QlikSense Desktop (free) discontinues in June 2020

[paul_scotchford]

Today I read that QlikSense desktop will no longer available for download and use (as well as existing installations) from June 2020. 

Rumour or fact ?

Why do this ? Besides profiteering ? Surely there are other ways to encourage early adopters ? Forcing people to Qlik SaaS offering is not a great option as it does not support much in the way of extensions and of course locks out 3rd party extension provides such as VizLib which I use when prototyping before migrating to a server.

[paul_scotchford]

I have tested the ability to authenticate QlikSense Desktop to the Qlik Business Cloud and happy to report that QlikSense Desktop works when using Cloud credentials to login.

[SergeyMak]

Hi Paul,

I'm thinking of going down Power BI route... It looks quite promising too.

Best regards,

Sergey

[paul_scotchford]

Hi Sergey,

Let me know how that works out. 

[MohamedELH]

Hello,

I am happy to see that other QS users find this decision quite unefficient. QSD free is an efficient driver for encouraging low BI consuming users.

If this is the case, I will see with my partners to analyze PowerBI capabilties more in details....

[vunguyenq89]

So sad with this decision from Qlik ☹️

From a Community point of view this demotivates people from answering questions and joining discussions.

I have no access to QSE, so with QSD going commercial I have no place to test my solution before answering a question on Qlik community.

[igdrazil]

I JUST noticed that QSD is being set behind a pay-wall with unreasonable costs compared to the current model.

THEN I noticed that the relevant blogpost is close to 2 months old and I didn't notice it even tho I'm with QSD all day. 
An E-Mail announcement to all Community members sending out a notification about this HUGE change would have been great, just saying!

Even though, we have a QSE installation and a couple of user-tokens, we still use the desktop version to push it further inside our company. We might have to stop this process since we can't just give out QSD for free to our colleagues to let them play before having to use a full access token. 

Not sure how to proceed from here, I really hope the community speaks up to find a different solution about this!

[felipe87]

Soo sad to hear this... I met Qlik at my work and was fascinated..
I worked in a public job so It took a few years , but now we finally have bought a few licenses.

This was only possible because we had the Desktop Free version to use before , so that we could see the actual potential of the tool. Eventually we need more processing power, security control and schedule reloads and that is why we end up buying.

I was also thinking on using Qlik for my personal use. Was building a Dashboard with data from my personal Finances. I was going to show this to a lot of people (planing on starting a Personal Finance Education Project) and that was going to be free publicity to Qlik.. Maybe in the future, some of those people will became clients..
Now I think I had to find a new tool for that. Maybe Power BI ?
For a single person the fees for Qlik it too much.. I know that you get a lot from the tool, but for people with small projects (with maybe no revenue attached to it) it is too much...
Hope they change it... Wonder if Qliqview desktop will change too ???

[Suvijak]

My company using Qlik Enterprise that no effect, but my personal like to practice coding on my personal PC that cannot use company account. so, now I need to find other free option for study.

If limitation some feature for free account is acceptable, but no longer for free user. and minimum price too expensive for me.

Regard

[prabhu0505]

IMHO discontinuing free desktop is a terrible idea, if there is no proper backup option planned

Kind'ah feel... Qlik community activities are already going down and scattered (qlikbranch, github,..etc.). 

If free desktop is taken out then there won't be much innovative thoughts or discussions happening around the usability of tool.

[walkasia]

I would like to join the chorus of those disappointed by this decision.  We are a very small non-profit.  We have been using Qlik Sense to demonstrate our amazing impact on our community and to increase our funding for our programs.   And we have been talking up how amazing the Qlik Sense product is to all of the larger non profits that we interact with in the Washington DC vicinity.

I understand completely that Qlik Sense needs to have a licensing and pricing model that works for them, and am happy to pay them for the good work that they do.  My bigger issue is the complexity being introduced by forcing us to the cloud and to the enterprise model.

As I understand it, as of the end of June, our options will be (1) move completely to the Qlik Cloud, which raises data privacy issues for us, as our county funding requires that we secure our client data;   or (2) move to an Enterprise model, just so we can continue to use desktop, which is a level of complexity that we get no benefit from at all and that may actually make it harder for us to work, as we have no IT department and only 1 data "person"...  or (3) start looking at other products.

I have reached out to Qlik Sense sales to discuss what our options might be, but am pessimistic about the outcome.

Any suggestions about the simplest implementation would be appreciated.

- Gwen