Skip to main content
Announcements
Have questions about Qlik Connect? Join us live on April 10th, at 11 AM ET: SIGN UP NOW
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
Not applicable

What is difference between Qlik Sense & QV Desktop client?

Hi,

What is difference between Qlik Sense & QV Desktop client?

BR,

Anta

27 Replies
Not applicable
Author

As someone who just discovered Qlik, this is the best answer.  Here is the relevant part of the blog:

  • QlikView is a tool for situations where you want prepared business applications, i.e. applications created by developers who put a lot of thought into the data model, the layout, the charts and the formulae; and deliver the applications to end-users who consume the applications. We call this Guided Analytics. The end-user has total freedom to explore data, select, drill down and navigate in the information, and can this way discover both questions and answers in the data. The end-user is however limited when it comes to creating new visualizations. This type of situation will without doubt be common for many, many years to come.
  • Qlik Sense is a tool for situations where you don’t want to pre-can so much. Instead you want the user to have the freedom to create a layout of his own and in it, new visualizations; charts that the developer couldn’t imagine that the user wants to see. You want Self-service data discovery, which means a much more active, modern, engaged user. In addition, Qlik Sense is much easier to use when you have a touch screen, and is adaptive to different screen sizes and form factors. On the whole, Qlik Sense is a much more modern tool.
Not applicable
Author

This response was the best on this string. Others were too short, and others way too long. In a few sentences, you get the gist of the main differences and purposes between the two.

Not applicable
Author

this answer should pop to the up most

straight to the point, not long not short!

sohailansari201
Creator
Creator

That's a good and evolving question. I bet we come across this question by our clients and users quite frequently. There are many answers available on the Internet but then there are real life practical answers that we learn with our experience in the field. I will try to summarize this difference with my personal experience.

According to Henric Cronström on community:

QlikView is a tool for situations where you want prepared business applications, i.e. applications created by developers who put a lot of thought into the data model, the layout, the charts and the formulae; and deliver the applications to end-users who consume the applications. We call this Guided Analytics. The end-user has total freedom to explore data, select, drill down and navigate in the information, and can this way discover both questions and answers in the data. The end-user is however limited when it comes to creating new visualizations. This type of situation will without doubt be common for many, many years to come.

My practical learning points about QlikView:

  • Organizations need to invest in HR expertise for QlikView development
  • Organizations need to invest in either in-house or hosted/rented QlikView infrastructure.
  • Not available in cloud.
  • Licensing is somewhat complicated and a bit expensive in my opinion.
  • Easy to use development interface.
  • Has some APIs available to integrate QlikView with your existing application and other QV management services.
  • The QlikView developer usually goes horizontal across all functional areas of an organization to collect data, bring it at a single place and design a data model for Qlik to consume. (Can leverage an existing ETL process and/or Data warehouse as well)
  • Many data connectors available to connect with a variety of data sources.
  • The QlikView dashboard development process works pretty much like any other software development methodology but I have mostly witnessed Agile methodology.
  • The QlikView dashboard building time is usually much more faster compare to any other type of software development.
  • The end user receives the ready to use product and immediately get the results required for B.I. Analysis.
  • In this case, the "Self Service" B.I. plays a small role. (Requires Power users/trained users)
  • The in-memory associative data model is amazing and beyond comparison.
  • Once you model the data properly, it can be used for QlikSense as well.
  • Offers much more control to developers over design and control of the visualizations.
  • Has C++ and C# in its roots
  • Mobile friendly with little effort
  • Mobile App available
  • Allows external branded reporting using it's tool called NPrinting.
  • Some pre-build extensions are available to use. However, you can also build your own extensions
  • Both QlikView and QlikSense environment can exist side by side.

Again as per Henric Cronström on community:

QlikSense is a tool for situations where you don’t want to pre-can so much. Instead you want the user to have the freedom to create a layout of his own and in it, new visualizations; charts that the developer couldn’t imagine that the user wants to see. You want Self-service data discovery, which means a much more active, modern, engaged user. In addition, Qlik Sense is much easier to use when you have a touch screen, and is adaptive to different screen sizes and form factors. On the whole, Qlik Sense is a much more modern tool.

My practical learning points about QlikSense:

  • QlikSense was introduced mainly with the idea of providing "freedom" to the end user to perform "Self Service' B.I. on their data. You give a data set (mostly Excel sheet) to end user and the user should be able to import and start making some visualizations and dashboard on its own. It's that simple. You can say it's Excel on steroids.
  • Does that mean you do not need QlikSense expert developers? No, the end user is mostly non-technical and does not know the in and out of data modeling or how to write efficient KPI formulas. For a small set of data, an end user can probably find their answers by doing self-service B.I. But when it comes to multitude of data sets, their size, sources, procurement, relationships, creating schemas, facts/measures, optimization, set analysis, speed, cross functional data, security and many other factors, you again see the need to bring in a QlikSense expert who can again provide you some "Guided Analytics" on this "Self Service" tool.
  • Organizations usually want to perform data analysis across their entire sets of data to find the patterns, trends & cross relationships. If every manager starts doing their own analysis there is a very high chance that they will be building their own B.I data sources and most likely will be coming up with different numbers for the same KPIs. And we know that management hate to come to this point. Therefore, bringing in experts make total sense in order to march towards single source of truth for the company.
  • In my opinion, the "Self Service" tag with QlikSense is mostly because to show it's simplicity to use. But as you start working with it, you will soon realize that you can make most use of it by putting an expert to it.
  • Many data connectors available to connect with a variety of data sources.
  • Easy drag and drop interface.
  • Licensing is simpler as compare to QlikView
  • Cloud option is available; therefore infrastructure cost can be minimized.
  • Uses the same power of in-memory associative data model.
  • The Control offered to developers over design and control of the visualizations is not as good as QlikView. This is good for a simple end user as they do not like too much customization but it gives frustration to the developers specially who are coming from QV background.
  • Many supporting APIs are available for developers for integration and other purposes.
  • Has Javascript and HTML5 in its roots
  • Highly mobile friendly
  • Mobile App available
  • Allows external branded reporting using it's tool called NPrinting.
  • A lot of third party extension are available to use. However, the problem I see with using extensions is the maintenance. As you upgrade QlikSense you got to be careful about extensions support for the new version. Many extension developers made them as their hobby, therefore support can become an issue for these kind of extensions. However, you can also build your own extensions if you want to go that route.
  • QlikSense is catching up fast with QlikView features and even beyond. It is improving with every new release. I believe there are couple of releases every year.
  • Both QlikView and QlikSense environment can exist side by side.
  • I have a feeling that Qlik as a company is focusing more on QlikSense vs QlikView (again this is just my opinion)

Please feel free to correct/update any of these observations.

Anonymous
Not applicable
Author

thanks

cheenu_janakira
Creator III
Creator III

Hi everyone,

Although question was marked as answered, this is my 2 cents worth in terms of my experience with View, Sense and ultimately QAP.

Firstly, QlikView is C++/C# based and makes integration with web components at best, difficult. Workbench is not a great tool and is not easy to use. Sense is moving away from this C++/C# 'limitation', as further explained below.

On the other hand, as most people post here, QlikView is more suited to 'guided' BI as opposed to self-serve. The Sense UI makes self-serve much easier (as in Mike Tarallo's example). Even though collaboration tools allow 'users' to create their own objects in a View (server) app, it is not a user-friendly GUI and alternatively QlikView desktop is much more adapted to 'experts' as opposed to someone picking it up by themselves and trying quickly to put some charts together. Sense has a much easier UI for DIY within a published application or even Sense desktop.

I think my perspective of Sense vs View, comes from what I have experienced and implemented in Sense mashups. The following below list is a set of reasons why I think the Sense platform is the right choice for the future and Qlik developing as a company overall in a very competitive market.

One notion I use as an underlying observation is also required at this point. When looking at BI, the DIKW hierarchy/pyramid lacks one aspect that seems to only be implied in the definition of BI itself. BI is supposed to allow 'fact-based' decision-making and this is why some organisations involve a 5th step in this hierarchy/pyramid: 'action', turning the decision-making into concrete operational actions. However, with View this requires to a great extent to doing the analysis from Qlik (AccessPoint Qlik application) and implementing the 'action' steps or anything else in a different platform (typically a web-oriented platform for the lack of a better term), i.e. taking 'action' in a different environment.

To me, the Qlik 'magic sauce' is in the data model and data cloud. A lot of 'energy' and time has been spent on lists/checks on "which BI platform is better and why?", typically from the front-end perspective.

Qlik demarcates itself from other products in the manner in which it handles the data model and the way one can since v8.5/9 "leverage" the 'symbol table' with 'set analysis'. (Check this article which is superb in explaining this 'magic sauce': http://www.dbms2.com/2010/06/12/the-underlying-technology-of-qlikview/)

I know I might be taking a 'wild step' and say things that are not 100% verified or true, but as far as I know, Qlik feels like it was created by someone who did a lot of data analysis and was just sick and tired of the "clunky" way in which to build a 'data model' in anything that is SQL- or cube-based. The joins are tedious, transformations are subject to being in the right place with multiple parentheses encasing clauses. A nightmare to code and not 'easy' to edit/change/scale. Furthermore, the green-white-grey is a 'silver bullet' and pure genius from a 'data analysis' perspective and also a great boon for data modelling and Qlik developers for their 'ground work'. There have been an innumerate amount of times I wsa 'business expert' for clients just because I had their data and loaded it into QlikView with a whole set of barely anything else but ListBoxes.

The 2 above points being said, below are the reasons why I think Sense is a smart move from a Qlik organisational perspective.

  • With Sense (and QAP) importance is given to the way Qlik handles the data model which is ultimately the 'magic sauce' and the product differentiator. The front-end can be anything you want, Sense Hub or web mashups.
  • Capability APIs and mashups makes Qlik easily accessible to web developers in a language and format they are familiar with (JavaScript). Web developers are a much larger crowd than Qlik developers.
  • Engine APIs allows configuration of extremely intelligent and customised implementations (e.g. creating apps on the fly which would allow for more apps to be delivered to more clients (BIaaS), without having concurrency of 'unused' apps which would all take memory resources on 'normal' servers. Sample video of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2yqfNsQ8JY)
  • Visualisations objects have been opened to D3 and angular and the birth of Qlik Branch community has allowed the quick development of the amount of visualisations available and easily implementable for Qlik clients/users (yes, versioning might be an issue, but I'll pass on that discussion here).
  • Via hypercubes, it will be easier to leverage external APIs and access external data without having to extract and store external data. Here is a good video explaining how this would work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43GwNbJ_YBY.
  • QAP server makes sense for 'larger' deployments of Qlik without having the (linear) 'pricing' issue long having been the conversation of threads of discussion and being the main client complaint. For what would be approx. 73+ users, QAP pricing starts making much more sense as pricing is 'core-based' making it more "acceptable" in a "large-scale"/enterprise solution.
  • Ultimately, developing on the thought of 'action' further above, mashups and using Qlik in the 'background' to handle the data and rendering the analytics via mashups allows for much greater enrichment (also forBI-related 'data entry') and creating an interface where BI/Analytics is a true working tool - something in the vein of 'in-memory' ERP, where the BI/analytics is merging with the workflow.

I would be glad to hear thoughts on the above. From a Qlik developers perspective, I think they will always be required from a data modelling and systems (admin) perspective, but need to skill up for the change in technology.

qliksunil
Partner - Contributor III
Partner - Contributor III

@Michael_Tarallo 

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the post. I think the explanation you have given is little biased. People who are new should know what are the great advantages of using Qlikview over QlikSense. I know QlikSense is a product which is very newly launched and there is a lot of scope on improvement of the platform. That doesn't mean Qlikview lost its credibility just because Qlik company not giving investments or putting enough time on enhancing Qlikview Platform. This statement of yours put higher management of industries in confusion and mistrust to go with Qlikview. And ultimately not to go with QlikSense, as this also is in it's initial stage. Altogether worrying much about a stability of the Product up gradation of Qlik as a whole.

Qlikview as a tool has a proven track record and there must not be any statement from Qlik Tech to demean this tool just because you have developed a new tool QlikSense and market it. By putting the Top level management in confusion in a long term it will hamper the trust on the product.

I am been closely associated with Qlik since last 10 years, i know what Qlik has achieved through Qlikview alone. Don't try to loose that trust and confidence you have gained from Customers and developer over the years just to compete.

I highly recommend to follow the way Qlikview as product grown over time. Qlikview has a very systematic and stable release by not interfering must with the older versions. Same should be done with QlikSense.

Best Regards

Sunil

Melissa_Potvin
Community Manager
Community Manager

(posting on behalf of product marketing )

QlikView is our first-generation BI solution that drove the shift in the market away from large, IT-driven, stack-based technologies to more agile data discovery approaches, kicking-off the data analytics revolution. With our one-of-a-kind Associative Engine, customers readily adopted QlikView to solve business problems because it allowed them to rapidly create highly interactive dashboards and analytics apps without dependence on stack technology. Over two decades, QlikView has driven tremendous value for customers of all shapes and sizes, across all major industries and geographies.

In 2014, we introduced Qlik Sense, our next-generation platform for modern analytics.  It supports the full range of analytics use cases across an organization — including governed self-service, centralized dashboards and applications, natural language conversational analytics, custom and embedded analytics, mobile analytics, and reporting.   It runs on the same Associative Engine as QlikView, but includes a new Cognitive Engine for AI-enabled insight suggestions, automation, and natural language processing.  And it does this within a governed, multi-cloud architecture available in combinations of SaaS, private cloud and on-premises deployments.

For new Qlik customers, there is no longer the need to perform a comparison between the products – we recommend Qlik Sense.  And for our existing customers, you should feel confident in the continued use and support QlikView, while considering Qlik Sense for new use cases and applications.  We have a program now available that makes it easy and economical for you to bring Qlik Sense on-board, modernize your architecture, and consume your existing QlikView apps through Qlik Sense Enterprise on cloud services or Kubernetes.