Tableau vs QlikView

Tableau and Qlikview are two important BI tools available in the market for analyzing data. This article is a window to a complete overview of each of the tools, along with the basic differences based on three main categories of Business, Technology, and Visualization. Every organization wants the best BI tools, to handle the humongous data that they deal with each day. Tableau and Qlikview are the two giant BI tools that operate in the market successfully on Big Data. In this blog, we are going to discuss 'Tableau vs QlikView'.

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Tableau vs QlikView: What Is The Difference?

So let us get started with this Tableau vs QlikView article,

What Is Tableau?

Tableau is one of the most popular Business Intelligence tools, which helps in analyzing the data visually. It allows us to create and distribute the interactive dashboard, which displays the trends, variations, and density of the data in the form of charts and graphs. It can easily acquire data from files, relational and big data sources, and processes it. It also provides for data blending and real-time collaboration.

It holds high importance for businesses, academic researchers, and many government organizations, whose main focus is data collection and its analysis through visual analytics.

Tableau is regarded as a leading Business Intelligence and Analytics Platform in Gartner Magic Quadrant.

Related Article: Tableau for Beginners

What Is QlikView?

QlikView is one of the leading Business Discover platforms available. It is built with a number of features that differentiate it from traditional BI tools in the market. It is programmed to analyze data through different colors, which are used to indicate the relationship between different types of data. It also indicates the data that are not related. 

QlikView applications manage data automatically, without any manual intervention. Its best features include, the in-memory data processing and data compression to 10% of the original size. These advantages make it the best in the field.

Related Article: QlikView For Beginners

Let us understand the advantages and disadvantages of using Tableau in Business Intelligence for Data Analytics.

Advantages Of Tableau vs QlikView

What Are The Advantages Of Using Tableau?

1. Visual Capabilities

The remarkable visual capabilities of Tableau are what it is known for. Tableau is developed to read and handle complex data formats and computations to produce required data blending and dashboarding to present you with extremely insightful data visualizations in the form of understandable graphs and charts. The researchers say that visuals are more impactful on memory than numbers and words. Consequently, Tableau seems to have made analyzing data easier, which otherwise would very confusing through the traditional spreadsheets.

Related Article: Data Visualization Tools Open Source

2. Easy creation of interactive visuals

Tableau Software offers the easy, "drag and drop" way of creating data visuals. Even a beginner can get hands-on software in very little time. The interface is built to handle endless variations with an additional capability of warning you for visuals against the best practices.

3. High Performance

Tableau's performance is great with large chunks of data. While the software is processing the big data, the dashboard manages to handle the load and there will be no performance drop seen with any of the user tools. This high performance with data visualization makes it one of the popular tools with a considerably large market.

4. Multiple data source connections

As a BI tool, Tableau is built with support for many common data sources used in the industry. Tableau can establish and manage the connections with HADOOP, SAP, and DB Technologies, increasing the radius of capabilities of the software tool as a whole. This improves the application performance of the software, enabling it to handle all sorts of data storage.

5. Support to other scripting languages

As a developer or a data scientist, it is not the best practice to completely rely on a tool for every process associated with data analytics. Sometimes, we feel the need to write our own scripts to perform some specific tasks on the data. Tableau, thus, supports Python and R. You can write scripts and run them on Tableau. Sometimes, this will perform the initial data cleansing task, hence reducing the load on Tableau. However, Python is not the natively supported language in Tableau.

6. Responsive UI

Tableau is responsive to devices. The reports and other UI automatically get resized according to the device size, it is opened on. Hence it is mobile, tablet, and laptop-friendly in nature.

7. Community and Forum Support

There are many Tableau enthusiasts, who are constantly contributing to the Tableau community growth. There are immense forums that support any Tableau beginner with the blockers he or she is facing. Overall, their community support is commendable.

What Are The Advantages of Using QlikView?

1. Dynamic Environment

Qlikview provides a dynamic BI user interface, where, with a single click, one can consolidate, visualize, and analyze data sources to unprecedented precision.

2. Data Interpretation and Analysis

The visually advanced and dynamic dashboard allows for a good data interpretation and analysis

3. Data Sharing

Different teams can collaborate and work on the crucial data, as real-time data sharing is enabled in Qlikview.

4. Independent Handling of Qlikview

Qlikview does not demand high-tech application knowledge to operate it. Both, application scripting and dashboard can be handled without much training and any external IT help. Any non-technical employee with little exposure to the application will be skilled enough to work on it.

5. Low on maintenance

The implementation of the application is hassle-free and is simple. It doesn't require dedicated maintenance even in the long run.

6. In-memory storage

Whenever any aggregation, the calculation is made on data, the operations proceed in-memory, while the data will be transferred from back-end to front-end. This saves a lot of storage memory, as the pre-calculated data will not be stored anywhere.

7. Data compression

The Qlikview considers only the useful bits of data. It removes all the junk bits and ensures that the data is redundancy-free. Hence, in the process, the data will be compressed to 10% of the original size, which improves the efficiency of data handling by the software.

8. QIX Engine

The QIX engine of the software is sensitive to click. It recognizes every click and responds to it through the process of changing color hues by highlighting the data related to the selected field. This helps in a better understanding of the data for the user.

9. Direct and Indirect searches

Qlikview allows for both direct and indirect searches. If you want to fetch some information about data, you can simply input anything related and get results. The result will be prompt in both direct and indirect causes.

10. Affordable Cost

Qlikview software is very affordable. The hardware required for the software is also cost-effective. There is also a free trial available in the software. 

Disadvantages Of Tableau vs QlikView 

What Are The Disadvantages of Using Tableau?

1. Lack of automatic Scheduling

Tableau doesn't offer the automatic refresh of the reports with the process of scheduling. There is no option to directly schedule in Tableau. Hence, always, there is a need for manual intervention when users have to update data in the back end.

2. No custom visual imports

Unlike other BI tools available in the market like PowerBI, where the visuals can be imported, Tableau lacks this feature. Whatever the custom visuals are needed, they have to be recreated within Tableau UI manually, which sometimes becomes double work and time-consuming.

3. Restrictions in custom formatting

The custom formatting and limited 16 columns scaling are difficult points for Tableau users. Also, there is no way to implement the formatting directly to multiple fields. This forces the user to apply the formatting manually, which is very time-consuming.

4. Static and single value parameters

Tableau's parameters are static and single-valued. Hence for any change in the data encountered, the users have to manually update the parameters. There is no way the parameters can be updated automatically.

5. Pricing

The scaling for larger organizations becomes an important limitation as the pricing of Tableau is very high for an average company. The smaller enterprises find it difficult to buy and install the product because of its expensive investment, compared to other available BI tools in the market.

6. Intensive staff training

The tool though is quite easy, to begin with, it is really difficult to understand and utilize all the facilities offered by the tools embedded in. One needs to undergo intensive staff training to start to meddle with the tool, in both cases of a developer and a user. This is not only time-consuming but also increases the cost of ownership.

7. Integration into existing infrastructure

Though Tableau claims that it is easy to integrate Tableau into your company's environment, it is practically not so easy. It is difficult to make Tableau integrate with the existing infrastructure to get a seamless business landscape, both technically and financially.

What Are The Disadvantages of Using QlikView?

1. Technical expertise

To create the application for the end-user, technical expertise is needed as the process is quite complex. For things that are at a base level, there is not much training needed. However, with the increase in complex computation, scriptwriting demands pre-knowledge of the software.

2. Poor Customer support

The customer support is deemed as poor and unsatisfactory, according to the customer reviews.

3. Embedding

If you want to embed the Qlikview software with some other software, things become messy, as this software is quite distinct in appearance.

4. Work on old functions

Qlikview has remained with some obsolete tools and interface designs. It lacks the new methods of drag-and-drop function and other designs that offer cutting-edge technology over the normal Qlikview functions.

Related Article: Qlikview Interview Questions and Answers

Architecture Of Tableau vs QlikView 

Architecture of Tableau

The following diagram reads the architecture of Tableau. 

The architecture of Tableau follows the famous, highly scalable, n-tier, client-server model. Here, the server serves web clients, desktop-installed clients, and mobile clients. Tableau Desktop is the authorized edition, which is used to create multiple views on the server.

 

Tableau server is the analytics platform, which is used as an enterprise-level, business analytic tool, used to level up thousands of clients.

Architecture of QlikView

QlikView architecture is made of the front-end and the back-end. The front-end visualizes the processed data while the back-end provides the security and publishing tool for the user documents.

The frontend is made, mainly of the QlikView server, which is used by the users to view the already generated BI reports.

The back-end mainly consists of the QlikView Desktop and QlikView Publisher. The drag and drop mechanisms can be conducted on the Desktop, while the distribution service is performed by the Publisher.

Difference Between The Tableau And QlikView

There are four different categories, based on which the Tableau and QlikView are differentiated. They are

1. General features
2. Business Features
3. Visualization features
4. Technical features

QlikView vs Tableau: General Features

Feature	Tableau	Qlikview
Deployment Process	It does not own a data warehouse. It cannot create layers while connecting to the data set The process of deployment is easier than Qlikview, as it deals with structured data.	It has its own data warehouse where multilevel layers can be used for deployment. It starts to produce reports within minutes of installation. It does not use cubes. Hence it loads tables and charts in-memory to enable interactive queries and the creation of reports
Ease of Use	The interface is simple to use. It has a drag-and-drop feature. It doesn’t allow you to search for content across all the data. You can create views easily with various objects due to an advanced GUI.	The interface is simple to use.  You can search for any data trend by typing in data in the search box. You will be presented with the required connections and relationships. However, it is hard to create views, because of menu-driven design.
Ease of Learning	Simple drag-and-drop features enable you to learn things quickly.	You can learn to work with Qlikview easily, being guided by community support.
Cost	The desktop “public version” is free of cost, with a limitation to download all your data. The private version costs $999 or $1,999 depending on the data access. Tableau server costs $1000/server user with a minimum of 10 users and added maintenance	Its personal version is free. It costs $1350 for each named user and an additional cost of $15000 for every concurrent user. The server license costs you $35000 per server. Additional PDF distribution service costs $21000 for each server. SAP NetWeaver costs an added amount of $22500.
Connectivity with other tools	It can integrate with data sources like CSV, SQL databases, Salesforce, Cloudera Hadoop, Firebird, Google Analytics, Google BigQuery, Hortonworks Hadoop, HP Vertica, MS SQL Server, MySQL, OData, Oracle, Pivotal Greenplum, PostgreSQL, Salesforce, Teradata, and Windows Azure Marketplace. It can be integrated with R. It can connect to Big Data sources.	It has very good capability of integration with Amazon Vectorwise, EC2, and Redshift, Cloudera Hadoop and Impala, CSV, DatStax, Epicor Scala, EMC Green Plum, Hortonworks Hadoop, HP Vertica, IBM DB2, IBM Netezza, Infor Lawson, Informatica Powercenter, MicroStrategy, MS SQL Server, My SQL, ODBC, Par Accel, Sage 500, Salesforce, SAP, SAP Hana, Teradata, and many more You can integrate R using API. It can connect with Big Data.
Mobility	It is available on all the devices	It is available on both web-based and mobile-based clients.
Maintainability	Easy to maintain	Easy to maintain
Security	It provides much-secured mechanisms to access each of the tableau features. It helps organizations, to promote the protected data sources for all users, in order to authenticate the fragile data content.	It provides security for the documents, scripts, and sections through user authentication. Document access through the Qlikview desktop is managed by Windows NTFS File Security. The user access to web-based Qlikview Enterprise Management Console is limited to only Windows users who are a part of the particular windows group.

 

Related Article: Tableau Interview Questions And Answers

QlikView vs Tableau: Business Criteria

Feature	Tableau	Qlikview
Scalability	Scalability is good here. It can handle large amounts of data without any hassles	It can handle huge amounts of data. However, RAM has to be scaled in order to scale the system to the new requirement.
SaaS Platform	Tableau as a SaaS platform integrates easily with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.  Tableau users can also connect to cloud data sources like Amazon Redshift and all kinds of web data. Available as core or digital	It is available as an amazing business vendor in business intelligence which provides both cloud-based and on-premise service. Qlik Sense Cloud Business works are the Saas offering. Needs Special Licensing.
MindShare	Integrated into Mindshare using Tableau public	Not Integrated into Mindshare
Implementation Time	Fast	Slow
Server License	It is available as a user license and core-based license. License cost for desktop personal is $999 and for desktop professionals, it is $1999 annually The server costs about $10,000 for 10 users and the online cost is $500 per user per year.	Personal edition costs free. Enterprise edition server costs around $36150 per year. Server costs per year for 25 user costs, $8675. Named user license costs $1395 per year per named user. Extranet server costs up to $18600 per server.
Big data Support	To achieve big data using Tableau, integration with big data platforms like Hadoop, NoSQL, Apache Spark SQL, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuer, Splunk, and many more is established. Big data visualization using drag-and-drop mechanisms without writing complex code. It can connect to live data sources or use it from in-memory. Tableau enables the users to traverse across data sources like Salesforce, MySQL, Excel files, etc. from Big data sources. It provides a single visual interface to data across all the data sources, once it is connected to the data sources.	With many advanced connectors, Qlikview can easily integrate with big data platforms like Hadoop, NoSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, as well as newer platforms like Amazon Redshift and Google BigQuery and many more. It is capable of mature data integration to process advanced data of different data types. Governed data enterprise and libraries provide a “build once and deploy anywhere” sort of environment which boosts the reuse of data and applications.
Viability	It is viable in terms of new features and adaptability. Fast growth is seen.	Some of the features are obsolete compared to the newer BI tools in the market. However, it doesn’t fail to handle big data and provide precise data visualization. It is a Public company.
Overall cost	The billing is dependent on customer needs, hence pricing is not publicly available.	The personal version is free of cost. Enterprise version pricing is dependent on customer choices, hence is not publicly available.
Partner Network	Below average network.	Large partner network, having 1000+ partners.

QlikView vs Tableau: Visualization Criteria

Feature	Tableau	Qlikview
Dashboard Support	The dashboard is shown as the tabs at the bottom, which get updated with recent data from the data sources. Users can create views in the workbook, along with many objects like text areas and images.	The dashboard displays values from across many fields simultaneously. The feature of in-memory data allows for the display of dynamic values in all the sheets. Views can’t be created.
Web Clients	Supported	Supported
Mobile Clients	Supported on phone, tablets, and iPad.	Supported on iPad
UI Interactivity	Interaction is good but has no MDI support.	Interaction is good and has MDI support.
Visual Controls	There are good visual controls like zoom.	Visual controls are good with options to update the visualization, you need.
Analyst Desktop	Tableau Pro is the best fit.	Qlikview Desktop fits well.
Data Interactivity	Good data interactivity	Better data interactivity
Visual drill down	Visual drill down is good	Visual drill down is better
Offline Viewer	Available for the free reader	Available for the personal edition

QlikView Vs Tableau: Technical Criteria

Feature	Tableau	Qlikview
Data mining	Is supported to a limited level	Not supported
Development	Development is better on Tableau Pro	Development is better on Qlikview Developer
Data integration	Data Integration is best with a wide variety of data sources being supported.	Data integration is good.
Integration with GIS	Best suited for integration with GIS	Performance for integration with GIS is average
Modeling	Below average in modeling	Below average in modeling
Analytics	Below average in analytics	Below average in analytics
Xvelocity support	Supported	Not supported
PowerPivot Support	Supported well	Not supported
API	Not good	Limited

Conclusion

Tableau and QlikView are very powerful BI tools. To decide on the best one for your company, you need to do a detailed analysis of comparing your requirements against the features of each of these applications. Each one of them has their own set of strengths and perform better for some solution criteria while performing average in a few others. Weighing each requirement of your company by importance and opting for the one that performs best in the given conditions, will be the ideal solution.

If data visualizations are your focus, then Tableau stands out of all. It is by large, the best performance BI tool for visualization.

Qlikview finds prominence if you are looking for high adaptability and deep data analytics. It is also a natural choice if you are looking for a moderately priced tool.

So, ensure to have a detailed report, before banking on one!