Why use qliksense as a external reporting solution instead of another in-memory database?

[#1]

I've noticed the more we've worked on our project the less we actually use qliksense. Basically now we are using it as a data api, authorization service (section access) and in some cases custom built extensions. I like the tool but is it worth the cost?

[Gysbert_Wassenaar]

That's a question only you can answer. Is the alternative cheaper? Is it still cheaper when you have to code and maintain all the code and infrastructure of all the alternatives for the Qlik Sense functionality you now use?

[#3]

Its cheaper in the sense of $ vs $, but this is not taking into account the actual work and maintainability. I would just like to get arguments on behalf of qliksense

[ErikWetterberg]

And don't forget that you have QlikCommunity too, an almost invaluable resource!

Erik

[#5]

Im not quite sure that will sell to top management as a business argument, but yes, it is an extremely helpful resource.

[awhitfield]

"but is it worth the cost?"

That's subjective, so only the end users can decide that, no one else can decide it for you!

Andy

[#7]

Im looking for arguments from a technological standpoint what are the pros and cons for going with Qlisense/QAP against a  custom solution.

Qliksense has a steep initial cost which raises concerns within organizations, therefor it would be great to get some comments from maybe the qlik development group

[Gysbert_Wassenaar]

If only technological arguments count then your custom solution can be far superior. Whatever current technology allows can be implemented. And for ease of argument it will be assumed that it is 100% bug free and 100% reliable with 0% risk in all regards and requires no maintenance at all. It's a no-brainer. And since it's custom made it 100% fits your business requirements and organization. Unfortunately nobody can afford it, but that's not a techological argument.

From my point of view QAP is superior to anything else in this playing field that I'm aware of (admittedly IBM is doing very cool, but different, stuff too). But I cannot know if the solution your organisation needs is best served with QAP. I don't know what that solution must be able to deliver. Perhaps half a dozen php scripts and an sqlite database will do the trick. In that case QAP is overkill. But I have no idea. I can't answer that question for you.

[Alexander_Thor · Accepted solution]

This is a great question!

I can of course only give our perspective of it but the value for our internal teams is that we have completely removed the need for our advanced and custom analytics teams to build backend APIs.

Our front-end developers paired with someone that has strong data modelling and set analysis skills can produce content insanely fast now.

We don't have to write data pipelines to extract, transform and stage data anymore.
We don't have to write boilerplate CRUD apis for simple things such as listing, filtering and searching data anymore.

And the best thing of all, we can adapt so much faster. The structure of data is seldom static, it will change. But instead of us having re-write our data pipelines we just re-structure our QVD layer to handle the data change.

The icing of the cake is that we get out-the-box charts, access control both for features AND on data row level which is horrible to maintain otherwise and of course the flexibility to aggregate and query the data on-the-fly without having to change our underlying data structure.