool requires more structured data and does not have its own data warehouse. It means that you do not need to create layers when connecting to the dataset. Moreover, Tableau offers a desktop version and Tableau Online for cloud deployments. So, you’ll find a full range of products and options for simple deployment.

QlikView

The developers of QlikView have also made sure that their tool is easy to implement without the help of people with technical skills. It runs on both 32- and 64-bit systems and installation is quick. The tool is also easy to configure. Thanks to association technology, data modelling in QlikView is easy even for less advanced users.

6. Performance & Speed

Tableau

Tableau allows you to create interactive visualizations in a short time. What's more, it enables you to share reports both online and offline, which can speed up your work.

However, because Tableau uses cubing techniques to process data, it's slower than its competitor. If you want to optimize some features such as user traffic, you can implement Tableau Server, which can help you achieve better performance.

QlikView

When it comes to data processing, QlikView is faster than Tableau. It’s one of the fastest data visualization tools on the market. It has an associative model which allows the in-memory engine to easily and quickly combine large data sets. Unlike Tableau, QlikView has its own data warehouse and an additional scripting feature. Interestingly, it doesn't use cubes, which makes it load all tables into internal memory. Moreover, you can carry out performance tuning and optimization in this tool at the design, server, and scripting levels. These features make execution with fewer resources faster and easier.

7. Insight Generation

Tableau

Tableau has a storytelling feature to generate insights and prepare an engaging presentation using available data points. With this tool, you can present essential information and insights through easy-to-understand presentations, reports, and narratives that will be a valuable source of information for your audience. It is essential when dealing with business customers and visualizing the effects of an AI solution. This visualization tool will make even the most complex issues suddenly become easy and obvious.

QlikView

By using association technology, QlikView has a lot of useful tools and helps generate a lot of valuable insights. With this tool, we can quickly and easily read correlations between variables and hidden relationships in data. It can publish the gathered findings in the form of reports or visualizations. It is essential from a business point of view because it allows you to draw meaningful insights about the company and make better business decisions.

8. Mobility

Both tools aren't dependent on a device, and you can easily access them from your laptop, tablet, or smartphone.

9. Security

Tableau

When we talk about such an essential solution as a data visualization tool, where vital data is stored, you must consider its security. Fortunately, Tableau has very robust security, supported by Tableau Server, which uses SSL/TLS encryption. It provides a wide range of advanced options, such as its own identity service for local authentication, as well as integration solutions to keep your data secure. It supports standard authentication such as Kerberos and Active Directory.

QlikView

QlikView is also a very secure tool. Its desktop version has Windows NTFS File Security, which monitors direct access to various documents. The tool especially carefully analyzes data sources and takes care of the authentication of documents, files, scripts, etc. Authentication is also required to use the QlikView Enterprise Management Console, and only people who are members of a specific local Windows Group have access.

10. Customization

Tableau

Another critical issue is the ability to customize the tool to your needs. In this case, Tableau templates offers the highest degree of customization of all available solutions. In this tool, even the smallest element of the visualization can be formatted. The whole editing process is straightforward and intuitive so that any user can handle it, even not very advanced users.

QlikView

Compared to its competitor, QlikView is quite a complex tool when it comes to customizing elements. Although it also allows you to format and adjust data, it requires more knowledge and expertise than Tableau. Moreover, the tool doesn't qualify as much customization for dashboards, charts, graphs, or reports.

Tableau vs. QlikView — Summary