Qlik vs Tableau: Software comparison

Business analytics tools can help users unearth important insights and actionable information based on their organization’s data. While it can be tempting to choose the first software system you see so that you can begin improving your business as soon as possible, not all software solutions are built the same or provide the same features.

To identify the best system for your organization, you need one capable of supporting your business data needs. This article will compare the features and capabilities of the business analytics tools Qlik and Tableau to help you choose the solution that’s right for you.

What is Qlik?

Qlik is a business intelligence (BI) and visual analytics platform that supports a range of analytic use cases. It helps users build interactive dashboards and reports, and extract data from various data sources. It also uses AI to help users understand and use data more effectively, minimizing cognitive bias, amplifying discovery, and elevating data literacy.

What is Tableau?

Tableau is a data analytics platform and software company that offers data visualization software for organizations working with business information analytics. Tableau is designed to help people see and understand data, and to simplify data-driven decision-making.

Qlik vs. Tableau: Feature comparison

Head-to-head comparison: Qlik vs. Tableau

Data analytics

Qlik’s products use the real-time data pipeline to create continuous intelligence and allow users to make well-informed actionable decisions. In addition, they enable users to gain insights into their data through their augmented analytics features.

The Qlik system can generate analyses on data and data use by employing AI to elevate users’ data literacy. This analysis process involves features such as auto-generated insights, natural language interaction, AutoML predictions, interactive predictive calculations, and automated creation and data prep. This way, users can learn through the system’s auto-generated analyses and insights, and they can also manage their data analysis with conversational analytics and search-based virtual discovery.

Tableau users can explore and analyze their data through the software’s VizQL technology, which translates drag-and-drop actions into data queries. Its intuitive analytics features use visualizations.

Tableau Prep also prepares dirty data for analysis with automated data cleansing features. Once data is ready for analysis, users can utilize the interactive dashboards to gain insights into their data through deep learning, predictive analytics and data mining methods. Tableau can handle an extensive range of data from multiple sources, including big data. Some of their analysis features include cohort analysis, what-if analysis, drag-and-drop segmentation and a robust calculation language.

Reports

Qlik provides reporting features that are accessible through the user’s dashboards. Users can access visualizations of their KPIs, performance and other business trends to fuel their insights. The software supports various reporting forms, enabling users to design and create their own visualizations, including bar charts, gauges, pie charts and tables.

Qlik’s executive reporting feature can provide essential information based on business data analysis insights for senior managers and decision-makers. Qlik offers advanced reporting capabilities that integrate with popular document formats, combine objects into a single report and can be shared via multi-channel delivery.

Tableau Reports are a feature of Tableau for visualizing data from multiple sources, so users can check data trends and gain further insights. Once their raw data is processed to extract meaningful information, Tableau’s software can convert this into visuals for better understanding.

Tableau’s advanced visualization techniques involve maps, charts, tables, graphs, cartograms, box and whisker plots and bubble clouds. Data visualizations and reports can be interacted with and customized by the user through their dashboards to create visuals that represent their preferred information. Their dashboards are a collection of the user’s data visuals that display a complete report from their data.

Dashboards

Qlik users can create business intelligence dashboards to improve their data literacy. Once raw data has been collected and transformed into analytics-ready information, users can apply it to create dashboard visuals. Qlik’s dashboards utilize embedded visualizations, integrated AI-generated recommendations and governed self-service.

The Qlik software supports four types of dashboards to meet users’ needs, including analytical dashboards, strategic dashboards, tactical dashboards and operational dashboards. Each of them offers visuals and tools to help users make smarter decisions based on their organizational data.

Tableau users can build dashboards that tell stories and help them uncover insights from their data. It provides users with several views of data or worksheets so that they can visualize them simultaneously in one consolidated display. Users can combine data sources, add filters to their real-time visualizations and interact with their data through their dashboard, enabling them to reach meaningful answers from their data collections and analysis.

Tableau also provides built-in story points for their dashboards, which can help users explain their data and insights to their audience. Tableau dashboards feature a device designer, which allows users to ensure that their dashboards can be appropriately displayed across all viewing devices.

Should you choose Qlik or Tableau?

So now that you know more about Qlik and Tableau, which business analytics solution is the better option? The answer to this question may depend on the needs of the user. Each software product comes with its own unique features, which may be more supportive to some users than others. Both tools are classified as “Leaders” in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for analytics and business intelligence and both tools offer self-service, drag-and-drop data analysis features.